March 30 - April 01, 2023
Huntsville, Texas

Recent discussions of ‘justice’ have enlarged the field of Romanticism to include (for example) environmental, social, and epistemic justice, at the same time as Romantic scholarship has turned to investigate the institutions of criminal justice and their histories. These lines of inquiry recognize that conceptions of ‘justice’ in the era of revolutions have been formative to modern institutions and sensibilities. We welcome presentations that explore Romanticism’s connection to justice, understood in the widest possible sense. Talks that engage Romanticism’s geographical, linguistic, and/or methodological scope in areas that advance diversity and inclusion in the field are especially welcome.

Home to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Huntsville, Texas, seems a particularly apt place to discuss issues of justice, and we welcome papers that engage with the conference location and history:

Although America’s sprawling penal system—a collection of some five thousand jails and prisons—is highly decentralized, Huntsville, perhaps even more than Washington, D.C., could stake a claim to serve as its capital city. For 160 years, it has coordinated criminal punishment for the Lone Star State and, in the last half century, it has stood at the forefront of a carceral revolution that has remade American society and governance. (Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire)

To foreground Romantic and our own concerns with issues of justice, this conference will open with a pre-conference day of speakers, workshops, performances and conversations about Criminal Justice, the Arts, and Activism.

Please check back soon for more information about the plenary speakers, seminars, concerts, exhibits, mentoring programs and events, conference excursions and more.