Call for Papers - Histoires de la Terre

CONFIRMED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Ceri Crossley (Birmingham), Tim Unwin (Bristol), Grégory Quenet (Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines)

The publication of Buffon’s Théorie de la Terre in 1749 heralded the advent of an era in which thinkers would seek a new understanding of the earth and humanity’s relationship with its physical environment.  This conference invites exploration of how Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment developments in the earth sciences and related fields (e.g. cartography, oceanography, mining, tunnelling, palaeontology, evolution) have informed French and Francophone literatures of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Proposals are invited for papers in English or in French, on the conference theme from any of the periods cited above and from any discipline of French and Francophone studies.

Possible areas of study may include:

• Natural disasters – earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, landslides, etc.
• Goldmines, iron-mines, coalmines, etc. and mining
• Oil prospecting and drilling
• Mineralogy and minerals
• Mountaineering, alpinism, rock-climbing
• Caves, caverns, potholing, tunnels
• Exploration of extreme terrains – deserts, tundra, the Arctic
• Subterranean spaces and networks, journeys, creatures
• Maps, cartography, topography
• Myths and legends of the earth and in earth sciences (Gaia, Hades, Vulcan, etc.)
• Palaeontology, fossil-hunting, dinosaurs
• Evolutionary theory and the earth
• Birth and development of geology, earth sciences and theories of the earth
• Uniformitarianism and catastrophism
• Geological time, the age of planet earth
• Cosmogony and the earth sciences
• Archaeological digs, sites, discoveries
• Collections of minerals, gems, fossils, antiquities taken from the earth
• Tourism and the exploration of sublime landscapes
• Glaciers, ice-fields, icebergs
• Creation / disappearance of islands
• Oceans and oceanography
• Electricity and the earth
• Other worlds, early theories of interplanetary exploration

This list is in no way intended to be exhaustive.

Proposals (300 words maximum) for 20-minute papers should be sent to the conference organisers Dr Louise Lyle (l.lyle@sheffield.ac.uk) and Dr David McCallam (d.mccallam@sheffield.ac.uk) by 31^st October 2006.

Conference organizers to publish a volume of selected essays from the papers presented.