Workshop Held: Transatlantic Junctures of Gender, Genre, Class and Race in the Long 19th Century 

26 June 2026 

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb 

9:00 AM, Room A-101

On Friday, 26 June 2026, the POTRAND19 project held its workshop Transatlantic Junctures of Gender, Genre, Class and Race in the Long 19th Century at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. The event brought together colleagues from Zagreb and abroad for a full day of papers, a plenary lecture, a round table, and a book launch, ranging across genre theory, transatlantic literary history, and the long nineteenth century's afterlives in contemporary fiction. The discussion was wide-ranging and generous, and the workshop closed with a strong sense of the many directions this kind of comparative, transatlantic work can still take. For full programme and Book of Abstracts see Wokshop announcement below. 

Genre, Secrecy, and the Fold: Reading Henry James with Deleuze and Guattari

Tatjana Jukić Gregurić opened her paper with the frontispiece to the New York Edition volume containing Henry James's In the Cage — a cover image built around framing lines and a bird, echoing the novella's own image of the telegraphist caged like "a guinea-pig or a magpie." Jukić Gregurić used this visual as a way into Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's chapter "1874: Three Novellas, or 'What Happened?'" from A Thousand Plateaus, in which James's In the Cage serves as one of the central literary examples.

Following Deleuze and Guattari, Jukić Gregurić laid out a structural distinction between the novella and the tale as genres organised around opposing temporalities. The novella, she explained, is organised around the question "What happened? What could have happened?" — a genre of secrecy, retrospection, and postures of body and mind that fold and enfold. The tale, by contrast, is driven by the question "What is going to happen?" — a genre of discovery, in which attitudes and positions unfold and develop rather than close in on themselves. Jukić Gregurić traced how this generic logic plays out in James's own prefaces, showing how attentive James was, avant la lettre, to the very distinctions Deleuze and Guattari would later formalise.

Writing the Journey: Dickens, Trollope, and the Transatlantic Travelogue

Borislav Knežević took up the question of what it means to write a travel book, and where such writing sits culturally between reportage, literature, and polemic. Drawing on Anthony Trollope's journalism on American literary piracy in The Athenaeum (occasioned by the copyright disputes surrounding his own 1862 travel book North America), alongside Igor Webb's essay "Charles Dickens in America: The Writer and Reality" and David Bordelon's "Transatlantic Dickens; or, Travels through Nineteenth-Century Book History in America," Knežević examined the cultural place of the travelogue and the question of narrative voice it raises.

Turning to Dickens's own American Notes (1842), Knežević traced how Dickens saw America — including his early adoption of the phrase "the almighty dollar," coined shortly before by Washington Irving, to capture what Dickens took to be the ruling spirit of American life. Knežević noted that Dickens was, by contrast, drawn to America's institutions and charities precisely because they were supported and assisted by the state — a form of public provision quite different from what exists today. Rather than adjudicating what he saw, Knežević argued, Dickens presents material for readers to judge for themselves, casting them, in his own words, as a "fellow-passenger" on the journey.

Recovering a Forgotten Voice: Ethel Carnie Holdsworth's This Slavery

Martina Domines offered a close reading of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth's 1925 novel This Slavery — a writer she noted remains strikingly little known, little taught, and little read, despite being among the earliest working-class women novelists published in Britain. Domines pointed to a renewed critical interest in Carnie Holdsworth's work currently taking shape in Britain, and argued that this neglect says as much about the literary canon's blind spots as it does about the novel itself.

To frame her reading, Domines drew on Barbara Korte's concept of "configurations of poverty," using it to trace how This Slavery constructs poverty across several registers at once: through the life-worlds it depicts, through the textual form and style in which those lives are rendered, and through the kinds of agency it grants — or withholds from — its characters. Read this way, Domines suggested, Carnie Holdsworth's novel emerges not simply as a social document of Lancashire mill life, but as a formally deliberate act of representation in its own right.

"Australia for the Australians": The Bulletin, Genre, and the Aesthetics of Exclusion

Tihana Klepač presented a paper on how The Bulletin, the Sydney weekly that became known as "the Bushman's Bible," used the short story to manufacture the Australian national myth of the bush and mateship, while quietly excluding Chinese workers, Aboriginal people, and women from the category of "Australian." Drawing on Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Klepač argued that the magazine's aesthetic strategy — what Christopher Lee calls the "effacement of the artist" — presented these exclusions as simple facts about the country rather than as editorial choices, so that the myth appeared to describe Australia rather than construct it.

To show how this worked in practice, Klepač compared Henry Lawson's "The Union Buries Its Dead," where the writer's self-effacement produced exactly the national type the Bulletin wanted, with Barbara Baynton's "The Chosen Vessel," where editor A. G. Stephens cut a key passage and retitled the story to relocate the danger to women from inside the white settler community to an outside intruder. Because that editorial intervention left a visible trace, Klepač suggested that Australia offers an unusually legible case study for how national literatures build — and hide — their own exclusions.

Space, Time, and the Sublime: Stipe Grgas on the Atlantic as Historical Event

Stipe Grgas opened by questioning the recent turn toward spatial thinking in the humanities, arguing that space itself has become something of a dogma — a category taken for granted in the same way historical narrative once was. Having displaced older historical biases, Grgas suggested, criticism has now installed a spatial bias in their place, when in fact history and space cannot be meaningfully separated from one another. He framed this through the concept of time-space, before turning specifically to the sea and ocean as a limit case for spatial thinking: the sublimity of the sea, he argued, exposes a gap in our epistemological tools, since the ocean's very lack of limit resists being talked about in the terms available to us. Grgas drew on Heidegger's insistence on the equal primordiality of time and space to support this point.

Grgas then differentiated the Atlantic from other bodies of water along three axes: size, movement, and directionality. Unlike the Mediterranean or the Adriatic, which carry their own bounded histories, the Atlantic resists this kind of containment. Movement across the Atlantic, he noted, is inscribed in the prefix "trans-" itself, while directionality carries its own ideological freight: Hegel's account of the westward sea as the fulfilment of human civilisation. Crossing the Atlantic, Grgas argued, was Heidegger's kind of event — the sort after which history is never the same again — and he paired this with Adam Smith's judgment in The Wealth of Nations that the discovery of America was one of the two greatest and most important events in the history of mankind. Grgas closed by gesturing toward geosophy and Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West as further frameworks for thinking the Atlantic as historical event.

Barbary Captivity, National Narrative, and the Long History of a Genre

Jelena Šesnić traced the genre of Barbary captivity narratives — first-hand accounts by sailors of the US merchant marine held by North African corsairs from Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli (present-day Libya) — back through a much longer literary genealogy, beginning with Cervantes and running through Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as the archetypal English novel. She drew on the scholarship of Gesa Mackenthun to situate this material within a wider literature of maritime contact and captivity. Šesnić showed how the same underlying conflict between Christianity and Islam surfaces even within Croatian literature, pointing to the moreška sword dance performed on Korčula and to Hanibal Lucić's Robinja ("The Slave Girl"), the first secular Croatian play, centred on a noblewoman held captive by the Turks.

Šesnić then widened the frame to nineteenth-century American Indian captivity narratives and slave narratives as related genres, before returning to specific Barbary accounts: John Foss's 1798 narrative of his captivity in Algiers, and Jonathan Cowdery, the ship's surgeon aboard the USS Philadelphia, captured when the vessel fell into Tripolitan hands. Šesnić noted that, strictly speaking, these accounts do not meet a narrow definition of the literary, but argued that this is precisely their interest: as "unruly" narratives, not yet fully literary, they show a genre in the process of being gradually absorbed into an emerging national narrative.

Auctioning People and Goods: New Orleans and the Slave Trade

Petra Sapun Kurtin's paper began with the material history of New Orleans as a hub of the domestic slave trade, noting that the city held some 50 slave-auction houses where enslaved people and ordinary goods were sold side by side. Against this backdrop, she examined how the city's female authors — Kate Chopin, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Grace King — represented, or failed to fully represent, this history, before turning to contemporary neo-historical fiction that returns explicitly to the slave trade: Valerie Martin's Property (2003), narrated from inside a slaveholding household, and Josh Russell's Yellow Jack (1999), set amid New Orleans's yellow fever epidemics.

To show what these later, more critical works were responding to, Sapun Kurtin turned to Ludwig von Reizenstein's The Mysteries of New Orleans, a sensationalist mid-nineteenth-century serial novel that catalogued enslaved people using an elaborate racial vocabulary — "dark mulatto," "mestiza," "fancy maid," "yellow girl" — language that turned the auction block into a site of spectacle, extending even to the sale of children. She argued that this same sensationalism could serve two opposite purposes at once: contemporaries used the "tragic mulatto" figure to generate abolitionist sympathy in readers, while Property and Yellow Jack return to that same figure today as a corrective, working to undo the spectacle and give the enslaved a fuller interiority the earlier literature denied them.

Sublime and Liminal: Lovecraft's Antarctic Horror

Lucija Relić examined class, gender, and race in H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, framing the novella through the aesthetics of the sublime, liminality, and the horror genre's characteristic encounter with the Other. Drawing extensively on Dejan Ognjanović's Poetika horora ("Poetics of Horror"), Relić situated Lovecraft's Antarctic expedition narrative within a longer tradition of cosmic and gothic horror, in which the sheer vastness and alienness of a landscape becomes inseparable from the terror it provokes.

Central to her argument was the novella's debt to Edgar Allan Poe, and specifically to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), Poe's own Antarctic tale of a doomed voyage toward the South Pole. Relić traced how Lovecraft draws directly on Poe's novel — down to borrowing its uncanny cry, "Tekeli-li" — to stage his own encounter with an unknowable, ancient world at the edge of the map, arguing that the liminal space of the South Pole becomes the site where anxieties of class, gender, and race are most exposed.

Perplexity as Method: Kimberly Engber on Jane Addams

Kimberly Engber's plenary lecture traced the literary self-presentation of Jane Addams — the Chicago social reformer once branded "the most dangerous woman in America" by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover for her pacifism. Engber focused on Addams's 1910 autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes, arguing that Addams deliberately presents herself as almost unqualified to tell her own story. Engber read this self-declared inadequacy not as modesty but as a considered method: a way of writing that resists the false authority of a single, all-knowing narrator.

Engber illustrated Addams's continuing resonance through Gwendolyn Brooks's poem "Jane Addams," written for the centennial of Hull House, closely analysing its call to live and act despite uncertainty — "Go ahead and live your life... You might be surprised. The world might continue" — and its closing insistence that what matters, in the end, is simply that one bothered. She then turned to Chapter V of the autobiography, "First Days at Hull-House," showing how its organisation is topical rather than chronological, and how Addams defends this unconventional form. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," Engber read the public square in front of Hull House as a space that constitutes a kind of civic order in miniature, arguing that Addams's impulse to exist for others is precisely what keeps her relevant today.

Turning to the 1930 sequel, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, Engber described it as a record of a growing world consciousness, and argued that perplexity — rather than clean synthesis or tidy categories — is a condition Addams treats as necessary to a genuinely lived democracy. Engber closed by situating Addams alongside John Dewey and the Chicago philanthropist Anita McCormick Blaine, both central to the same progressive circle, and by pointing to Addams's attentiveness to tragedy, addiction, and the lives of migrants — including mothers who felt they had lost their Americanised children — as evidence of her deeper aim: finding common purpose and showing the importance of tradition within a modern industrial society, rooted in genuine relationships with one's neighbours at Hull House.

Round Table: The Present Tense of English and American Studies

Chaired by Tatjana Jukić Gregurić, President of CASE, the round table "The Present Tense of English and American Studies" brought together Kimberly Engber, Martina Domines, and Mateusz-Milan Stanojević, co-organised by CASE and CAAS, for a wide-ranging discussion of the current state of the discipline.

The conversation addressed the lasting impact of the 2020 disruptions — the COVID-19 pandemic and Brexit — on research circulation, joint projects, academic exchange, and funding, and whether European and transatlantic scholarly cooperation has become more regional in the years since. Speakers also discussed how the advancement of AI and large language models is reshaping English as a discipline, and what this means for research and teaching in the near term. Further discussion turned to the broader position of English studies within the humanities today, and to whether the formats of academic communication — conferences and symposia among them — are changing, gaining in number even as some feel they are losing their edge.

Book Launch: Jelena Šesnić's Metafore ideologije i figure teksta

The workshop closed with the launch of Jelena Šesnić's Metafore ideologije i figure teksta: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick i američki književni studiji ("Metaphors of Ideology and Figures of Text: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, and American Literary Studies"), presented by Stipe Grgas, Borislav Knežević, and the author herself. Both Grgas and Knežević spoke warmly in praise of the book.

The study takes Herman Melville and Moby-Dick (1851) as its central focus, tracing how the novel and its author have continued to command scholarly and critical attention across more than a century of American literary studies. Chapter by chapter, Šesnić moves from the dominant critical and theoretical readings of Moby-Dick within "older" American studies up to the 1980s, through the paradigm shifts that followed — new historicism, the sociology of literature, cultural studies — and on to more recent methodological currents including new materialism, ecocriticism, and new formalism. Along the way, the book also examines Melville's own position as a writer caught between artistic truth and the literary marketplace, and the broader processes of literary historiography, canon formation, and periodisation that shaped Moby-Dick's changing status. The book introduces new critical vocabulary for the study of nineteenth-century literature and proposes theoretical models that Šesnić suggests could be extended to other literary corpora and national contexts.

The book first appeared in print in 2025, published in the Biblioteka L series. This year it was made freely available as an open-access publication through FF Open Press, the University of Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences' open-access publishing platform: https://openbooks.ffzg.unizg.hr/index.php/FFpress/catalog/book/227.

The workshop once again confirmed the value of sustained, comparative work across genre, period, and national tradition, bringing together scholars working on the long nineteenth century from Henry James to Jane Addams, from the Barbary Coast to the Australian bush. We are grateful to all the colleagues, near and far, who took part and contributed to a rich day of discussion, and to our guest from the USA, Kimberly Engber, for the plenary lecture that anchored the day. The workshop reaffirms POTRAND19's central aim: to examine transatlantic literary cultures of the long nineteenth century through shared conceptual vocabularies and historically grounded interpretative frameworks, and it sets a strong foundation for the project's continuing work. 

Workshop Announcement: Transatlantic Junctures of Gender, Genre, Class and Race in the Long 19th Century

26 June 2026 

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb 

9:00 AM, Room A-101

On Friday, 26 June 2026, beginning at 9:00, room A-101 at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb will host the POTRAND19 project workshop Transatlantic Junctures of Gender, Genre, Class and Race in the Long 19th Century.

Among the workshop highlights:

13:00 – Plenary Lecture
Our guest from the USA, Dr. Kimberly Engber (Wichita State University), will deliver the plenary lecture "Perplexity: Jane Addams' Autobiographies and American Uni/versities." The lecture is co-organised by HUAmS and HDAS, and all members are warmly encouraged to attend.

16:00 – Round Table: The Present Tense of English and American Studies
Speakers: Kimberly Engber, Martina Domines and Mateusz-Milan Stanojević. Co-organised by CASE and CAAS. Chair: Tatjana Jukić Gregurić (President, CASE)

17:30 – Book Launch
Jelena Šesnić: Metafore ideologije i figure teksta: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick i američki književni studiji (Biblioteka L, FF Open Press, 2026). Presenters: Stipe Grgas, Borislav Knežević and Jelena Šesnić. The book is available at: https://openbooks.ffzg.unizg.hr/index.php/FFpress/catalog/book/227

You are warmly invited to join us.

For Book of Abstracts please click HERE.

Inaugural Workshop of the Transatlantic 19th-Century Literary Cultures Project 

20 February 2026 | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb 

As part of the project Transatlantic 19th-Century Literary Cultures (POTRAND19), we held the inaugural workshop “Pojmovnik transatlantske književnosti u dugom 19. stoljeću” on 20 February 2026 at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. Conceived as a focused exchange on the state of research and conceptual frameworks shaping the study of the long nineteenth century, the workshop brought together colleagues from the Department of English, particularly from the Literature Section, for sustained and theoretically engaged discussion. We were especially pleased to welcome the Head of the Department, Prof. Mateusz-Milan Stanojević, whose presence and thoughtful contributions underscored the genuinely interdisciplinary spirit of the event. The full programme is provided below. 

A Note

Unfortunately, Dr. Domines was unable to join us due to illness. We look forward to welcoming her contribution at a future event.

The workshop once again confirmed the importance of sustained, collaborative dialogue across disciplinary approaches in nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies. We thank all colleagues who participated and contributed to the rich and thoughtful discussion.

This inaugural workshop reaffirmed the project’s central aim: to examine transatlantic literary cultures of the long nineteenth century through shared conceptual vocabularies and historically grounded interpretative frameworks. The discussion demonstrated the value of sustained interdisciplinary exchange, showing how literary studies, intellectual history, and cultural theory can productively illuminate one another when brought into dialogue. We are grateful to all colleagues who participated, contributed their expertise, and helped shape a collegial and intellectually generous atmosphere that sets a strong foundation for the project’s future activities.