‘Unless one is five and a half feet tall, has a bass voice and a beard on one’s chin, one has no business being a man’ (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse, 1761)

‘BE A MAN – THAT is the first and last rule of the greatest success in life’ (Albert J. Beveridge, The Young Man and the World 1905)

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Although there is a growing body of scholarly literature focusing on theories of masculinity in the social sciences, attention to the construction of masculinities remains underrepresented across the arts and humanities, despite feminist scholarship being a well-established field. For example, while R.W.Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinities (1995) is a mainstay of scholarship in the social sciences, it rarely surfaces in a discipline such as literary studies. This conference aims to redress this imbalance by asserting the value of investigating and exploring constructions of masculinity in the arts and humanities. In particular, we argue that masculinity becomes particularly pressing when considering the history and construction of nationhood and citizenship. Masculinity haunts the work of theorists of nationhood as varied as Homi Bhabha, Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm, yet has rarely been investigated explicitly in the arts and humanities, although there are signs that this is beginning to happen. This event aims to bring together researchers from across the UK and beyond working in the intersections between masculinity and discourses of the nation and citizenship. It will interrogate the way that masculinity has been, and still is, constructed as invisible or un-gendered, as well as examining essentialist assumptions. 

The conference will feature panel sessions, a keynote address by Ana Carden-Coyne (University of Manchester) and a public lecture by Rachel Woodward (Newcastle University). This conference will also feature a roundtable discussion with the keynotes and John Strachan (Northumbria University), which will seek to offer an interdisciplinary perspective on the use of theories of masculinities and nation.