Victorian Society of America summer schools

Now in their fourth decade, the Victorian Society in America's Summer Schools, in Newport RI, and London, UK, provide in-depth study of the multi-faceted architecture and culture of the nineteenth century.

The courses include lectures by leading experts, site visits and guided tours. The programs are designed to allow students to see and do as much as possible. There is little free time during the programs, the pace is physically demanding, and there are many walking tours.

The Victorian Society in America sponsors the Summer Schools. The tuition fee includes one year's membership of the VSA.

The dates for 2010 have been announced. Save the dates on your calendar!

NEWPORT SCHOOL, RI
Dates: June 4-13, 2010
Cost: $2,300

LONDON, UK SCHOOL
Dates: July 10-25, 2010
Cost: $4,300

A limited number of partial and full scholarships will be available to qualified candidates. To apply refer to the Application information.

For more information on the Summer Schools, please contact:



Susan E. McCallum, Administrator
Victorian Society in America Summer Schools
100 Prospect Street
Summit, New Jersey 07901
Phone: 908 522-0656
Email: vsasummerschools@comcast.net

CFP: Oceania and the East in the Victorian Imagination (3/19/2010; 10/28-10/30/2010)

15th Annual Conference of the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States (VISAWUS)

OCEANIA AND THE EAST IN THE VICTORIAN IMAGINATION

October 28-30, 2010 Honolulu Hawai'i

The 15th Annual Conference will focus on the complex relationships between the Victorians and the East, including India and China, Malay and the East Indies, Australia and New Zealand, and the South Sea Islands. This international conference will bring together specialists in Asian and Victorian art history, literature, gender studies, science, history, literature, politics, and biographical studies, among others, to explore how the Victorians perceived the East and how the Victorians were perceived in the East. We invite paper proposals on political, cultural, social, religious, artistic, scientific, economic, agrarian, and other aspects of this rich interaction. By March 19, 2010 email a 300-word abstract & 1-page CV (put your name on BOTH) to: Richard Fulton fulton@hawaii.edu For further information, log on to VISAWUS.org.


About the image: "Cassini" map of Hawai'i. The original copper plate engraving was published in Rome in 1798 at the Pressola Calcongrafia Camerale and was based on Capt. James Cook's map of 1784. The Death of Cook was added in 1798.

CFP: Victorian Systems and Standardization (11/15/2009)

Congress 2010: Victorian Studies Association of Ontario/ Association of Canadian
College and University Teachers of English Joint Session

VICTORIAN SYSTEMS AND STANDARDIZATION

Our little systems have their day…
Tennyson, In Memoriam, Prologue, st. 5

From the factory to the railway, the telegraph to the postal service, the growth of empire to the establishment of national educational curricula, the nineteenth century was marked by large-scale impositions of system, and by a concurrent emphasis on the standardization of objects, concepts, and people. This panel seeks to explore the imbrications of system and standardization throughout the Victorian era, and to examine how the concept of rationalized organization was imagined and understood by Victorians. How did the generalized abstraction inherent in the process of standardization shape the lived experience of individuals? What supra-individual needs were anticipated in the construction of various kinds of system? To what extent did the Victorians envisage a connection between systematization and knowledge production?

Papers may focus on any occurrence of system or standardization during the
Victorian period, such as:
- Genre as artistic standardization
- Disciplines (scientific and otherwise)
- Domestic conventions
- Bodies in systems
- Heterodox and orthodox belief systems
- Formal and informal economies
- The aesthetics of system

We are also interested in events and ideas that were explicitly figured as
resistances to system, such as:
- Works of genius or inspiration
- Free love
- Anarchy
- Mutiny

For more information see http://www.accute.ca/2010cfp.html#jo. Please send your
700-word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50
word biographical statement, and the ACCUTE submitter information form, to
VSAOatACCUTE@gmail.com by November 15th.

Image by flickr user British Postal Museum and Archive / CC licensed

CFP: Commitment in British Women Writers' Novels

Commitment in British Women Writers' Novelists of the 18th & 19th Centuries

Contributions are invited for a conference which will take place at the University of Caen in France on 17th and 18th June 2010.

As soon as novels developed, women played an important role both as readers and as authors, since among the 2,000 works which were published in the 18th century, 600 were written by women. One can then wonder about the way they used that means of expression and ask whether Mary Wollstonecraft opened the path for a British female literature characterized by commitment through her desire for political and social equality with men. Let us specify that during that seminar the term “commitment” will be used in the sense it had in the 18th and 19th centuries rather than in the sense it took in the 20th century.

Some could focus on the different aspects of commitment whether it is political, social, religious, moral, intellectual, artistic… It would also be quite interesting to consider the sources of inspiration for that commitment in novels by Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, or the Brontës (this is not an exhaustive list). Besides one could deal with the role played by some major figures such as Harriet Martineau or Harriet Taylor Mill, John Stuart Mill’s wife, but also by some ideals and among them that of the “New Woman”.

Other proposals could be centred on the form that commitment takes on. Does it influence women writers’ strategies for articulating their experience? How does commitment characterize the very text? Does it make itself known always strikingly? And more generally are women writers’ means of expression the same as those adopted in the society of the time?

Please send your proposals (one A4 page maximum) before 1st December 2009 to Elise Ouvrard (ouvrard_elise@hotmail.com).

CFP: NCSA Conference on Theatricality & Performativity in the Long 19thC

Call for Papers: Theatricality and the Performative in the Long Nineteenth Century

Submission deadline: September 15, 2009

31st Annual Conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association

The University of Tampa, March 11-13, 2010, Tampa, Florida

Keynote speaker: Michael Fried (Johns Hopkins University)

Plenary Event: Exhibition of Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, with a roundtable discussion featuring Margaret D. Stetz (University of Delaware), curator and author of Facing the Late Victorians; Dennis Denisoff (Ryerson University), and Maria Gindhart (Georgia State University)

Dramatic expression and self-conscious performances marked almost every aspect of nineteenth century life and artistic culture, as theatrical turns and performative mindsets introduced in the 17^th-18^th centuries expanded in the 1780s through the beginning of World War One. We invite paper and panel proposals that explore these themes and subjects in the long Nineteenth Century (1780-1914). Papers might address the theatrical shows—whether serious drama, circus displays, vaudeville, operas, or Shakespearean revivals—that appeared in cities and towns on both sides of the Atlantic (as well as in more distant lands). Or they might investigate how politics, social events, military engagements, domestic affairs, public trials, crime reports, religious rituals, architectural spaces, sculptural moments, exhibition halls, artistic and musical compositions, and the early moving pictures of the cinema, assumed a theatrical sensibility. Welcome also are proposals for papers and panels that bring scholarly and theoretical interests in performativity to bear on concepts of identity, individuality, and audience in the given era.

Please submit abstracts of approximately 500 words along with a brief (one page) c.v. to the Program Co-Chairs, Janice Simon (U of Georgia) and Regina Hewitt (U of South Florida) at the conference address ncsa2010@earthlink.net by Sept. 15, 2009. Speakers will be notified by or before Dec. 15.

Any graduate student whose proposal is accepted may at that point submit a full-length version of the paper in competition for a travel grant to help cover transportation and lodging expenses.

Conference sessions will be held at the University of Tampa , a campus with both a state-of-the-art conference center and the historic late-19^th century Plant Hall, site of the Plant Museum where _Facing the Late Victorians_ will be exhibited and a reception will be held. Excursions to the Tampa Bay History Center and the historic neighborhood of Ybor City are also planned. Accommodations are available at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Tampa, a short walk from campus. For further information, please visit the NCSA website http://www.english.uwosh.edu/roth/ncsa/ or contact Elizabeth Winston, Local Arrangements Director (U of Tampa), at the conference address ncsa2010@earthlink.net.

CFP: BAVS conference on "Victorian Forms and Formations"

CFP: British Association for Victorian Studies 2010 Conference : ‘Victorian Forms and Formations,’ Sept. 2-4, 2010, U of Glasgow

The 2010 BAVS conference seeks to address the question of ‘form’, in all its varied meanings, in Victorian culture. We invite papers that address the topic of literary form, and that engage with current debates in the field over the return to form in literary criticism, but also wish to broaden the topic to encompass forms and formations in other disciplines, including but not limited to art history, science, architecture, politics, religion and history of the book. Papers might consider the role of different social and political groupings and institutions in the Victorian period, or the formation of a particular idea or discipline. They might deal with wide-ranging debates over varied attempts at reform in the nineteenth century, or could focus on the formation or reformation of the individual. Papers considering material forms, including the fashioning of the body in medical and other discourse, are welcome, as are papers on the physical features of the Victorian landscape: urban and rural spaces, natural forms and the built environment. We also invite papers that are concerned with the reworking of Victorian forms in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and culture.

Plenary speakers:

• James Eli Adams
• Matthew Campbell
• Margaret Macdonald
• Catherine Robson

A number of postgraduate bursaries will be available for postgraduate students presenting a paper at the conference or acting as a conference reporter. Please check this site in spring 2010 for details of how to apply.

Deadline for submission of abstract: 15 March 2010. Please send a 200-word abstract to bavs@arts.gla.ac.uk

Suggested topics for consideration:

Poetic form* Narrative form* Generic formation* Neoformalism* Political formations* Social reform* Educational reform* Scientific formations* Geological forms* Religious formations* Imperial formations* Urban forms* Architectural form* Sculptural form* Domestic design* Intellectual formations* Forms of publication* Bodily formations* Gendered forms* Forms of conduct* Forming identities* Moral forms*Neovictorian forms*

The full CFP is online here.

Colby Book Prize: Nominations by 1 December 2009

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals is very pleased to award the annual Robert Colby Scholarly Book Prize for a scholarly book that most advances the understanding of the nineteenth-century British newspaper and/or periodical press. All books exploring periodicals of the period are eligible (including single-author monographs, edited collections, and editions) as long as they have a publication date of 2009. The winner will receive a plaque and a monetary award of up to $3,000, and will be invited to speak at the RSVP conference at Yale University in New Haven (September 10-11, 2010). The prize was made possible by a generous gift by Vineta Colby in honor of Robert Colby, a long and devoted member of RSVP and a major scholar in the field of Victorian periodicals.

Previous winners of the Colby Prize are:

• 2009: Catherine Waters, Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Ashgate)
• 2008: Kathryn Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context (Ashgate)
• 2007: David Finkelstein, Ed., Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition (University of Toronto Press)
• 2005-2006: Linda Hughes, Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (Ohio University Press) and Peter Morton, The Busiest Man in London: Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875-1900 (Palgrave)

Steampunk Exhibit

Lisa Hager forwards a link to the site devoted to an upcoming Steampunk exhibit at Oxford's The Museum of the History of Science.

You'll need to scroll a bit, but there are some fascinating images here.


(Steampunk aficionados might be interested in this interview I did with Ann and Jeff VanderMeer about their recent anthology.)

Victorian Search at the University of Toronto Mississauga

POSITION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, MISSISSAUGA

Applications are invited for a tenure-stream position, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Drama, University of Toronto Mississauga, University of Toronto. Qualifications: Ph.D. in English, with specialization in Victorian Literature. Applicants should be qualified to teach, supervise theses, and carry out research in that area, and have evidence of excellence in research and teaching. The successful candidate will also be a member of the tri-campus Graduate Department of English. Duties will consist of research; teaching undergraduate courses at the UTM campus and graduate courses at the St. George campus; supervision of graduate theses. Salary commensurate with qualifications and experience.

We strongly encourage you to submit your application online at

http://www.jobs.utoronto.ca/faculty.htm

If you are unable to apply online, please mail your application to Professor Leslie Thomson, Chair, Department of English and Drama / Room 290A, North Building / University of Toronto Mississauga / 3359 Mississauga Road North / Mississauga, Ontario L5L 1C6, Canada. Applications should include a curriculum vitae and ONE writing sample of scholarly work of not more than 25 pages. Applicants should also arrange for three letters of reference (or dossier) and graduate transcripts to be sent directly to the departmental address above as soon as possible. Appointment commences 1 July 2010. The deadline for applications is 2 November 2009.

The University of Toronto offers the opportunity to teach, conduct research and live in one of the most diverse and cosmopolitan locations in the world. The University also offers opportunities to work in a range of collaborative programs. The University of Toronto is strongly committed to diversity within its community and especially welcomes applications from visible minority group members, women, Aboriginal persons, persons with disabilities, members of sexual minority groups, and others who may contribute to the further diversification of ideas. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority.

CFP: British Women Writers Conference

The 18th Annual 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers Conference
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX

"Journeys"
April 8-11, 2010

Call for Papers

This year's conference will explore the abundant varieties of journeys found in 18th- and 19th-century British women's writing. We encourage interdisciplinary considerations of topics such as migration, travel, exile, exploration, tourism, border crossing, religion, travel writing, art, fantasy, children's literature and more.

We are pleased to announce that our speakers will include Kate Flint, Felicity Nussbaum, Mary Fissell, Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, and Erika Rappaport.

Proposals for panels and individual papers might consider, but are not limited to, the following issues:

-Travel writing/art
-Biographical narratives
-Marriage/Honeymoon
-Continental tours
-Motherhood/Childhood
-Colonialism and Empire
-Philosophical investigations
-Scientific inquiry
-Religious explorations
-Spiritual awakenings
-Transatlantic movement of persons, ideas, and/or goods
-Immigration/Emigration
-Memory as travel
-Dreams
-Re-envisioning the past/future
-Mapping the body
-Rites of passage
-Crossing class boundaries
-Movement between private and public spheres
-Exile (Social, Political, Familial)
-Women and work
-Education
-Intertextuality

Individual proposals should be two pages: a cover sheet including name, presentation title, university affiliation, address, email address, phone number, and brief biographical paragraph; and a 500-word abstract. Please do not include any identifying information on the abstract.

Panel proposals should include a coversheet--containing panel title, presenters' names, presentation titles, university affiliations, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, brief biographical paragraphs, and the name of the moderator--followed by separate abstracts (500-word) that describe the significance of the panel topic and each presentation. Please do not include any identifying information on the abstracts.

Proposals must be submitted electronically as an attachment in .doc or .rtf format by October 15, 2009 to the conference email address: BWWC18@tamu.edu.

For more information and updates, please visit our conference website:

http://www-english.tamu.edu/bwwc18

Thank you!
Elizabeth Talafuse
BWWC 2010 Organizing Committee
Texas A&M University

Public Lecture at Loyola, Chicago

Public Lecture on Saturday, September 12, 2009
by Professor Simon Gatrell, University of Georgia
Public Lecture: “Sex, Sin, & Revision in Hardy’s Fiction”

Klarchek Information Commons 230, 216
Loyola University Chicago
Lake Shore Campus
Coffee 10:30 AM
Public Lecture 11:00 AM
Panel discussion 12:00 PM
Lunch 1:00 PM

Participation is free.