Happiness and anxiety are motive forces of history. Through consumption, labor, sex, food,religious devotion, politics, and art, people seek to satisfy cravings for happiness. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences all, on some level, dissect competing visions of what constitutes happiness, regardless of whether it is defined as physical, aesthetic, or spiritual fulfillment. As men and women pursue these visions, competition, non-conformity, heresy, invasion, miscegenation, and disorder produce anxieties that happiness will not be achieved. Individuals, organizations, communities, and states responding to such threats draw boundaries to contain challenges both internal and external; to shore up positions; and to keep order.

We invite you to present interdisciplinary scholarship that puts into conversation fields such as history, literature, urban studies, anthropology, cultural studies, architecture, gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, art history, archaeology, and political science. Through a critical discussion of these fundamental concepts of happiness and anxiety we hope to stimulate dialogue linking topics as diverse as the Chicago Bulls and the English Civil Wars; American suburbanization and the paintings of Jan Vermeer.

Potential paper topics include, but are not limited to, explorations of the following:

- Consumption, production, and the politics of exchange
- Race and identity
- Immigration, migration, and citizenship
- Empire, nationalism, and patriotism
- Urban and suburban spaces
- Print and material culture
- Food, body image, and adornment
- Psychology, psychiatry, and subjectivity
- Religion and philosophy
- Gender and sexuality

Submission Guidelines:
Submission deadline is November 18, 2011. Panel submissions are preferred, though individual papers will be considered. Panel submissions should include a 200 word abstract and two page CV for each panelist, panel title, and theme. Individual paper submissions should include a 250 word abstract, paper title, and two page CV. All submissions should also note whether or not they will require multimedia services. Successful candidates will be notified by early January and should submit final papers by March 14, 2012.

Email submissions to: BrownHGSAConference@gmail.com.

Questions should be directed to Patrick Chung
(patrick_chung@brown.edu), Zack Dorner (zachary_dorner@brown.edu), or Brooke Lamperd (brooke_lamperd@brown.edu).