A Virtual Student Conference Hosted by the University at Albany’s English Graduate Student Organization Deadline for submissions: February 1, 2024
Tracing the etymology of the word nostalgia, Aaron Santesso locates it as a historical concept that first emerged in 1688 when the physician Johannes Hofer combined the Greek words nostos (return home) and algia (a painful condition) to diagnose what he considered to be a medical condition ailing his patients that “grew out of a uncommon and ever-present idea of the recalled native land” (Santesso 13; Hoffer 381).
As time has progressed, nostalgia has become something of a “catch-all term” that is often invoked in temporal terms (a longing for one’s past), rather than the geographical term that Hoffer first imagined (15). In addition to this spatio-temporal confusion, the objects of nostalgia studies often vary between the individual and the community.
While Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut, for example, define nostalgia as “a sentimental longing for one’s past” that influences one’s sense of identity, they also provide the caveat that nostalgia is “deeply social” because it creates meaning for an individual in-part through-social connectedness (48, 51).
Still, others contend that nostalgia is purely political and rhetorical. In A Careful Longing: The Poetics and Problems of Nostalgia, Aaron Santesso defines nostalgia as not a “desire for the past,” but “an impersonal, highly literary mode of idealization responding first and foremost to the concerns of the present” (13). Through numerous close readings that track the emergence of nostalgia in eighteenth-century poetry, Santesso also repositions nostalgia from an individualized experience, “an intimately personal longing for the past,” to, rather, one that operates at the level of the community and the nation state (13).
Indeed, the enigmatic nature of nostalgia makes it hard to pin down, and in this conference, we will seek to examine nostalgia with a wide-reaching net that encapsulates the vast interests and experiences of nostalgia; we are accepting work from all fields, backgrounds, and interests that broadly relate to nostalgia.
Some topics may include:
–yearning and longing –absence – ethics, politics, & morality – affect – storytelling – the rhetoric of nostalgia – transnational/or global climates – nostalgia as a cultural product – commodification – visual/or multimodal representations of nostalgia – identity making – artifacts – temporality – place-making – modernity and industrialization
