CFP: “Underground”
The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Biennial Conference
March 12-14, 2026 |Cincinnati, Ohio
C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists seeks submissions for its eighth biennial conference, which will take place March 12-14, 2026, at the Hyatt Regency in Cincinnati, Ohio. We invite individual papers and group proposals on literature and culture in the United States, the Americas and beyond during the long nineteenth century.
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The conference theme of “Underground” offers a way of understanding nineteenth-century American lives, literatures and cultures along and between different scales and registers of knowledge and experience. It encompasses the literally and metaphorically subterranean, the secret, the concealed, the incipient, the mysterious, and the forgotten across human and natural histories. Reciprocally, it gestures toward the pleasures and dangers of unearthing, the archeological dig and the mining expedition, secrets exposed and silences broadcast, and sudden shifts in the terrain implied by the volcanic, the revolutionary, the slow growth that bursts suddenly into view. While the underground has become an important critical nodal point for contemporary scholars, this gathering will keep sight of the way the equation of the underground and the clandestine emerged in the nineteenth century to be shaped and reshaped in response to a particular set of political and social contexts in the 19th century (Cohen).
Indeed, given our conference site in Cincinnati, Underground readily brings to mind the most regularly surfaced implication of the subterranean nineteenth century: the defiant northward and transnational movement of enslaved Black peoples in the antebellum U.S. Underground suggests movements or assemblages that have been deemed illicit, illegal, or criminal by the state. Despite its situation outside of the realm of the visible, it also suggests networks, organizations, undercommons, collectivities and coalitions of subalterns/the “underclass.”
Underground also speaks to other registers of what might lie beneath or outside of view, such as that which is literally and metaphorically buried: plots, plans, the dead, the unconscious.
The literality of the buried and unearthed provides the occasion to consider the ecological underground: material extraction, the geologic, deep sea exploration, the arboreal and the vegetative, the rooted and rhizomatic. Roots can of course carry other valances. In Black life, they signify the genealogical, and histories lost and found. In Indigenous thought they become “an apt metaphor to explain how the aspirations for freedom—the tree of life—had stayed alive” to “imagine a decolonial future” (Estes). We can thus look to the Underground as a strategy for both reconstructing and decolonizing history and imagining radical visions for the present and beyond.
As this very public announcement of our gathering makes clear, and as Foucault indeed insisted long ago in The History of Sexuality, the underground is not always spoken of in a whisper. In keeping with Frederick Douglass’s famous joke/complaint that the Underground Railroad “has been made most emphatically the upperground railroad,” and well before it was safe, this theme recognizes the potential for the secret to be uncovered, the dead to return, the repressed to become flagrant, and the dormant to erupt in unpredictably spectacular fashion.
Format
C19 welcomes proposals for roundtables, workshops, dialogues, and novel presentation formats, as well as traditional panels and individual paper submissions. We prefer that panel proposals reflect a diversity of institutional affiliation, academic rank, and disciplinary background. Please include at least four presenters on a panel, one of whom might be a respondent. Each session is 90 minutes long, and all group proposals must leave time for discussion. Individuals seeking potential collaborators may wish to post directly to the C19 listserv, the discussion board on C19’s Facebook page, or email CFPs/ requests for co-panelists to the chair of the C19 Communications Committee, Jess Goldberg (jag525@cornell.edu) for posting on the forthcoming conference website.
C19: 2026 will once again feature a series of seminars, which will provide participants the opportunity for a collaborative conversation around a particular topic. Each seminar will be capped at 15 participants and will be run by leaders with expertise in the topic. Each participant will submit a five-page paper before the conference to be read in advance by the other participants; time in the seminar itself will be reserved for discussion. Seminar participants will be listed in the program. Topics and seminar leaders will be announced soon.
Conference participants are limited to one appearance on the program as A) a presenter, roundtable participant, or respondent. In addition, participants can have a second appearance as B) a session organizer, chair, seminar participant, or speaker/facilitator in a professional support session. Please submit a maximum of one proposal for a panel paper.
While we welcome papers and panels on the conference theme, we will gladly receive submissions on any subject.
The deadline for submissions is September 5th. The conference website will open for submissions on April 31st. Instructions will be posted there.
Questions can be directed to Program Chair, Martha Schoolman, mschoolm@fiu.edu.
Possible topics/approaches include:
The Oceanic
The Hold
The Underground Press
“Sub”/genres (e.g., the gothic, sentimental novels,, the slave narrative)
"Low" culture (e.g., urban sensationalism, dime novels, minstrelsy, melodrama)
The Underclass/class
Radical Undergrounds
The Undercommons
Fugitivity
Dissident sexualities and queer undergrounds
Secret Societies
Rumor and Conspiracy
Opacity, Surveillance, Visibility
Unexpressed affect, such as longing and resentment
The unconscious (e.g., the personal, national, racial, sexual, cultural)
Censorship
Environmental and Ecological undergrounds
Mining, Oil, Resource Extraction, Petrocultures
Groundwaters, the alluvial
Agriculture
Geology
Indigenous Sovereignties and Survivance
Archives/Repertoires/Archival Silences
Extravagance/Aesthetics/Glamour
Burial Practices, Cemeteries, Grave Robbing
The Undead
Resurrections and returns
Outsider Theory
Germination and gestation
Roots, rooting, the rhizomatic
Grass roots movements
Uprisings
Emergent spiritualities
Subterranean structures, infrastructure
New perspectives on the Underground Railroad
The Program Committee
Martha Schoolman, Florida International University, Chair
John Funchion, University of Miami
Julia H. Lee, University of California, Irvine
Matt Seybold, Elmira College
Caroline Wigginton, University of Mississippi