Call for Papers
Traffic imprinted modernity upon human experiences. From the successive revolutions in print, to imperial and colonial scenes and circuits of trade, the unprecedented speed of the steam age, and the trading of enslaved people and migration of indentured servants, its new continuousness, density, and violence changed everyday life. Traffic introduced new rhythms and temporalities, not only of flow and speed but of stoppage and waiting. It turned places into nodes within networks; oceans and deserts into abstractions to be moved through. It transplanted exotic new ideas and desires, filled homes with foreign imports, jostled bodies into new modes of movement, and uprooted people from their land and lives.
Given our joint conference, we especially welcome reconsiderations of the traffic between the Romantic and Victorian periods and paradigms; given our cross-registration with the North American Conference on British Studies, we welcome work on the traffic between disciplines. Los Angeles County, a geography framed by the continuous flows of car traffic, will no doubt help us reflect on traffic’s nineteenth-century origins and contemporary legacies.
We welcome proposals for individual papers, panels of three or four presenters, and roundtables for more than four presenters.
Our conference theme is meant to provoke rather than constrain, so we encourage submissions to understand “traffic” in broadest terms possible. The theme might encompass topics like (but not limited to) the following:
- Literary publication and the dissemination of ideas
- Cross-cultural, imperial, transnational, transimperial, and Anglophone exchanges
- Trade flows of commodities and raw materials
- Crossing borders: human and non-human migration
- Human trafficking: enslavement, indentured servitude, ethnic cleansing
- Mobility and stasis within settler colonialism and racial capitalism
- Novel and outmoded transportation methods
- Flights of fancy and imaginative transport
- On and off the beaten path: travel and its genres
- Cities and crowds
- Home and away: how traffic affects domesticity
- Invasion, retreat, and other military movement
- Spirit, religion, and traffic in souls
- Economies of movement
- Paralysis, stasis, and being stuck
- Resistance, chokepoints, and snarled traffic
We welcome proposals for in-person presentations in Pasadena on Nov. 11-15, or online for the one-day virtual pre-conference on Nov. 6.
Please don’t use AI in the process of creating abstracts, papers, or presentations. AI will not be used in the vetting of abstracts.
Abstract submission is being managed via Oxford Abstracts, which requires registration. Individual paper abstracts are 300 words; panel and roundtable submissions are 1200 words. For more information about submission guidelines please click “Submit Here” to access the platform.
Your name can appear twice in the program.
For more information, please contact traffic2026ucr@gmail.com.