Nineteenth-century strata

Abstract

The 36th annual meeting of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies association – held in Salt Lake City and co-hosted by the University of Utah and Brigham Young University – invited participants to dig into the theme of “Nineteenth-Century Strata.” Celebrating the breathtaking geological stratigraphy that constitutes the state of Utah, from the red rock of the Colorado Plateau to the snowy peaks of the Wasatch Mountain Range, as well as the rich diversity of the peoples and species that have made Utah their home, the conference sought to showcase the varied ways that nineteenth-century scholarship can think about literal and figurative layerings. Our conference opened with a welcome reception at the Natural History Museum of Utah, a copper-toned and terraced building nestled beautifully into the natural contours of the surrounding foothills. Inside, the Museum houses a vast array of specimens from Utah’s prehistoric past, and our guests enjoyed having the galleries all to ourselves in the after-hours reception. We walked among the colossal skeletons of Utahraptor, Triceratops, and other ancient species, learned about the bounty of fossils trapped in the gooey mud of the nearby Cleveland Morrison Formation, and, from the museum’s grand balcony, watched the sunset over Salt Lake City, whose deep prehistory as Lake Bonneville is still visible in the sedimentary layers of the Pleistocene rock that hugs its curves. The more recent temporal dislocation was not lost on us either. Our conference was originally proposed for 2021 but, like so many of our plans, was disrupted by the COVID outbreak. The previous INCS conference in Los Angeles in early March 2020 was likely the last in-person humanities conference in the United States before the pandemic drove us online, and INCS 2022 in Salt Lake City may have been one of the first conferences to return face-to-face. We were very lucky. At the end of March, case numbers were low, vaccines had become widely available, our attendees were vigilant about masking in sessions, and spring temperatures allowed us to explore outdoors. The opportunity to engage with each other in ways that we had missed during the previous two years was indescribably invigorating, both professionally and personally. When the organizing committee chose the theme of “Nineteenth-Century Strata,” we hoped to attract papers on geology and deep time; stratifications of gender, class, and race; the rise of cities and urban architecture; layering in the visual arts through