International Scholars Gather in Paris for SGNCS Symposium on Solidarities and Shifting Alliances

The Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies (SGNCS) successfully concluded its international symposium, Solidarities and Shifting Alliances, held at the University of London Institute in Paris from 17–19 June 2026. Bringing together scholars from universities across Europe, North America, South America, Asia, and Australia, the symposium explored the alliances, conflicts, and networks that shaped the nineteenth century and continue to inform contemporary scholarship. Across seventeen panels, participants addressed an exceptionally broad range of topics, including imperial diplomacy, transnational political movements, oceanic and maritime worlds, colonial governance, environmental humanities, literary cosmopolitanism, religion, museum history, visual culture, gender, extractive aesthetics, and the circulation of knowledge across borders. By bringing historians, literary scholars, art historians, museum specialists, and scholars of religion, politics, and environmental humanities into sustained conversation, the symposium reflected SGNCS's commitment to genuinely international and interdisciplinary scholarship, foregrounding the connections, exchanges, and relational approaches that transcend traditional national and disciplinary boundaries.

The symposium featured keynote lectures by Daniel Foliard (Université Paris Cité), whose address examined photography, memory, and the relationship between the living and the dead in colonial contexts, and Hannah Williams (Queen Mary University of London), whose closing plenary explored colonial collecting networks linking Haiti and nineteenth-century Paris. Together, the keynote lectures framed the symposium's central concern with the movement of people, ideas, objects, and power across borders.

Complementing the academic programme, participants had the option of visiting the Musée Auguste Comte, the Paris apartment where the philosopher lived from 1841 until his death in 1857. From this apartment, Comte cultivated an international network of intellectual exchange extending across Europe and the Americas. The visit provided an opportunity to reflect on the symposium's central themes by considering both the global reach of positivism and the hierarchies and exclusions that accompanied the solidarities it fostered.

Hosted by the University of London Institute in Paris, itself an institution with deep historical ties to Franco-British intellectual exchange, the symposium highlighted Paris as an ideal setting for examining the global circulations and shifting alliances of the nineteenth century. Charlotte Legg, the symposium’s co-chair, noted the particular importance of the event for furthering the study of France and the francophone world in global perspective:

This dimension of the global nineteenth century is still relatively underexamined, and the symposium provided a welcome intellectual forum for thinking through connections and circulations across national, imperial and cultural borders. Through papers and discussions on the Haitian Revolution and the Atlantic World, transimperial relations in the Pacific, republican and anti-republican political networks across continents, and the trajectories and cultural translation of works of art and literature, among other topics, the conjuncture of Francophone histories and cultures with those of many other political and cultural communities was well examined.

In his closing remarks, SGNCS President Kevin A. Morrison reflected on the Society's broader mission:

From the beginning, our ambition has been to create a space where scholars from different disciplines, traditions, and parts of the world can engage one another in sustained conversation. We have never sought to become the largest organization in the field. Rather, we have sought to build the strongest intellectual community—one characterized by rigorous scholarship, genuine collegiality, and sustained dialogue across disciplines, methodologies, languages, and national traditions.

Morrison also announced the Society's forthcoming initiatives, including its 2027 World Congress in Chile—the first major nineteenth-century studies conference to be held in Latin America—which will offer more than €6,000 in travel grants to support scholars requiring financial assistance. He also announced the Society's 2028 symposium in Germany, "The Matter of Media in the Global Nineteenth Century," devoted to media, technology, mobility, and the infrastructures of global communication.

The symposium celebrated several milestones for the Society. Global Nineteenth-Century Studies recently entered its fifth year and was accepted for inclusion in Scopus, while the Society's book series, Studies in the Global Nineteenth Century, will publish its first four volumes this year, reflecting the continued growth and international reach of scholarship in the field.

The Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies is an international, multidisciplinary scholarly organization dedicated to advancing the study of the long nineteenth century through conferences, publications, and collaborative research that transcend national and disciplinary boundaries.