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