CFP: Thomas Carlyle and the Twenty-First Century: Reexamining Carlyle Amid Political, Economic, Technological, and Religious Change

Carlyle Conference Call for Papers Thomas Carlyle and the Twenty-First Century

Reexamining Carlyle Amid Political, Economic, Technological, and Religious Change

University of New Hampshire
May 28–29, 2027

Nearly a decade has passed since scholars last gathered for a major international conference devoted to Thomas Carlyle’s life, writings, intellectual networks, reception, and legacies. Following conferences at Villanova (2007), Dumfries (2008), Edinburgh (2012), Oxford (2016), and Cambridge (2019), Thomas Carlyle and the Twenty-First Century will provide an opportunity to assess the current state—and consider the future—of Carlyle studies.

The conference coincides with the completion or maturation of several major scholarly enterprises:

• the Norman and Charlotte Strouse Edition of the Writings of Thomas Carlyle, published by the University of California Press, under the leadership of Chris Vanden Bossche
• the fifty-volume Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, published by Duke University Press, together with the continuing development of Carlyle Letters Online; and
• the Oxford University Press edition of The French Revolution: A History.

These achievements invite both celebration and reassessment. What new questions become possible now that scholars have access to an unprecedented range of Carlylean texts, letters, editions, and digital resources? What can Carlyle studies contribute to nineteenth-century studies and to broader debates in intellectual, political, religious, economic, and cultural history? Conversely, what might the concerns of the twenty-first century reveal anew about Carlyle and his world?

The conference particularly invites reconsiderations of Carlyle in relation to political, economic, technological, and religious challenges that connect—and distinguish—the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. How did Carlyle understand ideological division, political authority, democracy, revolution, nationalism, social cohesion, and international conflict? How did his diagnoses of industrial capitalism engage questions of inequality, poverty, exploitation, class antagonism, commodification, and globalization? How might his critique of the “Mechanical Age” be reread in a period increasingly shaped by automation, artificial intelligence, digital media, and rapid technological transformation? How did Carlyle respond to religious doubt and secularization, to Christianity and Islam, and to the search for faith and spiritual authority in a disenchanted world?

These questions require sustained critical attention to the political and ethical limitations of Carlyle’s thought. How should twenty-first-century scholarship approach his arguments concerning hierarchy, authority, race, slavery, empire, democracy, and political violence? Where do Carlyle’s diagnoses illuminate problems that remain recognizable today, and where do his proposed remedies reveal the historical limitations, contradictions, or dangers of his thinking? Rather than presuming Carlyle’s contemporary relevance, the conference invites participants to investigate the forms that his relevance—or irrelevance—might take.

We welcome new readings of Carlyle’s major works, including Sartor Resartus, The French Revolution, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Past and Present, and Latter-Day Pamphlets, as well as his biographies, histories, journalism, correspondence, and lesser-studied essays. Papers might examine Carlyle’s treatments of historical crisis, revolution, leadership, work, belief, social order, modernity, and renewal; his rhetoric and experiments with literary form; or the extent to which his writings anticipated, misread, or remained bound to the political and intellectual conditions of the nineteenth century.

The conference welcomes papers on all aspects of Thomas Carlyle’s life, writings, thought, reception, networks, and influence. We also invite work on Jane Welsh Carlyle and on the wider intellectual, literary, political, and cultural worlds in which the Carlyles participated. Papers might consider how the Carlyles imagined historical rupture and renewal; how their writings circulated internationally and across disciplines; or how Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle have repeatedly disappeared from—and returned to—scholarly and public attention.

We particularly encourage scholarship that reconsiders established interpretations in light of current approaches to nineteenth-century studies. Proposals are welcome from scholars at all career stages and from a wide range of disciplines, including literary studies, history, intellectual history, political thought, economic thought, philosophy, religious studies, book history, art history, Victorian studies, and the digital humanities.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Romanticism, Idealism, Platonism, and Transcendentalism
• Carlyle and the Enlightenment
• capitalism, industrialism, labor, poverty, and political economy
• socialism, communism, and Marxism
• democracy, authority, leadership, and heroism
• revolution, political violence, and social order
• nationalism, cosmopolitanism, empire, and globalization
• race, slavery, abolition, and colonialism
• Christianity, Islam, religious belief, doubt, and secularization
• technology, mechanization, automation, and the “Mechanical Age”
• utilitarianism, Stoicism, fatalism, and theories of history
• rhetoric, satire, historiography, biography, and literary form
• readers, critics, publishers, translators, and international reception
• Jane Welsh Carlyle, correspondence, gender, marriage, and domestic life
• archives, scholarly editing, digital humanities, and Carlyle Letters Online
• Carlyle’s disappearance from—and possible return to—the literary and intellectual canon
• the future of Carlyle studies

We also welcome papers examining Carlyle in relation to particular writers and thinkers, including Plato, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, G. W. F. Hegel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Friedrich Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf, and other figures whose work illuminates Carlyle’s intellectual networks, reception, or legacy.

At a moment when the writings of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle are more comprehensively available than ever before, the conference asks a broader question:

What remains unread, underexamined, or misunderstood in the Carlyles—and what should the next generation of Carlyle scholarship seek to discover?

Submission Information

Please submit an abstract of your paper of approximately 250–300 words, together with a brief biographical note, to Brian Wolfel at [email protected] by January 10, 2027.

Proposals for individual papers, panels, roundtables, and alternative formats are welcome. Individual papers will normally be 15 minutes in length.

The co-organizers of the conference are as follows: 

Brian Wolfel ([email protected])

David Sorensen ([email protected])

Brent Kinser ([email protected])

Thomas Carlyle and the Twenty-First Century
University of New Hampshire
May 28–29, 2027