Welcome to NASSR 2017

Sponsored by Carleton University and the University of Ottawa, NASSR 2017 will meet in downtown Ottawa, Canada’s capital, at the Delta Ottawa City Centre, from August 10-13, 2017.

The theme of the conference is “Romantic Life,” understood in the broadest terms possible to include: 

  • biography; autobiography; lives; anecdote; history; secret history; life-writing
  • Bildung; development; progress
  • portraiture; still life; visual art; visual culture; the sister arts
  • theatre and cultures of performance
  • the good life; the happy life; vita activa; political life
  • end of life; elegy; palliation; mourning; momento mori
  • the afterlife; afterlives; romantic cultures of posterity
  • institutional life; under-lives; secret societies; clubs; shadow-lives; undergrounds; exiles
  • slavery; traffic in human lives; forced migration; diaspora
  • mimesis; representation; media; mediation; virtual reality; second lives; avatars
  • book history; authorship; print culture; manuscript culture; book-life; book liveliness
  • measures of life: chronologies; scales; charts; census; population; statistics
  • the sciences of life; the human sciences
  • natures; environment; ecology
  • natural history; natural philosophy
  • “it” narratives; thing theory; object-oriented ontology; the new materialisms
  • disaster; catastrophe; ecological crisis; ecocriticism
  • organicism; vitalism; materialism
  • theories of emergence
  • Lamarckian evolution; devolution; hybrids; mutation
  • preformationism and epigenesis
  • biopolitics and biopolitical life
  • human and non-human life; the humanities; animal studies; planetary life; the anthropocene

For information on the NASSR 2017 CFP, including special sessions, click on the “Call for Papers” tab located above.

Conference Organizers: Lauren Gillingham (University of Ottawa) and Julie Murray (Carleton University)

Conference Organizing Committee 

Danielle Barkley (McGill University)
James Brooke-Smith (University of Ottawa)
Frans De Bruyn (University of Ottawa)
Ian Dennis (University of Ottawa)
Ina Ferris (University of Ottawa)
Paul Keen (Carleton University)
Sara Landreth (University of Ottawa)
April London (University of Ottawa)
Emma Peacocke (Queen’s University)
Mark Salber Phillips (Carleton University)
Fiona Ritchie (McGill University)
Jonathan Sachs (Concordia University)