CFP: Reading & Writing in Prison (4-5 June 2010 / Edinburgh Napier U)

Reading and Writing in Prison: An Interdisciplinary Conference

Edinburgh Napier University

4-5 June 2010

This conference aims to bring together scholars, writers and practitioners to share their perspectives on the significance of reading and writing in prisons.

Writing about imprisonment raises key issues that go beyond an immediate concern with incarceration and its institutions, involving notions of subjectivity, citizenship and nationhood. Scholars and practitioners alike have long been arguing that opportunities for reading and writing in prisons can become a dignifying tool for prisoners to re-evaluate and reconstruct their lives, with positive impact on recidivism rates. The conference will act as a platform for exchange about existing scholarship and practice in the area, with the long-term goal of facilitating future research networks, publications and practical projects.

This event explicitly seeks conversations across the disciplines and between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. Contributors are invited to address reading, writing and imprisonment in any geographical location, in both historical and contemporary contexts. Some of the questions this conference wishes to address are: what defines the genre of prison literature or prison autobiography and how has it changed historically? How do institutional contexts and penal policies impact on reading and writing in prison? What effect do creative practice, prison education and reading groups have on groups of offenders and, conversely, society at large? What is the role of researchers and universities in contributing to debates around narratives of imprisonment, reading and writing in prison?

Possible topics include:

• Prison literature and prison (auto)biography as a genre
• The history and publishing context of prison writing
• Representations of prison reading and writing experiences
• Gender, class, ethnicity/race and age and their impact on reading and writing in prison
• Writing and political imprisonment
• Prison libraries and reading groups
• Creative writing in prisons: practice and problems

Invited speakers who have agreed to participate (subject to funding) include:
Ed Wiltse on student-prisoner reading groups and the object(s) of literary studies; Gowan Calder and Caspar Walsh on creative writing; Jenny Hartley and Rosalind Crone on prison reading in the nineteenth century; Sarah Turvey on prison reading groups; Bashabi Fraser on the imprisoned writer and the nation.

Contributors should submit an abstract of their proposed paper (250 words) and a brief biographical statement to a.schwan@napier.ac.uk by 1 March 2010.

For further information, please contact the organiser:
Dr Anne Schwan
Email: a.schwan@napier.ac.uk

Image by flickr user alias_archie / CC licensed

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.

CFP: Oscar Wilde

Importance of Studying Oscar [Wilde]: Plays, Stories, Letters, and Lectures:

This panel to be held during the 41st NeMLA Convention, April 7th-11th, 2010 in Montreal, Quebec’s Hilton Bonaventure Hotel offers an opportunity to analyze the role Oscar Wilde has played and continues to play in literature, theater and other aspects of culture. Focus can be on his influential wit and wisdom and/or techniques used to present Oscar in the classroom. This topic calls for a diversity of approaches. Please send 200-400 word abstracts to Professor Annette Magid at a_magid@yahoo.com Deadline for paper submissions is September 20th, 2009.

(from the VICTORIA mailing list)

Victorian Childhoods CFP

Victorian Childhoods
Keynote Speaker: Professor Colin Heywood, University of Nottingham

One Day Colloquium on 20 March 2010



Call for Papers
We welcome offers of papers on any of the following themes, or indeed any other aspects of Victorian childhood:

- the spaces of childhood: nursery, schoolroom, playground, the street, and the countryside
- children as angels, demons, invalids, observers, fairies, historical figures
- the cultural and material worlds of childhood: stories, songs, toys, games, clothes
- theories and constructions of childhood in both text and image

Please send a brief abstract of 250-300 words to Rosemary Mitchell at r.mitchell@leedstrinity.ac.uk by 18 September 2009. Ideally, all papers will be published in a Leeds Working Papers volume in advance of the colloquium, and will need to be submitted by 2 January 2010.

Colloquium convenors: Karen Sayer, Susan Anderson, and Rosemary Mitchell.

CFP: "Victorian Maenads" (special issue of The Michaelian)

The Michaelian is an academic, non-profit, peer-reviewed online journal dedicated to the study of Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) and their circle. The journal is published by Steven Halliwell and The Rivendale Press as one of the OSCHOLARS group of journals under the general editorship of D. C. Rose.

The inaugural edition of "The Michaelian" can be viewed at http://www.oscholars.com.

The theme for the second issue (June 2010) is “Victorian Maenads.” In this issue, we seek to explore and contextualize late-Victorian writers' engagement with the classical past, specifically through the writings of Michael Field, but *also* in the writings and art of their friends and contemporaries and other women writers of the late-Victorian period. We encourage contributors to take an interdisciplinary approach to the theme.

Contributors may delve into the Fields’ dramatic and poetic canons, as well as their lifewritings. Additionally, papers may engage with the “Victorian Maenads” theme, more broadly addressing the work of other women writers, or female characters, subjects or lives. Contributors may address issues related to:

• gender and Decadence/Aestheticism

• women and higher education

• women and travel

• women and social disorder/rebellion

• transgressive women

• maenads as a figure of mobility/action

• “The Woman Question”

• appropriations of Greek and Roman figures such as Lucrece or other contemporary women writers and their use of the Greek and Roman past.

We also welcome articles that do not relate to the theme, but engage directly with the writings and lives of Michael Field and their circle. We welcome fictocritical responses, as well as book reviews and reports of events of interest to Michael Field scholars and those interested in late-Victorian literature and culture (i.e., announcements, exhibitions, conferences). Essays on teaching experiences related to the introduction of Michael Field and their canon to undergraduates are also of interest.

The journal seeks to unite advanced graduate students and scholars from many universities to create a unique forum for a wide-ranging discussion about all aspects of Michael Field scholarship, including literature and literary history, feminist and lesbian/queer perspectives, collaborative writing, life-writing, theatre history, publishing history and art history.

Please send all submissions electronically via email to Michelle Lee, michellestoddardlee@gmail.com by October 16.

Submissions should include the article in MS Word and a brief cv. While there is no set word limit, articles should ordinarily be about 5,000 words in length and double-spaced throughout. References should be parenthetical and follow the MLA style guide with endnotes rather than footnotes for additional information, and a Works Cited at the end.

CFP: Crossing the Line: Affiniities Before and After 1900

(Download this CFP as a PDF here.)

A Two-Day Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference

Thursday 28 January - Friday 29 January 2010

Keynote Speaker: Professor Regenia Gagnier (University of Exeter)

Publishing Workshop: 'The Future of Academic Publishing' with Paula Kennedy
(Palgrave Macmillan)

Plenary Lecture: 'Funding for Postgraduate Researchers', Dr Mark Llewellyn
(University of Liverpool)

We live in a world that they [the Victorians] built for us, and though we may laugh at them, we should love them, too.
--Times Literary Supplement (16 May 1918)

Crossing the Line is a student-led postgraduate conference that will explore and interrogate the multifarious affinities between Victorian and Modernist cultures. It focuses on the cross-currents of attraction and repulsion at the turn of the century. This event asks whether affinities exist innately in the body as psychological and emotional connections, and investigates those affinities which are cultural constructions. It questions whether affinities are permanent or can be eroded by the passage of time.

We invite research students from the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences to present papers considering affinities across the threshold of the Victorian and Modernist worlds.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Intellectual partnerships and borrowing

• Historical/political affinities: Does history repeat itself?

• Colonial/Post-colonial/Trans-cultural affinities

• Alliances and conflicts within and between social classes

• Sexual attractions and repulsions

• Dealing with inheritances: the Victorian legacy and shaping of Modernism
  

• Afterlives: rereading, rewriting, revisioning Victoriana

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: 15TH SEPTEMBER 2009

We welcome proposals for 20 minute papers that demonstrate a clear interdisciplinary focus. Please send abstracts of approximately 250 words to: organisers@crossing-the-line.org.uk.

A selection of the best papers will be published in the AHRC funded Victorian Network journal.

Organising committee: Katharine Easterby, Kim Edwards, Jane Ford, Hana Leaper and Gemma Lucas.

CFP: NVSA 2010: FIGHTING VICTORIANS: DISUNION, POLEMIC, CONTROVERSY

(Download the CFP as a pdf here.)

The peace, that I deem`d no peace, is over and done.
Alfred Tennyson, 1855

Princeton University: April 16-18, 2010

NVSA website: http://web.stonehill.edu/nvsa/

NVSA solicits submissions for its annual conference; the topic this year
is FIGHTING VICTORIANS.

The conference will feature a keynote panel including Anna Clark,
Elaine Hadley, and Alex Woloch, and visits to Special Collections at the
Firestone Library and the Princeton Art Museum.

This conference will take up the nature and significance of
Victorian fighting and disunion, from international warfare to
peevishness. What did the Victorians think was worth fighting about?
Is there a specifically Victorian culture of argument? In what ways did
the Victorians value disagreement and controversy? “The age of
equipoise” saw more than its fair share of dust-ups, imbroglios, scraps,
and battles. Rather than enumerating the varieties of Victorian
belligerence, we seek papers that will reflect upon the ways Victorians
experienced, valued, and represented fighting, disagreement, and other
modes of disunion. What forms of debate and disagreement did the
Victorian public sphere promote or exclude? What are the forms of
solidarity and separation not only imagined by British social,
political, and evolutionary theory, but also experienced as part of the
development of empire or national movements? What is the force of
dissension in artistic, literary or political rivalries and movements?
What are the sites, genres, and modes of Victorian fighting? What are
the forms of representation, visual or textual, most suited to
representing violence or controversy? Finally, how do we Victorianists
argue now? Do we argue now?

While specificity is welcome and encouraged, the program committee
is not looking simply for papers describing particular instances of
violence. We are especially eager to see presentations that make a
claim about the nature, conception, or representation of disunity or
violence in the period.

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
Oscar Wilde, 1891

Arts of Combat

• Fights in literature: the novel, poetry, drama

• Warfare in the fine arts

• Literary forms and social interventions; novel arguments

• The emotions of Victorian disunion and fighting

• The styles and affects of refusing to argue: peevishness, grudges, funks, the slow burn, the silent treatment, envy, ressentiment

• Accommodation and appeasement

• The belligerence of aesthetic movements

Does the boxer hit better for knowing that he has a flexor longus and a flexor brevis?
Carlyle, 1831

Thoughtful Belligerence

• Cultures of Victorian argument

• Styles of pugilism: bare knuckle, street fighting, boxing

• Fighting words: diatribes and other rhetorics of disunion

• Belligerent thoughts, belligerent thinkers

• The genres of Victorian fighting: polemic, manifesto, dialogue, debate

• The concept of struggle

• Rules of engagement: the Queensberry rules, duels, fencing

• Victorian fights and contemporary theories of struggle and debate

Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain.
Arthur Hugh Clough, 1855

What is Worth Fighting For? / What is Fighting Worth?

• The Victorian public sphere: liberalism and the culture of argument

• Forms of dialectic

• Political fights: Chartism, Reform, Abolition

• Class: identity and struggle

• Religious schism: Dissent, The Oxford Movement, conversion

• Solidarity and separation: forms of antisociality or social enmity, the transcendence of social bonds

• Literary forms of solidarity and disunion: the novel and character space, lyric poetry and intersubjective tension

• Dissension as style in the visual arts

• Rivalries: literary, political, artistic, athletic

• Disciplinary formation: competition among the faculties, literature versus science, word versus image

• Fighting as a way of life: evolution as struggle, struggle and the field of culture

• Break-ups: empire and disunion, divorce, romantic break-ups, fallings out

• What do Victorianists argue about now? How do we argue?

. . . as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” 1867

Fight Sites: Spaces of Disunion, Violence, Controversy_

• More is less: one nation or two, Unionism and / or nationalism

• Imperial violence

• International warfare

• Civil war

• Memories and fantasies of war

• Domestic violence: gender and the home

• Venues of fighting and controversy: the periodical press, lecture halls, the university, the boxing ring, the streets
  

* * *

Proposals (no more than 500 words) by Oct. 15, 2009 (e-mail submissions
strongly encouraged):

Professor Gage McWeeny, Chair, NVSA Program Committee, (gmcweeny@williams.edu )
English Department, Williams College, 85 Mission Park Drive, Williamstown, MA 01267

Please note: all submissions to NVSA are evaluated anonymously. Successful proposals will stay within the 500-word limit and make a compelling case for the talk and its relation to the conference topic.

Please do not send complete papers, and do not include your name on the proposal.

Please do include your name, institutional and email addresses, and proposal title in a cover letter. Papers should take 15 minutes (20 minutes maximum) so as to provide ample time for discussion.

The Coral Lansbury Travel Grant ($100.00) and George Ford Travel Grant ($100.00), given in memory of key founding members of NVSA, are awarded annually to the graduate student, adjunct instructor, or independent scholar who must travel the greatest distance to give a paper at our conference. Apply by indicating in your cover letter that you wish to be considered. Please indicate from where you will be traveling, and mention if you have other sources of funding.

CFP: The Past’s Digital Presence: Database, Archive, and Knowledge Work in the Humanities

The Past’s Digital Presence:
Database, Archive, and Knowledge Work in the Humanities
A Graduate Student Symposium at Yale University
February 19th and 20th, 2010

How is digital technology changing methods of scholarly research with pre-digital sources in the humanities? If the “medium is the message,” then how does the message change when primary sources are translated into digital media? What kinds of new research opportunities do databases unlock and what do they make obsolete? What is the future of the rare book and manuscript library and its use? What biases are inherent in the widespread use of digitized material? How can we correct for them? Amidst numerous benefits in accessibility, cost, and convenience, what concerns have been overlooked? We invite graduate students to submit paper proposals for an interdisciplinary symposium that will address how databases and other digital technologies are making an impact on our research in the humanities. The graduate student panels will be moderated by a Yale faculty member or library curator with a panel respondent. The two-day conference will take place February 19th and 20th, 2010, at Yale University.

Keynote Speaker: Peter Stallybrass, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania

Colloquium Guest Speaker: Jacqueline Goldsby, Associate Professor, University of Chicago

Potential paper topics include:

• The Future of the History of the Book
• Public Humanities
• Determining Irrelevance in the Archive
• Defining the Key-Word
• The Material Object in Archival Research
• Local Knowledge, Global Access
• Digital Afterlives
• Foucault, Derrida, and the Archive
• Database Access Across the Profession
• Mapping and Map-Based Platforms
• Interactive Research

Please email a one-page proposal along with a C.V. to pdp@yale.edu. Deadline for submissions is September 10th, 2009. Accepted panelists will be notified by October 1st, 2009. We ask that all graduate-student panelists pre-circulate their paper among their panels by January 20th, 2010.

Please contact Molly Farrell and Heather Klemann at pdp@yale.edu with any additional inquiries. For more information about conference events, please visit our forthcoming website: http://digitalhumanities.yale.edu/pdp (October).

CFP: Victorian Newsletter

(Via VICTORIA-L)

The Victorian Newsletter invites submissions for a special number celebrating the bicentenaries of both Tennyson and Darwin.

Interdisciplinary approaches are welcome on the lives, work, and impact of these figures on Victorian literature and culture. One-page proposals (electronic) due August 1, with final papers due September 15. For information or submission, contact deborah.logan@wku.edu or victorian.newsletter@wku.edu.

CFP: Fanny Trollope

(via VICTORIA-L)

Women's Writing announces a special issue on Fanny Trollope:

Still largely overshadowed by her more widely read and reprinted son Anthony, Frances (or Fanny, as she preferred to be called) Trollope is now almost exclusively remembered for her travel writing and especially for the notoriously controversial Domestic Manners of the Americans. Her impressively prolific career as a writer, however, not only covered and transgressed numerous narrative trends. It also spanned from the early 1830s into the mid-fifties, which also prompts us to reconsider conventional lines of demarcation between periods as well as genres. A contemporary of Jane Austen, Trollope started writing at a time when fashionable silver-fork fiction was being self-reflexively reassessed and, throughout her extensive oeuvre, continued to combine diverse narrative forms while capitalising on the rapidly evolving subgenres of the time. Recent interest specifically in her social-problems novels has brought at least some of her so far lesser known works back into print, while research into women's contributions to periodicals has newly unearthed parallels between her seemingly very different works. A thorough reassessment of her position in nineteenth-century literary culture, however, promises to highlight her own versatility and the diversity of as well as important intersections between
literary developments.

This special issue aims to provide a forum for an encompassing reconsideration of some of her still rarely discussed novels and their significance for Trollope's position at the literary marketplace of her time and in the canon of Victorian popular fiction.

Topics may include but are not limited to:
Trollope as a "fashionable" writer
* Trollope in the marketplace: opportunist writing for money or
innovator in various genres?
* Self-reflexivity and self-irony in Trollope's fiction
* Trollope's representation of religion
* Trollope's representation of travel and emigration
* Trollope's representation of the domestic, the family, &c.
* Trollope's anti-heroines
* Trollope's reputation, then and now
* Trollope and intertextual influence
* Comparative readings of Trollope's works
* Trollope and Transatlantic Studies; Trollope and Europe

Please submit papers for consideration between 4000-7000 words to Tamara S. Wagner at tamarasilviawagner@yahoo.com.sg, by 31/1/2010. (NOTE: This is a corrected date.)

Contributors should follow the journal's house style details of which are to be found on the Women's Writing web site http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/0999082.asp This is the new MLA. Please note that instead of footnotes, we use
endnotes with NO bibliography. All bibliographical information is included in the endnotes. For example, we require place of publication, publisher and date of publication in brackets after a book is cited for the first time.

Please also include an abstract, a brief biographical blurb (100 words maximum), and a key of 6 words suitable for indexing and abstracting services.

Fellowship on Dickens's Global Circulation

(from Professor Regenia Gagnier)

NEW Research Fellow in British Academy supported pilot project on the global circulation of the novels of Charles Dickens (Fixed Term) (Ref. N2243)
The starting salary will be circa £24,000 pro ration Grade E
Closing date: 5:00pm on 17 August 2009.

Associate Research Fellow in the Global Circulation of Literature and Culture
(Fixed term) (Ref. N2243)

This new full time fixed term Associate Research Fellowship post is available from 1 October 2009 until 19th July 2010 to support a pilot funded by a British Academy Research Development Award for the Global Circulation of Literature and Culture Project.

The Global Circulation Project directed by Professor Regenia Gagnier and supported by Wiley-Blackwell's Literature Compass (http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/literature/) and NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship, http://www.nines.org/) is a global map and e-dialogue on how key Anglophone works, authors, genres, and literary movements have been received, imitated/mimicked, adapted, or syncretised outside Britain, Europe, and North America, or, conversely, how key works from outside these areas have been received, imitated/mimicked, adapted, or syncretised within Anglophone literary traditions. It asks, what forms of intertextuality, reception, etc. are generated through cultural contact?

In the pilot project on the global circulation of the novels of Charles Dickens, we are asking:


* How has Dickens been received, imitated/mimicked, adapted, or syncretised outside Britain, Europe and North America?
* What forms of intertextuality have been generated with indigenous cultural forms?
* What is the role of Dickens's Britain in the imaginary of other cultures?

The successful candidate will have a Ph.D. or comparable research experience and publications in the global circulation of literature and culture and/or Victorian Britain and cultural contact. Bi- or multi-literacy is desirable, especially bi-literacy in Chinese-English or Arabic-English literatures. Research skills in print and digital archives are essential. Depending on linguistic expertise and the results of archival research, the ARF will select one or two geographical/linguistic areas or time periods after 1830 on which to focus and will publish at least one article on his or her specialism. He or she will also have the opportunity to teach one or two undergraduate modules in a related area. Some travel may be required, e.g., to the Ada B. Nisbet archive at the Dickens Project, UC Santa Cruz, California.



The starting salary will be circa £24,000 pro rata on Grade E.


Application packs are available from http://www.admin.ex.ac.uk/personnel/jobs/N2243pdf and<http://www.admin.ex.ac.uk/personnel/jobs/N2243pdf%20and>

completed applications should be forwarded to Ms Jenny Hickman, SALL Research Administrator, Room 250, School of Arts, Literatures and Languages, Queen's Building, The Queen's Drive, Exeter, Devon EX4 4QH or email to J.A.Hickman@ex.ac.uk.



The closing date for completed applications is 5:00 pm on 17th August 2009 and interviews will be held the week commencing 30 August 2009.

New issue of RaVON: Materiality and Memory, edited by Kate Flint

The editors are pleased to announce the publication of the most recent issue of RaVoN (Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net), a special issue on "Materiality and Memory" edited by Kate Flint:

http://www.ravon.umontreal.ca/

The issue includes the following essays, all on Victorian topics:

Clare Pettitt (King's College, London): 'Peggotty's Work-Box: Victorian Souvenirs and Material Memory'

Kara Marler-Kennedy (Rice University): 'Immortelles: Literary, Botanical, and National Memories'

Kate Flint (Rutgers University): 'Photographic Memory'

Athena Vrettos (Case Western Reserve University): '"Little bags of remembrance": du Maurier's Peter Ibbetson and Victorian Theories of Ancestral Memory'

Megan Ward (Lawrence University): 'William Morris's Conditional Moment'

Catherine Robson (University of California, Davis): 'Memorization and Memorialization: "The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna"'

Adelene Buckland (Newnham College, Cambridge): ''Pictures in the Fire': the Dickensian Hearth and the Concept of History'

Jonathan Farina (Seton Hall University): 'Middlemarch and "that Sort of Thing"'

In addition, the issue includes a number of reviews that will be of interest to members of NAVSA: Joseph W. Childers on Sally Ledger's Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination; Priti Joshi on Christopher Herbert's War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma; Rachel Ablow on Nicholas Dames' The Physiology of the Novel; Bryan Rasmussen on Anna Maria Jones' Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self; Patrick Brantlinger on Francis O'Gorman's Victorian Literature and Finance; Jim Hansen on Adrian S. Wisnicki's Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel; Timothy Carens on Deborah Epstein Nord's Gypsies and the British Imagination; Susan Zlotnick on Rebecca Stern's Home Economics: Domestic Fraud in Victorian England; John Plotz on Julia Prewitt Brown's The Bourgeois Interior: How the Middle Class Imagines Itself in Literature and Film; and Dennis Denisoff on recent editions of Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Joseph Conrad.

Anyone interested in submitting essays for peer review by and possible publication in RaVoN can find more information here:

http://www.ravon.umontreal.ca/submission.html

Dino Franco Felluga
Victorian Editor, RaVoN

Lauren M. E. Goodlad
Victorian Review Editor

Michael Eberle-Sinatra
Romantic and Founding Editor

CFP: Relocating Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Exiles, Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

(via the VICTORIA list . . . )

We invite proposals for essays on Victorian settler narratives. How were new settlements, forms of emigration, and various cultural and especially literary exchanges represented in narratives produced and circulated on both sides of the Atlantic as well as across the Pacific? How did transatlantic or transpacific representation reshape the literary or visual imagination in Victorian Britain? How was the settler, the emigrant, the exile, or the sojourner differently conceptualised in the course of the long nineteenth century?

The proposed collection seeks to explore anew a global nineteenth century by combining a comparative study of texts (visual as well as literary) with close readings that address issues of intertextual interchanges, genre formation, and a new mapping of literary history that looks beyond the confines of national boundaries.

Suggested topics may include:
- Settling in the colonies
- Settler and other colonies
- “English colonies” in Europe
- “the English” in nineteenth-century American literature or art
- Australasia in British literature or art
- The “lost” colony in the Americas
- The transatlantic and the transpacific
- Cautionary tales of emigration
- Repatriation
- Portable domesticity
- Self-exiles
- Expatriate communities in the nineteenth century
- Missionary settlements
- Military settlements
- Intertextual interchanges

Please send abstracts of 500 words, accompanied by a brief bio, to tamarasilviawagner@yahoo.com.sg

The deadline for abstracts is 1 August 2009.