Reverberations of 1776: receiving, rewriting and reappropriating the American Revolution across the Atlantic. Britain, France, Germany, 1776-1876.
Host and dates: Université Bordeaux Montaigne, Pessac, France. 1-3 October 2026.
Deadline for submissions: 15 September 2025.
Event presentation
Université Bordeaux Montaigne and Universität Duisburg-Essen are pleased to announce the 4th annual LAPASEC (Landau-Paris Symposia on the Eighteenth Century) early-career conference. This conference gives early career researchers a chance to network and present, and to get to know a few well-established figures in the field. It is open to students of many disciplines, including history, literature, British studies, American studies, German studies, Romance studies, visual arts, musicology, history of law…
The three-day conference looks at the reverberations of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution, in the British Isles, France and Germany in the late eighteenth century and the greater part of the nineteenth century, up to and including the centenary celebrations of the event. The ways in which 1776 resonated with the French Revolutions of 1789, 1830, 1848 and other revolutions in Europe, including fear of revolution, are also of special relevance.
It is fitting for Bordeaux, France’s major Atlantic seaport in the eighteenth century, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Bordeaux had strong commercial ties with Northern America, and played a role in the American Revolution, for instance welcoming John Adams’s ambassadorial visit in 1778. The city also saw the opening of the world’s first US consulate, which was housed in the Hôtel Fenwick, still in existence today; Consul Fenwick was a figure of Bordeaux society until 1801.
It is well established that enlightened thinkers across Europe hailed independent America as a republic without kings, nobles or established clergy, while, in many cases, deploring that slavery continued after Independence, despite abolition in Pennsylvania and Vermont. Transnational abolitionist movements developed in Britain and France, and debates on American slavery reached well beyond Atlantic shores into German-speaking central Europe. This conference seeks to look beyond well-known figures and envisions the reception of the American Revolution not just as an American “influence”, or a “model”, on European elites, but as a process of transatlantic exchange and cultural transfer beyond the elite public and familiar themes.
Topics may include political and constitutional, as well as economic progress, but also the literary and imaginative uses of America in the decades following the Declaration of Independence. The 1876 centenary defines a period when the Fourth of July, and more broadly, America, was celebrated, but also criticized and redefined. Attention should be paid to the circulation of American texts, images, symbols and practices beyond pamphlets and political discourse, in literature and the multiple stories and histories (official, personal, intimate) written in the century after 1776.
Possible areas of investigation include:
- Transmission, translation, transnational networking
- Honouring, celebrating, commemorating the revolution (festivals, centenaries, homages, statues, heroes and heroines, pantheons…)
- Criticizing, rejecting, selecting aspects of the American Revolution
- Artistic and literary responses and elaborations in the Romantic era and beyond
Possible fields of research include:
- Political and intellectual history
- Literature
- Gender studies
- Minority studies
- Museum studies, heritage studies
- Visual arts, architecture, music…
- Fashion
- Philosophy
- Linguistics
- Economics
Applicants are encouraged to adopt cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural approaches in the abovementioned fields. They are invited to think about connections between their own research and the conference topic.
For those in the early stages of their academic careers, we are seeking to fund travel, accommodation and related conference costs.
Timeline
- Submission deadline: 15 September 2025
- Notification of acceptance: 30 October 2025
A 500-word proposal and a short bio-bibliographical presentation should be sent to the members of the organizing committee at: 
lapasec2026@gmail.com
The conference will use the French, German and English languages. Proposals in any of the three languages are welcome.
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
CfP LAPASEC 2026(Posted 21 July 2025)
Waterphors 2026.
Host and dates: CIRM (Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca sulle Metafore) in Genoa, Italy. 22 and 23 October 2026.
Deadline for submissions: 31 March 2026.
Venue details: CIRM (Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca sulle Metafore – 
https://cirm.unige.it 
), in Genoa, Italy.
Event presentation
Following the first edition in 2024 in Lyon, the second Waterphors conference will be held on 22 and 23 October 2026 in collaboration with the CIRM (Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca sulle Metafore – https://cirm.unige.it), in Genoa, Italy.
The CFP (in Italian, English and French) are available here https://cirm.unige.it/node/1134
How to submit a paper? All proposals should be sent to waterphors2026@gmail.com before 31 March 2026. Proposals (in French or English) must include a title, an abstract (maximum 500 words, not including the bibliography), 5 keywords, and a short presentation of the author. The theoretical and methodological framework and the study corpus must be clearly stated. Presentation length: 30 minutes maximum. All proposals will be anonymised before being submitted to the scientific committee for evaluation.
Website address
https://cirm.unige.it/node/1134
Contact details:
(Posted 7 Novemebr 2025)
Women and/of the Empire(s): On the 150th Anniversary of Queen Victoria’s Proclamation as Empress of India (1876-2026).
Host and dates: University of Porto, 29-30 October 2026.
Deadline for submissions: 15 June 2026.
Event organised by CETAPS – Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies
Event presentation
Under the Royal Titles Act of 1876, Britain’s Queen Victoria, who had often, albeit informally, been called Empress of India, had the title officially added to her style. The nominal head of the most powerful country in the world henceforth matched the titles used by the monarchs of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. In a context of international rivalry, the overtones of grandeur were intended to instil a notion of British superiority as well as to flatter the “Mother of Europe”. Ironically, however, the new title was also an attempt to cover up how close British control over India had come to utter collapse due to the Indian Mutiny (also known in India, significantly, as the First War of Independence) less than two decades earlier. At the same time, Victoria’s proclamation as Empress arguably exalted her as a supreme figure of the age in a global perspective as much as highlighted the fact that she was a woman with visibility and power in a period that almost universally denied women a range of rights and opportunities that we have come to assume are integral to any modern, democratic society.
This conference will seek to explore the realities and the legacies of the Victorian Age, its monarch and its empire. It will focus on women, their engagement in private and public life, their experience of class, travel, migration, and cultural exchanges – on either side of the cultural divide involved in imperial encounters – as well as on how women writers, of Victorian and later periods, have engaged artistically and critically with such realities in their poetical and fictional works.
Although Queen Victoria provides the starting point for the conference, we are also interested in contributions dealing with other aspects of the imperial/colonial experience, not limited to the nineteenth century, women, or the British Empire. Comparative perspectives, as well as broader chronological approaches, are also welcome.
Website address
https://womenandempire.wordpress.com
Contact details
CFP
For further details, please check the event original call inserted below.
(Posted 21 January 2026)