Remote Sensing

CFP: “On the Edge of American: Art, Exodusters, and Expatriates, 1850-1900”

This symposium foregrounds new scholarly writing on creativity and migration in the Victorian era with a special focus on the contributions of Black and Afro-Indigenous artists, designers, and performers. Moderated by the esteemed Dr. Tiya Miles, with a keynote by Dr. Jennifer DeVere Brody, the symposium will focus on the many forms that creativity took from 1850-1900 as Black creatives sought freedom, opportunity, and fortune outside the formal boundaries of the United States.

In her compelling analysis of the exodus of thousands of former slaves to the Kansas Territory following the civil war, the historian Nell Irvin Painter tells us that “the prospect of leaving the region entirely for truly free soil fired the imaginations of Blacks who realized that their oppression was inextricably bound up with Southern or perhaps American life.” Histories of American West such as have adopted Painter’s term “Exoduster” to describe complex settler politics of African Americans fleeing westward to escape enslavement, violence, economic exploitation, and social exclusion.

While we understand them as Americans, Exodusters and their white settler peers understood themselves as emigrating outside the United States when they entered the territories. “On the Edge of American” explores parallel experiences of these “Exodusters” to the expatriate artists who traversed the Atlantic to build careers abroad.  It seeks to describe the interrelation of America’s edges in communities as far-flung as the American West, the Caribbean, and Western Europe.

Within the fine arts, presenters are invited to discuss the work of artists such as James Presley Ball, Robert Duncanson, Edmonia & Samuel Lewis, Edward Mitchel Bannister, Grafton Tyler Brown, Taylor Gordan, and Nelson A. Primus. However, we also encourage scholars to consider the more ephemeral aspects of cultural production in which itinerant artists engaged, such as music and performance.

This approach is prompted in part by theater historian Joseph Roach’s influential “circum-Atlantic” framework for decentralizing the United States as the focal point of studies about the ‘New World,’ instead, placing all histories and cultures of the Americas on equal footing to facilitate comparative work across national boundaries. Roach places particular emphasis on the performance, broadly construed, of culture, politics, and identity as sites for the reproduction and recreation of culture in the face of profound loss.

Please submit a 300-word abstract, a paper title and an up-to-date CV by January 1, 2026 to melissa.ragain@montana.edu and regee@montana.edu  Selected speakers will be notified on March 1, 2026 and are expected to accept or decline the offer within one week of notification. Accepted papers will be presented in 20 minutes, followed by Q&A discussions. We welcome submissions from a variety of disciplines, including fine art, art history, visual studies, media and cinema studies, history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and political science.

The symposium will take place on Oct 23-24, 2026, in the Hager Auditorium of the Museum of the Rockies in coinciding with the exhibition “Chisel & Razor: The Artistic Lives and Legacies of Edmonia & Samuel Lewis”