CFP: NCSA Conference "Spiritual Matters/Matters of the Spirit" (9/30/2011; 3/22-24/2012)

Spiritual Matters/Matters of the Spirit

33rd Annual Conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association
Asheville, North Carolina
March 22-24 2012

From Romanticism's spiritual resurgence to the interrogations of Darwinism and science, the nineteenth century was immersed in conversation about the place of spirituality and religion in society, politics, and the arts. Paper and panel proposals are welcome on all aspects of belief, religion, and spirituality in the long nineteenth century, from 1789 to 1914.

Papers might address: retreats, communes, and utopias; visionaries and prophets; spiritual awakenings; esprit de corps and group spirit; revivals and reforms; religious doctrines and dogmas; proselytes, converts, and newcomers; spiritualism and the Feminist Movement; cults, cabals, and conspiracies; free spirits, lunatics, and addicts; revered commodities and capital; spiritual growth and enlightenment; perspectives on religious belief; acts of faith and interfaith; Theosophy and mysticism; shamans, mediums, and psychics; non-European spiritual traditions; representations of emotions and the unconscious; altered states; secular spirituality; spirituality of agnostics and atheists; aesthetic spirituality; theology and spirituality; ethnicity and spirituality; fears and phobias of spirituality and religion; spiritual conflicts and combats; sacred texts, pictures, music and shrines; spiritual tours and monuments; sacrilegious and blasphemous acts; matters of atonement and redemption;
reactions against spirituality or religion. Other interpretations of the conference theme are welcome.

Please e-mail abstracts (250 words) for 20-minute papers that provide the author's name and paper title in the heading, as well as a one-page c.v., to Phylis Floyd AND Michael Duffy by September 30, 2011. Presenters will be notified in November, 2011.

Phylis Floyd, Program Co-Chair
Michigan State University
floyd@msu.edu

Michael Duffy, Program Co-Chair
East Carolina University
duffym@ecu.edu

CFP: Victoriographies: A Journal of Nineteenth Century Writing, 1790-1914

Victoriographies: A Journal of Nineteenth Century Writing, 1790-1914 is to be published by Edinburgh University Press on paper and online from May 2011. The editor is Prof. Julian Wolfreys, its Book Reviews Editors are Megan Becker-Leckrone (US & North America) and Kate Hext (UK & Europe). It has a full and prestigious editorial & advisory board and is fully peer-reviewed.

Victoriographies – A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790-1914 seeks to invent afresh the long nineteenth century. Returning to the text as text, Victoriographies explores, as if for the first time, those canonical texts and authors that seem familiar, and interrogates the understudied, those authors and publications which demand a response. The journal is concerned with writing of the long nineteenth century and writing about the nineteenth century.Victoriographies invites articles which address philosophical, epistemological and ideological concerns, as these are embedded in the surface and texture of the text itself. The emphasis is on Victorian writing, about literary texts, poetry, prose fiction and prose non-fiction in the period 1790-1914. The editor welcomes 5,000-7,000 word submission of material for consideration as an article or a review. 

The first edition is available to peruse online now: http://www.euppublishing.com/toc/vic/1/1. This is a special edition entitled "Whither Victorian Studies," including an articles by Regenia Gagnier, Dinah Birch, John Kucich, Jonathan Loesberg and Catherine Robson, amongst others.

For links to more information on the journal, including its ethos, submission information and subscription rates see http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/vic.

CFP: M/MLA 2011 Conference Panel "The Serious Pleasures of Travel" (6/3/2011; 11/3-6/2011)

Panel Topic: The Serious Pleasures of Travel
M/MLA 2011 Conference: "Play...No, Seriously"
St. Louis, Nov 3-6


In the nineteenth century, travel became a serious business: with the explosion of travel guide books (Murray’s and Baedeker’s, most notably), Cook’s excursion tours, organized itineraries through the P&O and other ocean liner companies, and other commercial efforts, the world began to open up for tourism is ways previously unknown. Where travel had in earlier centuries often been focused on the pleasure of “finishing” one’s education through a Grand Tour, it now became accessible to many more people – at once a more playfully democratic pleasure and an enormously serious money-making venture for everyone from travel companies to local vendors at what we now think of a tourist traps. At the same time, however, pleasure-based travel—particularly in the sense of holiday-making—exploded onto the scene, allowing even working-class people the opportunity to seek out moments of playful respite from their daily lives.

This panel seeks to explore the intersections and/or contradictions between the seriousness of travel and its more playful aspects. Expensive and often predicated on colonial mindsets, presumed hierarchies, and privilege, traveling to foreign countries is also often about the playfulness of a short-term escape from one’s everyday life.

To what extent are the serious and playful perspectives at odds with one another? How does one both take other cultures seriously, respectfully, and still achieve a playful holiday? Have the parameters of what travelers take seriously changed over time? Apart from the obvious differences in technology, how was travel in the nineteenth century different from travel today—and what do those differences tell us about how seriously people take their own efforts at pleasure? To what degree to different sorts of travelers engage critically with the playful aspects of travel, or insist on the play within its more serious encounters?

This panel welcomes papers that explore how travelers balance the things they take seriously with their efforts at respite. Topics ranging from the business of travel to travelers' motives to analysis of narratives of individual experience are welcome, as are papers that consider travel at various points throughout history. I would very much like to have papers that represent work on travel from different periods, at least one from the 19th century. Please feel free to contact me off-list if you have any questions about the CFP or the conference itself.

Please send title and 250 word abstracts to Andrea Kaston Tange (akastont@emich.edu) by June 3, 2011.


M/MLA 2011 Conference: http://www.luc.edu/mmla/annualconvention.html

CFP: Bram Stoker and Gothic Transformations (5/15/2011; 4/12-14/2012)

Bram Stoker Centenary Conference 2012: 
Bram Stoker and Gothic Transformations
Derwent Building, University of Hull and Whitby, North Yorkshire
Organised by the University of Hull
12-14 April 2012


Keynote Speakers: Prof Sir Christopher Frayling, Professor Clive Bloom, Professor Luke Gibbons, and a special presentation by Professor Elizabeth Miller and Dacre Stoker

"My revenge has just begun! I spread it over centuries and time is on my side." (Dracula, 1897)

Count Dracula's declaration from Bram Stoker's iconic 1897 vampire novel is, in many ways, descriptive of the Gothic genre. Like the shape-shifting Transylvanian Count, the Gothic encompasses and has manifested itself in many forms since its emergence in 1764 with the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. Its revenge has just begun. It has spread over centuries and time is on its side.

When Stoker wrote Dracula the genre was well over a hundred years old but the novel marks a key moment in the evolution of the Gothic - the text harks back to early Gothic's preoccupation with the supernatural, decayed aristocracy and incarceration in gloomy castles in foreign locales. Dracula speaks to its own time but also transforms the genre - a revitalization that continues to sustain the Gothic today.

On the eve of the centenary of Stoker's death, which occurred in April 1912, the University of Hull's Department of English and School of Arts and New Media, in association with the Centre for Victorian Studies, will host a three-day international conference, Bram Stoker and Gothic Transformations. The conference will take place at the Hull Campus of the University and in Whitby.

In Dracula Mina describes Whitby as a "lovely place" but it soon becomes a site of horror, when Dracula lands from the Demeter in the form of a dog to make his first appearance on English soil. At Whitby Abbey, Lucy becomes the Count's first English vampire bride.

The conference is interested in the iconic significance of Stoker's vampire novel and seeks to reappraise Stoker's work within its fin-de-siècle cultural climate.  It is also interested in exploring the broader context of the changing nature of Gothic productions from the late eighteenth century to the present. Using Dracula as a key point in the evolution of the genre, it seeks to explore the novel's Gothic predecessors and influences, and the manner in which Stoker's work renewed the Gothic for future generations.

How do the Gothic's early themes of despotic rulers and fathers, grim prophecies, supernatural embodiments, incarceration, labyrinthine passages and corridors, threatened females, and sexual deviancy transform in subsequent cultural outputs from novels, theatre, films, television and computer games? How has the Gothic in its modern manifestations and variations sustained itself into a fourth century?

"At once escapist and conformist," Clive Bloom argues, "the Gothic speaks to the dark side of domestic fiction: erotic, violent, perverse, bizarre and obsessionally connected with contemporary fears." How does the new Gothic of the twenty-first century engage in fantasy and fear?

The organising committee welcomes abstracts of 250-300 words for a 20 minute paper. Please send your abstract by email to Dr Catherine Wynne, University of Hull, UK (c.wynne@hull.ac.uk) by 15 May 2011.

Topics may include, but are not restricted to, the following areas:

• Stoker's work in its social, political and cultural context
• The development of the Gothic from Otranto to the twenty-first century
• Stoker's influence on the genre
• Irish and British Gothic
• Gothic theatre and drama
• Gothic visualities
• Gothic technologies
• Gothic bodies
• Gothic monstrosities
• Gothic sexualities
• Gothic psychologies
• Gothic narratives
• Gothic Intertextualities
• Gothic places and spaces
• Hauntings and spectrality
• Criminality and the Gothic
• Science and the Gothic
• Reincarnations of Dracula
• Vampirism and the 'Young Vampires' of the twenty-first century
• Anti-Gothic, Gothic Parody, Comic Gothic

Conference website: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/scarborough/conferences/bram-stoker.aspx

CFP: Leon Edel Prize for Best Essay on Henry James by a Beginning Scholar (11/1/2011)

The Leon Edel Prize is awarded annually for the best essay on Henry James by a beginning scholar.  The prize carries with it an award of $150, and the prize-winning essay will be published in HJR. The competition is open to applicants who have not held a full-time academic appointment for more than four years. Independent scholars and graduate students are encouraged to apply.

Essays should be 20-30 pages (including notes), original, and not under submission elsewhere or previously published. Send submissions (4 copies, produced according to current MLA style, and with return postage enclosed) to:

Susan M. Griffin, Editor
The Henry James Review
Department of English
Universityof Louisville
Louisville, KY  40292

Author's name should not appear on the manuscript.  Please identify essays as submissions for the Leon Edel Prize. A brief curriculum vitae should be included.  Decisions about regular publication are also made at  the same time as the prize decision.

Deadline: November 1, 2011


Henry James Review: http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/henry_james_review/

Exhibit: The World of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (3/24 - 5/27/2011)

The World of Letitia Elizabeth Landon 
A Literary Celebrity of the 1830s
curated by F. J. Sypher

The exhibition "The World of Letitia Elizabeth Landon: A Literary Celebrity of the 1830s" opens at the Grolier Club, in its second floor members gallery, 47 East 60th Street, New York, on Wednesday, March 23, 2011 and runs through Friday, May 27, 2011, with manuscripts, first editions, prints, photos, and other materials to illuminate the life and art of a leading British writer of the late Georgian and early Victorian period.

In her day, Letitia Landon was an international celebrity, whose works circulated throughout the British Isles, on the Continent, and in the United States. Writings by her were translated into French, German, and Dutch, and distributed from Paris to St. Petersburg. Her work was known by Poe, Whittier, Hawthorne, and many other prominent American authors. Renewed recognition of Landon's impressive achievement is long overdue.

Landon was born in London in 1802, and began publishing poetry at the age of 17 in an influential London periodical, The Literary Gazette. In 1824 her romantic narrative poem The Improvisatrice became a major best-seller. She also wrote reviews, articles, and stories for London journals, and contributed to popular literary annuals such as Forget Me Not, and The Keepsake. In 1831 Landon published her three-decker novel Romance and Reality, followed by successful historical novels, Francesca Carrara (1834), and Ethel Churchill (1837).

In June 1838 Landon married George Maclean, a colonial official, and sailed with him to Cape Coast, West Africa (in present-day Ghana), where she died suddenly at the age of 36. The official verdict was that she had taken an accidental overdose of medicine, but rumor attributed her death to suicide or murder. Other reports asserted that she had died from a heart attack brought on by the condition for which she was taking medication.

Landon's work remained in print into the 1890s, and in the 20th century she was remembered in a number of biographical studies. Her voluminous publications are now again in print, and she has attracted attention for her success as a young single woman carving out an independent career in the tough arena of literary London in the 1830s.

Landon's writing today exerts a powerful fascination in the vividness and musicality of her distinctive voice. Her typical themes are "Sorrow, Beauty, Love and Death." As suggested in the title of her best-known novel, she writes movingly of "romance," and incisively of "reality."

Location and time: The World of Letitia Elizabeth Landon will be on view at the Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York, from March 24 through May 27, 2011. The exhibit will be open to the public free of charge, Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Additional information and directions are available under the "Exhibitions" tab of the club's website, www.grolierclub.org .

Catalogue: An illustrated catalogue of The World of Letitia Elizabeth Landon by F. J. Sypher (price $25) will be available at the Grolier Club.

CFP: "Eating Words: Text, Image, Food" One-Day Workshop (5/1/2011; 9/13/2011)

Eating Words: Text, Image, Food - a one-day workshop organized by the Centre for Material Texts, University of Cambridge

Some of our most material interactions with texts are grounded in the very food that we eat. Comestibles are eloquent objects; they come stamped with words, festooned with decorative designs, and wrapped in packaging that is at once visually and verbally loquacious. The kitchen has long been a textual domain, regulated by cookery books and recipe collections and noisy with inscriptions on pots, pans, plates and pastry-moulds. This one-day colloquium will explore numerous aspects of the relationship between writing, eating and domestic life across a broad swathe of history, in order to illuminate the unsuspected power of words and pictures in a paradigmatically practical locale and to shed light on the textual condition more broadly.

Questions to be addressed include:

• What is the relationship between the visual and the verbal in the history of food?

• What archival and physical evidence survives for the textual realms of the kitchen, and what methodological challenges does it present?

• Who produces the texts that circulate during the preparation and consumption of food, and for whom?

• How do the textual economies of the kitchen relate to those of other household spaces-the study, the library, the gallery-and of the wider world?

• How are public historical or cultural events refracted in the domestic locale and its object-worlds?

• What permutations has the metaphor of reading-as-eating undergone in its long history?

Speakers include: Deborah Krohn (Bard Graduate Centre), Sara Pennell
(Roehampton University)

This one-day workshop will take place under the auspices of the Centre for
Material Texts, University of Cambridge, on 13 September 2011. Please submit 25O
word proposals for 2O minute papers by 1 May to Melissa Calaresu (mtc12@cam.ac.uk)
and Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk). http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt

CFP: Dickens Special Issue of English: the Journal of the English Association (9/1/2011)

2012 is the Bicentenary of Dickens's Birth.

To celebrate, English: the Journal of the English Association is dedicating a special issue to his work and influence.

Topics covered might include:

• Dickens and adaptation
• Dickens and illustration
• Dickens and the Gothic imagination
• Dickens and the city
• Reading Dickens in the twenty-first century

But submissions on any topic connected to his work are encouraged.

Potential contributors should send essays of between 5,000 and 9,000 words to the journal editors via the English website at: http://english.oxfordjournals.org/. The deadline for submission is 1 September 2011.

Lectureship in Dramatic Literature, Victorian to Present Day, University of Newcastle

The School of English Literature, Language & Linguistics at the University of Newcastle seeks suitable applicants for a post in Dramatic Literature, Victorian to Present Day.  The Department has recently appointed a number of people who work in the Long Nineteenth Century, and seeks to extend this area of research and teaching into dramatic literature.

You can find full details of the post on the University of Newcastle's HR vacancies website at:

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/vacancies/

The job reference is B397A (SELLL)

The Hardy at Yale II Conference (6/9-12/2011)

The Hardy at Yale II Conference, sponsored by the Thomas Hardy Association and the Yale Center for British Art,  is now less than two months away.

Plenary presentations include:
Professor Penny Boumelha (Victoria University of Wellington) - "Hardy's Displacements"
Professor George Levine (Rutgers and New York University) - "Hardy's 'inward turn': From Mindless Matter to the       Realities of Mind"
Professor Herbert Tucker (University of Virginia) - "At the Bottom Line: How Hardy Tries Conclusions"
Professor Keith Wilson (University of Ottawa) - "The Epistolary Hardy: Volume Eight of The Collected Letters"

Other invited speakers include Dr. Linda Shires (Yeshiva University), Dr. Anna Henchman (Boston University), Dr. Gillian Forrester (Yale Center for British Art), Dr. Angelique Richardson (University of Exeter), Dr. Phillip Mallet (St. Andrews University), Prof. Pamela Dalziel (University of British Columbia), Dr. Jane Thomas (Hull University), Dr. Judith Mitchell (Victorian University), and Dr. Rosemarie Morgan (St. Andrews University).

Selected sessions include "Hardy, Empire and the Metropole," "Hardy and the Visual," "Embodied Hardy," "Hardy and the Ambivalences of Science," "Ecocritical Hardy," and "Jude the Pessimist, Jude the Optimist."  For a complete version of the conference program, and for registration information, please visit the conference website at http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ttha/hay/index.shtml.

Everyone is welcome, and we look forward to seeing you in New Haven from June 9 to June 12.
Registration due May 27. 

Literature and Mathematics in the Long Nineteenth Century (5/16-18/2011)

Registration Open:
A colloquium on 'Literature and Mathematics in the Long Nineteenth Century' will be held at the University of Glasgow, 16-18 May 2011.  All are very welcome to attend.  The programme and registration information are available at www.englit.arts.gla.ac.uk/conference/.  Papers will include:

• Marilyn Gaull: ‘Euclid Alone’
• Nigel Leask:‘‘Snatched from the Sickle and the Plough, To Gauge Ale-Firkins’: Robert Burns and the Excise’
• Daniel Brown:‘James Joseph Sylvester: The Romance of Space and the Calculus of Forms’
• Matthew Wickman: ‘Scott’s Shapes’
• Rachel Feder:‘Romantic Infinity: The Calculus & The Sublime’
• Melanie Bayley:‘Flatland, Darwin, and the Struggle for Persistence’
• Mark Blacklock:‘“Seeing as a Higher Child”: Hinton's Cubes and their Cultural Afterlives’
• Jason Hall: ‘Metre, Mathematics and the Fantasy of Accurate Measurement’
• Jonathan Farina:‘Calculation and Literary Interpretation’
• Elizabeth Throesch: Title TBA.
• Laurence Davies: ‘How to See the Fourth Dimension: Puzzles and Speculations’
• Alex Craik:‘Lord Kelvin's Popular Lectures and Addresses’
• Maggie Gover:‘Geometrically Inclined: Nineteenth-Century Optics and the War Between Mathematics and Experimentation’
• Michelle Boswell:‘The Poetical Mathematics and Mathematical Poetics of James Clerk Maxwell’
• Mark McCartney: ‘A Mind Running Slow and Clear: The Poetry of James Clerk Maxwell’
• Alice Jenkins: ‘Was There a ‘Common Context’ for Literature and Mathematics in English Periodicals?’
• Gabriela Fernandes Barberis:‘Spanish Contributions to Mathematical Literature and European Literary Influences’
• Joetta Harty:‘Empire of the Sums: The Power of Mathematics in Kim and Peter Pan’
• Nina Engelhardt:‘The Imaginary Domain as Transition Zone: Mathematics, Language and Reality in Musil's “The Confusions of Young Törless”’

CFP: Dickens Society Symposium (3/31/2012; 7/13-15/2012)

Dickens Society Symposium
University of Massachusetts Lowell & Lowell National Historical Park
Lowell, Massachusetts
13–15 July 2012

The Dickens Society will be offering an additional symposium and Dickens dinner during the bicentenary year.  These festivities will be held stateside at the Lowell National Historical Park on 13–15 July 2012. Hotel accommodation in downtown Lowell at the UMass Lowell Inn and Conference Center will provide easy access to a major exhibition at the National Park -- Dickens and Massachusetts: Untold Stories.  The exhibition will include several rare artifacts, including the 1842 portrait of Dickens by Boston painter Francis Alexander and the Boston Line Type edition of The Old Curiosity Shop donated by Dickens to the Perkins School for the Blind in 1868. Interactive elements such as electronically sensored skull models will enable visitors to try a phrenological "reading" of Dickens.  The popular Dickens walking tour of Lowell (first offered at the Dickens and America conference in 2002) and interactive sessions at the Tsongas Industrial History Center will also be featured offerings of the symposium.

Paper proposals on any aspect of Dickens and his works are invited. Final papers must be readable in twenty minutes. Please send one-page proposals electronically, by attachment, to Joel J. Brattin at jjb@wpi.edu no later than 31 March 2012. Further symposium information and updates will be available on the Dickens Quarterly website (http://www.DickensQuarterly.org) and from symposium co-chairs Diana Archibald (diana_archibald@uml.edu, English Department UMass Lowell, 61 Wilder St., Lowell, MA 01854) or Joel J. Brattin (Humanities & Arts Department, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA 01609-2280). Scholars at all stages of their careers are encouraged to submit proposals, and graduate students may register for the symposium at a reduced rate.

Located in the historic industrial city of Lowell, 25 miles northwest of Boston, the University of Massachusetts Lowell campus spans more than 125 acres along the Merrimack River. UMass Lowell is easily reached by either Manchester (New Hampshire) Airport or Boston’s Logan Airport. Lowell is connected to Boston via Amtrak trains (through north station in Boston) as well as bus service. Lowell is a great location from which to launch a side trip to the city of Boston, the beaches of Cape Cod, the resorts of Newport (Rhode Island), and even bustling New York City.

CFP: Crabbe's Tales (1/13/2012; 7/12 - 13/2012)

Crabbe's Tales
Newcastle University
Thursday 12 to Friday 13, July 2012

Confirmed keynote speakers: Dr. Mina Gorji (University of Cambridge), Prof. Claire Lamont (Newcastle University), Prof. Fiona Stafford (University of Oxford).

Reviewing 'Tales' (1812) Francis Jeffrey claimed that Crabbe was 'upon the whole, the most original writer who has ever come before us'. In marking the bicentenary of its publication this conference will focus on the telling of stories and the imagining of communities in Crabbe's nineteenth-century oeuvre including 'Poems' (1807), 'The Borough' (1810), 'Tales' and 'Tales of the Hall' (1819). its aim is to test Jerome McGann's claim (in an essay published in 1981) that Crabbe is 'a writer whose true historical period has yet to arrive.'

Proposals of 250 words are invited for 20-minute papers that address the following themes (although the list is not exclusive)

• Crabbe and the traditions of storytelling (Chaucer, Arabian Nights, New Testament parables)
• Crabbe and theories of narrative (Bakhtin, Benjamin, Barthes, Genette, Jameson)
• Crabbe and verse narrative (Byron, Hemans, Scott, Pushkin)
• Crabbe and Shakespeare
• Crabbe and gender
• Crabbe's readers, or the lack of them
• The geography and social geography of Crabbe's poems
• Crabbe and cultural periodization
• Crabbe in an age of revolution and war
• Hallucination, derangement and madness ('Peter Grimes', 'The Voluntary Insane', 'Where Am I Now?')
• Crabbe and his environments: maritime Suffolk, London, industrial Trowbridge
• Crabbe as 'Malthus turned metrical romancer'
• Crabbe and religion
• Crabbe's politics
• Crabbe's influence: Austen, Scott, Clare, Dickens, George Eliot, Clough, Britten
• Crabbe's paratexts: manuscripts, editions, illustrations, translations
• Crabbe's contemporary critics (Hazlitt, Jeffrey)

Proposals should be e-mailed to edwardsgavin@hotmail.com or michael.rossington@ncl.ac.uk by Friday 13 January 2012.

Conference organisers: Dr. Gavin Edwards (Institute of English Studies, University of London) and Dr. Michael Rossington (Newcastle University)

Conference website: http://conferences.ncl.ac.uk/crabbestales/

This conference is sponsored by the Medieval and Early Modern Studies @ Newcastle research group: http://research.ncl.ac.uk/mems/

CFP: 2011 Trollope Prize, now in partnership with The Fortnightly Review (6/1/2011)

New Partnership with The Fortnightly Review
The Trollope Prize at the University of Kansas is pleased to announce a new partnership with The Fortnightly Review.  The Fortnightly Review, an on-line version of the magazine begun by Anthony Trollope in 1865, will publish the winning graduate essay and will add a modest honorarium to the graduate award.

The Fortnightly Review has a storied history and was one of the most influential English-language periodicals of the nineteenth-century.  The brainchild of Anthony Trollope, who was inspired by Matthew Arnold’s call for “a current of true and fresh ideas” in his 1864 lecture on “The Function of Criticism,” The Fortnightly Review launched on May 15, 1865 under the
editorship of George Henry Lewes.  The new on-line series of The Fortnightly Review, edited by Anthony O’Hear and Denis Boyles, publishes articles on art and literature, philosophy and culture, informed by an awareness of the Fortnightly’s archived content.

The Trollope Prize
The Fortnightly Review is a natural place to publish the winning graduate essay of the annual Trollope Prize.  The Trollope Prize is awarded annually to the best undergraduate and graduate essays in English on the works of Anthony Trollope. The Prize is designed to help promote the study of Trollope in college classrooms and to encourage student engagement with both Trollope's work and Victorian literary history through their own intensive
research and writing.  Submissions for the prize are accepted from around the world.  The deadline is June 1, 2011. Winners will be announced in August 2011.

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.  In addition, the winning graduate essay will be published in The Fortnightly Review and the winner will receive a modest additional honorarium from the publication.

Visit trollopeprize.ku.edu for more information about the Trollope Prize, including submission criteria and guidelines.  Visit fortnightlyreview.co.uk for more information about The Fortnightly Review.

Modes of Transport: Travel Writing and Form, 1780-1914 (5/6/2011; 5/26-27/2011)

Registration is now open for: 


Modes of Transport: Travel Writing and Form, 1780-1914
An interdisciplinary conference
King’s College London 
26 & 27 May


Keynote Speakers: Mary Beard, Dane Kennedy, and Clair Pettitt


Other speakers include: Simon Goldhill, Alison Chapman, Peter Garratt, Anne Green, Michael Ledger-Lomas, Muireann O’ Cinneide, Matthew Rubery & Carl Thompson

There has always been a certain amount of unease and anxiety about how best to mould the quotidian, often repetitious, experience of travel into a digestible, literary narrative. The travel writer cannibalises other modes of literary, geographical and scientific writing, while simultaneously forging experimental, innovative and dynamic forms in the struggle to represent the heterogeneous and often chaotic experience of travel. It is the aim of this two-day conference to bring together academic researchers and professional travel writers in order to explore the relationship between travel writing and formal innovation in a variety of media across the long-nineteenth century.

Journals and Letters / Ephemera / Guidebooks / Travel in Verse / Transport and Literary Form / Mobile Reading / Tourism and Visual Culture / Literary Pilgrimage / Illustration / Maps / the Sea

Special Workshop: The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) historical collection

For registration and further details please visit:
http://travelconference.blogspot.com/p/registration.html

The deadline for registration and receipt of payment is Friday, 6 May 2011. Further enquires may be directed to Brian Murray and Mary Henes at travelconference@gmail.com

NAVSA Donald Gray Prize (5/9/2011)

NAVSA is now seeking nominations for the Donald Gray Prize for best essay published in the field of Victorian Studies.   The prize carries with it an award of $1000 and will be awarded to essays that appeared in print or online in journals from the previous calendar year. Essays may be on any topic related to the study of Victorian Britain.   Note that the actual date of appearance trumps the date given on the issue itself since it's common for journals to lag behind official issue dates. (The prize is limited to journal essays; those published in essay collections are not eligible.) The winner will also receive complementary registration at the NAVSA conference at which his or her award will be announced. 

Anyone, regardless of NAVSA membership status, is free to nominate an essay that appeared in print between 1 January 2010 and 31 December 2010.   Nominations will also be solicited from the Advisory Board of NAVSA and the prize committee judges; self-nominated essays are equally welcome.   Authors may be from any country and of any institutional standing.

To nominate an essay, please submit by Monday, 9 May 2011 (that's a receipt deadline, not a postmark deadline): (1) a brief cover sheet with complete address and email information for both the essay's nominator and its author, and (2) four hard copies of the essay to the Executive Secretary of NAVSA at the following address:

Meegan Kennedy
English Department
631 University Way
P.O. Box 3061580
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306-1580

Questions may be directed to meegan.kennedy@fsu.edu. You can find more information here: 

http://www.purdue.edu/NAVSA/Prizes/GrayPrize.cfm