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.