Online workshop: Contagion and Contamination in the Nineteenth Century
Contagion and Contamination in the Nineteenth Century
Free and Online One-Day Interdisciplinary Workshop
Thursday 1 May, 9.00am – 5.00pm (Central European Time)
The Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International (CNCSI) organises a free and online one-day interdisciplinary workshop exploring the relationship between contagion and contamination in nineteenth-century culture across the globe. The workshop will feature several emerging and established scholars as they interrogate a range of artistic renderings, literary representations, and historical case studies concerning contagious diseases, infection, and pollution in order to explore how ecological and epidemiological concerns of the present were first galvanised by the nineteenth-century anxieties of our recent past.
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Hungarian physician and social critic Max Nordau warned that society had become ravaged by a severe epidemic: an infectious pandemic of cultural and moral decline. In his infamous social critique Degeneration (1892), Nordau declared: ‘We stand now in the midst of a severe mental epidemic; of a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria, and it is natural that we should ask anxiously on all sides: “What is to come next?”’. Fears of this ‘severe mental epidemic’ were entwined with anxieties popularised by criminologists like Cesare Lombroso who speculated on the dormancy of an individual’s criminal disposition. Anxieties around moral contagion were further exacerbated by the popular press, political fiction, and satirical art which amplified the ever-expanding threat of social degeneracy.
Nineteenth-century cultural fears accompanied the pervasive, mediatised, and very real pathogenic threats to the bodies of late nineteenth-century individuals who faced epidemics of influenza, cholera, smallpox, the bubonic plague, scarlet fever, and venereal diseases on a global scale. On the other hand, the century also saw the transformation of medical responses to disease detection, prevention, and management. This included the cholera and sanitation investigations of John Snow in the 1850s, the pasteurisation and vaccination breakthroughs of Louis Pasteur, and the advent of antiseptic surgery through the work of Joseph Lister. As such, the nineteenth century was a time of invisible threat, seismic change, and vibrant discourse concerning diseases both real and imagined.
Programme
9:50-10:00 (CET): WELCOME ADDRESS
10:00-10:45 (CET): SESSION 1
Chair: Dr Madeline Potter, University of Edinburgh
Speaker: Dr Melissa Dickson, University of Queensland
Title: ‘The Nineteenth Century up-to-date with a Vengeance’: Spreading Vampirism and Russian Influenza across Bram Stoker’s Britain
11:00-11:45 (CET): SESSION 2
Chair: Professor Claudia Capancioni, Bishop Grosseteste University
Speaker: Timothy Mills, University of Portsmouth
Title: Implausible Deniability: Exploring the intersection of science, politics and public health in the British imperial response to contagion, contamination and the germ theory in late nineteenth-century India
11:45-13:00 (CET): LUNCH BREAK
13:00-13:45 (CET): SESSION 3
Chair: Dr Emily Vincent, University of Birmingham and Durham University
Speaker: Dr Amanda Sciampacone, The Open University
Title: Constructing Cholera’s Landscape: Nineteenth-Century Medical Climatology and the Colonial Picturesque
14:00-14:45 (CET): SESSION 4
Chair: Dr Emma Merkling, University of Manchester and Durham University
Speaker: Dr Mark Frost, University of Portsmouth
Title: ‘No clearer or diviner waters’: Contamination, Abjection, and Ecocrisis in the Victorian Imagination
15:00-15:45 (CET): SESSION 5
Chair: Professor Kirsten E. Shepherd, University of Oxford
Speaker: Professor Priscilla Wald, Duke University
Title: A Germ’s-Eye View: Getting Up Close and Personal with Our Microbes
16:00-16:45 (CET): SESSION 6
Chair: Joanna Norman, Victoria and Albert Museum
Speaker: Dr Katherine Ott, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
Title: The Lingering Nineteenth-Century, a Museum Exhibition, and a Curator
16:45-17:00 (CET): CLOSING REMARKS
Speaker: Dr Emily Vincent, University of Birmingham and Durham University
For more elaborate information about the papers and on how to register, visit this website.
