Early Career Conference | 1-3 October 2026 | Université Bordeaux Montaigne
Bordeaux: Reverberations of 1776: receiving, rewriting and reappropriating the American Revolution across the Atlantic. Britain, France, Germany, 1776-1876
Call for papers, deadline – 15 September 2025
Hosting institution: Université Bordeaux Montaigne, October 1st-3rd 2026
Organizing committee: Rémy Duthille (UBM), Tristan Coignard (UBM), Isabelle Massein (UBM), Moritz Rauchhaus (UBM), Christoph Heyl (UDE), Anjali Rampersad (UDE), Christian Feser (UDE).
Université Bordeaux Montaigne and Universität Duisburg-Essen are pleased to announce the 4th annual LAPASEC (Landau-Paris Symposia on the Eighteenth Century) early-career conference. This call for papers addresses MA students, doctoral candidates, and post-doctoral researchers. This conference is open to students of many disciplines, including history, literature, British studies, American studies, German studies, Romance studies, visual arts, musicology, history of law… This conference gives early career researchers a chance to network and present, and to get to know a few well-established figures in the field.
The three-day conference looks at the reverberations of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution, in the British Isles, France and Germany in the late eighteenth century and the greater part of the nineteenth century, up to and including the centenary celebrations of the event. The ways in which 1776 resonated with the French Revolutions of 1789, 1830, 1848 and other revolutions in Europe, including fear of revolution, are also of special relevance.
It is fitting for Bordeaux, France’s major Atlantic seaport in the eighteenth century, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Bordeaux had strong commercial ties with Northern America, and played a role in the American Revolution, for instance welcoming John Adams’s ambassadorial visit in 1778. The city also saw the opening of the world’s first US consulate, which was housed in the Hôtel Fenwick, still in existence today; Consul Fenwick was a figure of Bordeaux society until 1801.
It is well established that enlightened thinkers across Europe hailed independent America as a republic without kings, nobles or established clergy, while, in many cases, deploring that slavery continued after Independence, despite abolition in Pennsylvania and Vermont. Transnational abolitionist movements developed in Britain and France, and debates on American slavery reached well beyond Atlantic shores into German-speaking central Europe. This conference seeks to look beyond well-known figures and envisions the reception of the American Revolution not just as an American “influence”, or a “model”, on European elites, but as a process of transatlantic exchange and cultural transfer beyond the elite public and familiar themes.
Topics may include political and constitutional, as well as economic progress, but also the literary and imaginative uses of America in the decades following the Declaration of Independence. The 1876 centenary defines a period when the Fourth of July, and more broadly, America, was celebrated, but also criticized and redefined. Attention should be paid to the circulation of American texts, images, symbols and practices beyond pamphlets and political discourse, in literature and the multiple stories and histories (official, personal, intimate) written in the century after 1776.
Possible areas of investigation include:
- Transmission, translation, transnational networking
- Honouring, celebrating, commemorating the revolution (festivals, centenaries, homages, statues, heroes and heroines, pantheons…)
- Criticizing, rejecting, selecting aspects of the American Revolution
- Artistic and literary responses and elaborations in the Romantic era and beyond
Possible fields of research include:
- Political and intellectual history
- Literature
- Gender studies
- Minority studies
- Museum studies, heritage studies
- Visual arts, architecture, music…
- Fashion
- Philosophy
- Linguistics
- Economics
Applicants are encouraged to adopt cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural approaches in the abovementioned fields. They are invited to think about connections between their own research and the conference topic.
For those in the early stages of their academic careers, we are seeking to fund travel, accommodation and related conference costs.
Submission deadline: 15 September 2025
Notification of acceptance: 30 October 2025
A 500-word proposal and a short bio-bibliographical presentation should be sent to the members of the organizing committee:
lapasec2026@gmail.com
The conference will use the French, German and English languages. Proposals in any of the three languages are welcome.
With the submission of your proposal you consent that any data you submit will be saved by the organisers until the end of 2027 (or the publication of the conference proceedings). As part of our funding application, your data will be shared with the Université franco-allemande/ Deutsch-Französische Hochschule (UFA/DFH). Your e-mail address will be used for the limited purpose of informing you about updates and news relating to the conference and will not be passed on to any third parties, including UFA/DFH.
Image: Wiki Commons