CFP: special number of the Journal of Stevenson Studies: Stevenson, Essayist (2/10/2011)

Stevenson, Essayist: call for papers for a special number of the Journal of Stevenson Studies

Richard Dury (dury@unibg.it) and R-L Abrahamson (rabraham@faculty.ed.umuc.edu) will be guest-editing a special number of the Journal of Stevenson Studies dedicated to "Robert Louis Stevenson, Essayist".

Stevenson's essays are highly regarded and often quoted in discussions of his fiction but little discussed in themselves. We invite brief proposals (with summary CVs of relevant background studies) in any relevant area by 10th February 2011. Selection will be made by the end of February. Manuscripts are to be delivered in September 2011 for publication in mid-2012. Proposals could include the following:

• RLS and the essay tradition up to 1870
• The popular essay in the 1870s and 80s
• 1870s-80s magazines (London, New York) and the market for essays
• The Cornhill essays
• The Scribner’s essays
• RLS’s methods of composition
• RLS’s essay personas
• The reputation of RLS’s essays (early years, fame, hagiography, rejection, current views)
• RLS’s essay style
• RLS’s essays and Scotland
• RLS’s essays on America and American topics
• RLS’s essays on France and French topics
• RLS’s historical essays
• RLS’s essays and science
• RLS’s essays on literature
• RLS’s essays and the visual arts
• RLS’s essays and travel
• RLS’s essays and ethics

Click here for more information on the Journal of Stevenson Studies.

CFP: BAVS Conference 2011: Composition and Decomposition (3/31/2011; 9/1 - 9/3/2011)

Call for Papers: BAVS Conference 2011, University of Birmingham

Composition and Decomposition

The University of Birmingham will be hosting the 2011 BAVS Conference, 1–3 September 2011, on the Edgbaston campus. We invite papers that deal with the conference theme of "Composition and Decomposition" in all its various connotations.

This theme reflects Birmingham’s own nineteenth-century history as the "workshop the world." Birmingham is a city intimately connected with industry and manufacture. However, one of its main exports in the nineteenth century was pens. Our conference thus draws on the double of meaning of composition as both artistic practice and broader industrial process. At a time when the country as a whole, and this city in particular, is reflecting upon the legacy of industrial decline, this conference also invites speakers to think about its inverse, decomposition.

We invite participants to engage with the theme widely and imaginatively. Papers might be on the following:

• Decadence, decay, and degeneration.
• Formal composition or simply of what things are made.
• Putting things together, taking things apart.
• Waste and recycling; the return of discarded things.
• Ingredients, inventories, and other types of list.
• The role of composition in the practice of fine art, music, literature, and drama.
• Architecture and town planning.
• Scientific analysis and processes.
• The material culture of composition, whether draft manuscripts, laboratory equipment, or processes of manufacture.
• Industrialization, industrial processes, and industrial cultures.
• The importance of form and formal methodologies.
• Composition and the press; printing and print culture.
• The politics of deconstruction, whether as methodology or historical event (clearances, demolition, etc.).

Please send proposals (500 words max) to bavs2011@googlemail.com no later than 31 March 2011. Please direct any queries about the conference to the organizers at the above address.

Please note that the increasing popularity of BAVS as a conference where scholars of Victorian Studies share their research means that, unfortunately, not all offers of papers can be accepted.

The 2011 Conference hosts will select offers of papers according to the criteria of quality, engagement with the Conference theme, and with due regard to accepting papers from a spread of disciplinary areas, to support postgraduate research, and to fulfil BAVS’ commitment to interdisciplinarity.

Click here for more information on BAVS.

CFP: 2011 Trollope Prize (6/1/2011)

Call for Submissions: The 2011 Trollope Prize

It is with great pleasure that we announce the 2011 Trollope Prize, sponsored by the English Department and the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas.

The Trollope Prize will be awarded to the best undergraduate and graduate essays in English on the works of Anthony Trollope. Essays are invited on the topic of "Trollope and His World." Submissions may include essays focusing exclusively on the works of Anthony Trollope; comparative essays on Trollope and other writers; essays examining Trollope's work and career in the larger context of Victorian history, culture and society; historical or literary essays on topics central to Trollope's work and illuminated by his work; or essays on the reception of Trollope's work or on his larger cultural influence.

Beginning in 2011, two prizes will be awarded: one to an essay written by an undergraduate student and one to an essay written by a graduate student. The writers of the winning undergraduate essay will receive a $1,000 award and a hardcover copy of a Trollope novel. The winning undergraduate student's faculty adviser will also receive a $500 award to help support the continued development of curriculum focusing on Trollope's works. The graduate winner will receive a $2,000 award and a hardcover copy of a Trollope novel.

All essays must be received by June 1, 2011. Winners will be announced in August 2011.

Please visit the new website at trollopeprize.ku.edu for more information about the prize, including submission criteria and guidelines.

Thank you,

Lauren Harmsen Kiehna, on behalf of the Trollope Prize Committee at the University of Kansas

Click here to download flyer.

CFP: Rudyard Kipling: an International Writer International Conference (3/31/2011; 10/21-10/22/2011)

Rudyard Kipling: an International Writer

Institute of English Studies, London

October 21-22, 2011

Keynote Speakers: Amit Chaudhuri and Charles Allen

"Left and right of my writing-table were two big globes, on one of which a great airman had once outlined in white paint those air-routes to the East and Australia which were well in use before my death." - Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself

Kipling, hailed as "an interpreter of Empire" (Times, 18 Jan 1936), was regarded as a national institution when he died in 1936, and his funeral in Westminster Abbey was attended by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. His current reputation is many-sided: sometimes condemned as a racist who embodied the imperial mind-set or dismissed as a writer "whom nobody read," he is increasingly both value and criticized for his complex response to the "otherness" and diversity of races and classes in his writing.

This conference, sponsored by the Kipling Society, focuses on the figure of Kipling as an international writer. It seeks not only to re-assess Kipling’s involvement in imperial ideology, but also to examine his interests in wider international affairs and his connections with foreign locations both within and outside the British Empire. The conference thereby aims to re-examine his work and achievement by exploring his diverse roles as an internationalist, and by considering his relevance to our post-modern globalizing world. Papers are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Travels and travel writing

• Anglo-American relationships

• Anglo-Indian journalism

• War journalism and propaganda

• Inter-colonial networks

• Imperialism and cosmopolitanism

• Kipling’s writing on India, and other colonies

• Dislocation and returning: exiles, immigrants, expatriates

• Islam and other world religions

• Jews and anti-Semitism

• Kipling and Freemasonry

• Englishness and place

• The literature of modern technology

• The sea and sailors

• Postcolonial responses to Kipling

• Kipling’s place in modernism and other international literary movements

• Intertextuality and literary traditions

• The literature of "other" places (France, Scandinavia, Japan, etc.)

Send your proposals of 150-300 words for 20-minute papers to J.E.Montefiore@kent.ac.uk by 31 March 2011, entering your email subject as International Kipling 2011.

Conference Organizers: Professor Jan Montefiore and Dr. Kaori Nagai

CFP: Victorian Futures at the Dickens Universe (12/15/10; 7/29-31/2011)

DEADLINE reminder: "Victorian Futures at the Dickens Universe"

University of California, Santa Cruz

July 29-31, 2011

The Dickens Project invites paper proposals for a conference on Victorian Futures, with keynote speakers Jay Clayton (author of Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture) and Andrew Elfenbein (author of Romanticism and the Rise of English). The conference will be held at the University of California, Santa Cruz, beginning on the evening of Friday, July 29 and concluding at lunch-time on Sunday, July 31; papers will be allocated to "threads" to facilitate developing conversations of specific themes and topics. Submit 1-2 page abstracts and a short c.v. to Rebecca Stern (stern2@mailbox.sc.edu) by December 15, 2010.

Papers and panel proposals relevant to the theme of Victorian Futures are welcome. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Progress and its Discontents
• Prediction, Probability, Risk, Speculation, Gambling
• Visions and the Visionary
• Romantic Futures, Victorian Presents
• Utopia/Dystopia
• Science Fiction (the "futuristic")
• Futures that Never Happened (counterfactuals; counterfictions; narratological explorations of tenses future and conditional; the optative)
• The Birth of the Author (as historical fact, as biographical challenge, as a critical category)
• Heavens and Hells
• Victorian Pasts and Presents (and, of course, Futures)
• Victorian Afterlives
• Futures for Victorian Studies

Participants in Victorian Futures are cordially invited to spend all or part of the week following the conference in the redwoods of central California at the annual gathering of the Dickens Universe, an international research group devoted to the study of the novels of Charles Dickens and Victorian literature and culture.

The Dickens Universe's study of Great Expectations begins on July 31 and concludes on the evening of Friday, August 5. Confirmed speakers for the week include Andrew Miller, Jonathan Grossman, Kathleen Frederickson, Teresa Mangum, Claire Jarvis, Helena Michie, Joe Childers, and David Kurnick.

Academic participants in Victorian Futures who wish to stay on for the Universe will have the opportunity to sign up for one of three established Working Groups, which will meet Monday through Wednesday (see below). They may also convene their own Working Group or participate in the Dickens Universe's Nineteenth-Century Seminar. Scholars may thus use the week as an opportunity for extended discussion and scholarly exchange, either with established collaborators or with new acquaintances. Academic participants in the Universe will experience its wide range of scholarly and convivial events; they will also have the opportunity to make a twenty-minute presentation about their current scholarly project in the Nineteenth-Century Seminar, which meets four times during the week.

Please consider the following options:

(i) Attend Victorian Futures as a speaker or participant.

(ii) Attend the Universe as a participant, with the option of joining the Nineteenth-Century Seminar. For further information about the Universe, please direct your questions to John Jordan (picasso@cats.ucsc.edu); write to Catherine Robson (Catherine.robson@nyu.edu) to learn more about the Nineteenth-Century Seminar.

(iii) Attend the Universe as part of a working group. Established groups include Victorian Economics, coordinated by Nancy Henry (nhenry3@utk.edu); Victorian Poetry, coordinated by Tricia Lootens (tlootens@uga.edu); and Nineteenth-Century Sciences, coordinated by Rebecca Stern (stern2@mailbox.sc.edu). You may also convene your own group and/or use the lovely Santa Cruz campus as a venue for meeting with established collaborators. For more information about a particular group, please contact the organizer. For more information about working groups in general, please contact Rebecca Stern.

About the Dickens Project: The Dickens Project hosts a conference at the end of each July on the beautiful wooded campus of UC Santa Cruz above Monterey Bay; this event, the "Dickens Universe," traditionally brings together around 200 people to conduct an intensive study of a single Dickens novel.

Of these individuals, roughly half are members of the general public, and half are faculty and students, post-graduate and undergraduate. Thirty two universities are currently members of the Dickens Project Consortium, each sending Victorianist faculty and students to the Universe every year: members include Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, Indiana, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, and NYU in the United States; Exeter, Birkbeck, and Royal Holloway in Great Britain; plus universities in Israel and Australia. The Dickens Project has earned a reputation as a leading research collective for both Dickens and Victorian studies, and, through its development of a range of events for post-graduates (including an annual winter conference for the delivery of their early academic papers), has established itself as a prominent supporter of the careers of junior Victorianists.

Go to http://www2.ucsc.edu/dickens/ for more information.

CFP: Transport in British Fiction: 1840-1940 (1/15/2011)

Expanded Call for Papers: Transport in British Fiction: 1840-1940 (Collection of Critical Essays)

The editors are seeking proposals for essays to complete a collection of critical essays currently in progress on transport in British fiction 1840-1940. Because of a recent decision to expand the chronological range covered by the volume we are now seeking proposals on:

• Dickens and transport
• Transport in 1840s and/or 1850s fiction, especially trains
• Transport in 1930s fiction

The collection aims to assess transport’s position in literary consciousness during a century of rapid social, cultural, and vehicular change. Essays should focus centrally on the use of transport or forms of transportation in novels, novellas, or short stories during this period and might consider, for example:

• the narrative role of transport
• the contextual or historical picture of transport presented in fiction
• the representation of specific transport vehicles
• transport within the context of an author’s approach to new technologies
• transport and gender
• transport and class
• transport and sexualities

Other approaches to transport in British fiction during this period will also be considered. Proposals are welcomed on single authors or on topics which range across writers, subgenres, or periods of British fiction.

We envisage that completed essays will be 5,600 words long and due in May 2011.

Please email 500-word proposals and a 150-200-word biography by 15 January to BOTH editors: Adrienne Gavin (Adrienne.gavin@canterbury.ac.uk) and Andrew Humphries (Andrew.humphries@canterbury.ac.uk).