The 2025 joint RSAA/David Nichol Seminar conference, “Living / Building,” is a chance to think about connections between eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, the ways lives were built and made in the 18^th century and Romantic periods, and the way we live and build relationships today. The conference theme draws inspiration from Te Herenga Waka’s Living Pā, the Māori meeting house, research and teaching facility on campus. The pā is a “Living Building,” meaning that it is built to high sustainability and environmental standards, as well as reflecting Māori principles of design, learning, and community.

The Māori lawyer and intellectual Moana Jackson (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Porou, Rongomaiwahine) once said:

....for me the notion of home within kaupapa Māori [a Māori-centred approach] is a relational understanding. It depends upon relationships, and if the relationships are strong, if the ties that bind people together are secure, then whatever house they build to be at home in on their whenua [land] will be secure.

Conference participants are invited to bring this relational understanding to a wide array of topics and approaches that characterise scholarship on the eighteenth century and Romanticism in this part of the world. Proposed papers might respond to either or both of the terms “Living / Building” and topics might include:

• Building connections between eighteenth-century studies and Romantic studies
• Ways of living that were imagined, encouraged, discouraged, or denied in the period and its texts, artworks, and cultural practices
• Building relationships in Britain and across the world
• Living beings and ecosystems
• Building communities, infrastructures, movements, collectives, and enterprises in the eighteenth century and beyond
• Life and death, building and destroying, in the long eighteenth century

Papers on other topics related to eighteenth-century and Romantic studies are also very welcome. We particularly welcome papers on pedagogy in these fields.

Please send abstracts of 200 words, with a short bio note, to Nikki Hessell (nikki.hessell@vuw.ac.nz) by 1 July 2025.