CFP: Victorians. A Journal of Culture and Literature, special edition on Thackeray (6/30/2011)

Victorians. A Journal of Culture and Literature (formerly Victorian Newsletter) #120, Fall 2011 will be a special edition featuring new work on William Thackeray, in honor of the bicentennial of his birth. Submission deadline: June 30, 2011. Notification deadline: August 30, 2011.

Manuscript submissions: electronic e-mail attachment (Microsoft Word docs), in MLA documentation format.

Please address submissions and/or questions to: deborah.logan@wku.edu or victorian.newsletter@wku.edu.

Victorians. A Journal of Culture and Literature is sponsored for the Victorian Group of the Modern Language Association by Western Kentucky University and is published twice annually.

The Popular Imagination and the Dawn of Modernism (9/15-17/2011)

The Popular Imagination and the Dawn of Modernism, Middlebrow Writing 1890-1930

International Conference, School of Advanced Studies/Inst. of English Studies, London
15-17 September 2011


Registration and the programme are now available on the conference website. Please note that due to a torrent of spectacularly good abstracts, the conference has been extended by half a day, so it will now run from Wednesday morning to Saturday lunchtime. The organizers are also happy to announce that the conference will be hosting the launch of a new collection of the poetry of Hope Mirrlees, sponsored by Carcanet Books.

Keynote Speakers: Ann Ardis (University of Delaware, USA), Adina Ciugureanu (Ovidius University Constanta, Romania)

CFP: Learning From Lister: Antisepsis, Safer Surgery, and Global Health (9/16/2011; 3/22-24/2012)

Learning From Lister: Antisepsis, Safer Surgery, and Global Health
A multidisciplinary, multidimensional conference
22nd - 24th March 2012
King's College London
The Royal Society
The Royal College of Surgeons of England

Submissions are invited for a three-day conference commemorating the life, work and legacy of Joseph Lister, Professor of Clinical Surgery at King's College London from 1877 - 1893, to be held on the centenary of his death. Papers are requested for 15- or 20-minute parallel sessions which could take the form of talks, workshops or seminars, to be followed by 10 minutes of discussion, covering (but not limited to) topics such as:

• Discipleship
• 19th- and 20th-C surgical craft
• Advances in surgical science
• Nursing pedagogy and practice
• Health care innovation
• 'Translation' of principle into health care practices
• Lister's legacy and global health
• Controversy in surgical sciences
• Identification and control of hospital infections
• Hospital safety
• Sepsis / antisepsis / asepsis
• Dirt / cleanliness

Abstracts should be no more than 400 words, and proposals should state which of the conference's four major strands they would be situated under (History; Surgical Practice; Infectious Disease; Health Policy) and sent to ben.chisnall@kcl.ac.uk. The deadline for receipt of abstracts is Friday 16th September 2011. For a full programme, please visit the Lister website at www.kcl.ac.uk/lister.

As well as historians, we welcome and encourage papers from scientific, clinical, and health service and policy backgrounds, which could cover modern-day bacteriology, asepsis, surgical techniques, and safety issues in healthcare. These papers should make reference to Lister's legacy, and should be concerned with tracing the roots of this legacy into present-day practice. More information on abstract submissions is available at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/cultural/lister2012/programme/abstractsubmissions.aspx .

The conference will provide an opportunity for historians, surgeons, nurses, infectious disease experts, health services researchers and those interested in the development of hospital health policy, translational practices, and hospital safety to discuss their respective approaches to understanding Lister's contribution to improved surgical and health care practice both within its historical context and in the present day.

The conference is being organised by the Centre for the Humanities and Health<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/groups/chh> at King's College London<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/index.aspx>, the Royal Society<http://royalsociety.org/>, and the Royal College of Surgeons of England<http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/>. Events will take place across these three venues.

Rudikoff first book prize (7/20/2011)

The Northeast Victorian Studies Association is accepting nominations for the Sonya Rudikoff Award for the best first monograph on the Victorian period published in 2010. The Sonya Rudikoff Award was established by the Robert Gutman family in honor of Mr. Gutman's late wife. Ms. Rudikoff was an active member of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association and a recognized scholar.

Any text nominated for this award must be the author's first academic monograph. The subject should address Victorian literature and/or culture. Our focus is on Victorian Great Britain and the Empire, although we will consider texts that are transatlantic or long nineteenth-century in focus. We will not consider texts that are strictly American Victorian. Books must have been published during 2010. The award winner will receive a cash prize. The winning author and publisher will be announced at the April 2012 conference of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association at Columbia University.

Please have the publisher submit seven copies of the text by July 20, 2011 to

Professor Anne Humpherys
Ph.D. Program in English
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10016-4309

More information may be found at: http://www.nvsa.org/rudikoff.htm

Any questions should be directed to Jason Rudy at jrrudy@umd.edu

CFP: "Victorian Energy Crises" NeMLA Panel (9/30/2011; 3/15-18/2012)

Call for Papers: Panel on “VICTORIAN ENERGY CRISES”

Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)—March 15-18, 2012—Rochester, New York, Hyatt Rochester http://www.nemla.org/convention/2012/cfp.html


This panel will consider the ways energy, broadly conceived, was theorized, understood, and represented in Victorian literature, science, and material culture.


Throughout the Victorian era some very different conceptions of energy came to increasingly overlap, while others remained differentiated by the material objects with which they were associated or by their gendered, classed, and raced bodily sources. The Gospel of Work, for example, moralized labor as ennobling and masculinizing, while medical discourses constructed female lassitude as a pathology of gender. In other venues, the steam-power of factories and railways was theoretically correlated with the laboring body, and as a result mechanical engines became linked in the popular imagination to new conceptions of the body as a machine, expending labor and consuming nutrition like a “human motor.” The new science of thermodynamics, which produced the era’s most powerful images of energy decay, predicted the “heat death” of the solar system in 30 million years, the calendar H. G. Wells follows when depicting a depleted sun in The Time Machine.


This panel hopes to explore connections between the different knowledges which emerged in the Victorian era to theorize and understand energy, as well as the various cultural forms through which Victorians represented energy at work. Possibilities include the body; affect; machine cultures, engineering, and the physical sciences; ecology and natural resources; medicine, nutrition, and physiology.


Please send 300-400 word proposals by September 30, 2011 to Jessica Kuskey, Syracuse University jekuskey@syr.edu


Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)


Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however, panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable.  http://www.nemla.org/convention/2012/cfp.html

The 43rd annual convention will be held March 15-18th in Rochester, New York at the Hyatt Regency Hotel downtown, located minutes away from convenient air, bus, and train transportation options for attendees. St. John Fisher College will serve as the host college, and the diverse array of area institutions are coordinating with conference organizers to sponsor various activities, such as celebrated keynote speakers, local events, and fiction readings.

CFP: "Excavating the Art of Advertising," a 2011 UAAC-AAUC Conference Session (5/24/2011; 10/27-29/2011)

Call for Papers for a Session at the 2011 UAAC- AAUC  Conference

(Universities Art Association of Canada)
Carleton University / Université de Carleton
Ottawa, ON
October 27-29

Excavating the Art of Advertising / Aller au fond de l'art de la publicité

This panel will explore the art of advertising in the period before World War II. Over the course of the long nineteenth century, advertising developed into a large-scale industry that recognized the power of the image. Such advertisements were alternately described as an art of the people or as one of the horrors of modern life. With this panel, I aim to excavate the practices and discourses of advertising in order to reconsider its place in the visual culture of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. I seek to uncover collaborations and continuities between art and advertising, while also examining the tensions and ruptures that were pervasive. Proposals on any aspect of art and advertising will be considered.

Session Chair
Andrea Korda, Ph.D. 
andrea.korda@uleth.ca

Deadline: May 24th, 2011
Please send your abstract to Andrea at andrea.korda@uleth.ca

Unexpected Agents Symposium, registration open (6/24/2011)

Registration is now open for 'Unexpected Agents: Considering agency beyond the boundaries of the human (1800 — the Present)' at the University of Birmingham on June 24th.

The event is a one-day postgraduate symposium hosted by the English Department which will aim to consider how we might explore and account for agency from unexpected sources. Papers and discussions at this symposium will place the non-human, the object, the supposedly ‘lifeless’ at the centre, with a view to casting new light on and rethinking definitions of human agency and identity from an unconventional, askance perspective.  Our plenary speaker is Dr Sarah Kember of Goldsmiths, University of London.

The symposium cost is £15 for University of Birmingham students, and £30 for students from other universities.

For online registration please visit http://bit.ly/unexpectedagents

For more information, see http://www.english.bham.ac.uk/unexpected or contact us at unexpectedagents@gmail.com.

Updated CFP: Victorians Institute Conference "Charles Dickens: Past, Present, and Future" (6/20/2011; 10/21-22/2011)

UPDATED Call for Papers: 

VICTORIANS INSTITUTE CONFERENCE
"Charles Dickens: Past, Present, and Future"
Myrtle Beach, SC (Ocean Creek Resort)

October 21-22, 2011

To help usher in the global celebration of his bicentenary in 2012, the 41st annual conference of the Victorians Institute will focus rather broadly on the life and work of Charles Dickens. We welcome papers that examine Dickens's writings and their relevance to us today. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary essays exploring the literary life and legacy of Dickens in relation to science, economics, psychology, sociology, philosophy, law, history, aesthetics, and theater and film adaptation. This year's keynote speaker is Audrey Jaffe, Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph (The Ohio State
University Press, 2010); Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Cornell University Press, 2000); and Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience (University of California Press, 1991).

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Dickens's Journalism
• Dickens and the Literary Marketplace
• Dickens and Mass Culture
• Dickensian Friendships
• Dickensian Scandals
• The Dickens Circle
• Catherine Dickens
• Dickens and Science
• Dickens and Emotion
• Reading Dickens
• Dickensian Afterlives
• Spiritualism and Spirituality in Dickens
• Dickens's Moral Philosophy
• Dickens and the Posthuman
• Dickens and Travel
• Theatrical Dickens
• Dickens in America
• Dickens and Empire
• The Dickens Industry

Please send proposals of no more than 500 words and a brief one-paragraph bio by June 20, 2011 to: Dr. Maria K. Bachman, Department of English, P.O. Box 261954, Coastal Carolina University, Conway, South Carolina 29528-6054. Email: mbachman@coastal.edu


Victorians Institute & Journal: http://www.vcu.edu/vij/

CFP: Aesthetic Lives, update and deadline extension (6/30/2011; 9/23-24/2011)

International conference: Aesthetic Lives (www.esthetismes.org)
Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, FRANCE

23-24 September 2011

Guest speakers: Dennis Denisoff (Ryerson University, Toronto) and Ana Parejo Vadillo (Birkbeck College, University of London)

Deadline Extension: Please email your proposal by June 30, 2011 to catherine.delyfer@univ-montp3.fr AND bncoste@free.fr

Updated CFP:
‘[C]reating themselves out of themselves, and moulding themselves to what they were, and willed to be’

In 1873, citing Hegel’s vision of the Greeks, Walter Pater wrote in The Renaissance: ‘They are great and free, and have grown up on the soil of their own individuality, creating themselves out of themselves, and moulding themselves to what they were, and willed to be.’ This Paterian celebration of autonomy and self-fashioning was read with delight, cultivated, and variously implemented by the members of the Aesthetic Movement. Not only did Aestheticism create new objects, but it enabled singular lifestyles to be born. In the last third of the nineteenth century, the facts of existence ceased to be perceived as heteronomous. Life itself was gradually envisioned as a work in progress for an individual at once more aware of his/her freedom as subject and more conscious of changing societal constraints. New lifestyles flourished and novel representations of life emerged. From the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (which immediately preceded the Aesthetic Movement) to James Whistler, Oscar Wilde, William Morris, ‘Ouida’, ‘Michael Field’, or Edward Carpenter, many were those who devoted themselves to practicing and writing about literature and art while evolving a lifestyle which early twentieth-century critics would later identify with the 'men [and women] of the nineties.'

Fashioning one’s own life became both conceivable and technically and politically possible as individuals gradually ceased to acquiesce in given social configurations of power and value and started interrogating the status quo. Such questioning was often the source of original individual choices and collective interventions such as the creation of clubs, guilds, presses or journals. Within given social, economic and political structures/strictures, of which writers and artists were highly conscious, ‘Aesthetic’ living became an important embodiment of subjective experience and individual experiment.

After our first 2009 trans-disciplinary international conference entitled ‘British Aestheticisms’, our 2011 conference on ‘Aesthetic Lives’ hopes to focus on issues of Aesthetic subjectivity, on the lived experience of Aesthetic individuality or difference, and on original trajectories in the context of Aesthetic practices. How did writers and artists turn their existence into an artwork? What does it mean to found a club, an artistic community, a new journal when one is (or claims to be) an Aesthete? What were the cultural, social, economic or political constraints which hindered or enabled Aesthetic projects, aspirations and itineraries?

Importantly, the notion of ‘Aesthetic life’ is not meant in the limited biographical sense, but should be taken in the broad sense of a personal negotiation and a carving of one’s chosen itinerary or ethical choices in the context of Aestheticism. What kind of ethics can arise from Aesthetic choices? What are its daily manifestations, practically speaking? What were the obstacles or aporiae encountered by those who followed Pater’s ideas about self-fashioning and life as a work of art? How were these subjective choices received? And how do they anticipate the choices made by the figures of Modernism?

We welcome papers (in French or in English) studying individual artists and writers, specific formal or informal groups, and various arts of Aesthetic living. Descriptive and hagiographic approaches are to be strictly avoided.

Registration fee: 55 euros (includes coffee/tea and 2 lunches). A selection of papers will be published. Please email your proposal by June 30, 2011 to catherine.delyfer@univ-montp3.fr 

AND bncoste@free.fr

Victorian-focused Wikipedia event at the British Library (6/4/2011)

The British Library's English & Drama department is hosting a Wikipedia editing event on Saturday, June 4th. The purpose of the event is to improve Wikipedia's coverage of some of the important literary individuals and collections represented at the British Library.

It just so happens that the majority of the subjects highlighted for improvement hail from the Victorian period, including the Library's Dexter Collection of Dickensiana, the Lady Eccles Oscar Wilde Collection and the Barry Ono Collection of Penny Dreadfuls. We are also hoping to improve the encyclopaedia's entries for individuals such as Thomas Hardy, Bram Stoker and Lewis Carroll. Full details of the event can be found at

http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editathon,_British_Library

The day will be greatly enhanced by the attendance of some Victorian experts and enthusiasts so, if you're interested, please feel free to register (no Wikipedia-editing experience necessary). We will be showing some interesting items from the Library's collections, and refreshments will be provided ... a win-win situation!

Tim Pye
Curator, Printed Literary Sources
British Library
tim.pye@bl.uk

CFP: RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net

Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 
http://www.ravon.umontreal.ca/
Call for Submissions

RaVoN, an international refereed electronic journal, encourages Victorianists to submit articles for peer review and eventual publication in the journal.  Since Romanticism on the Net (RoN) expanded into RaVoN in 2007, the journal has published a number of Victorian articles by such critics as Stephen Arata, Alison Booth, Laurel Brake, Adelene Buckland, Carol Christ, Jonathan Farina, Kate Flint, Nicholas Frankel, Regenia Gagnier, Anne Helmreich, Natalie Houston, Christoper M. Keirstead, Laurie Langbauer, Peter Melville Logan, Teresa Mangum, William R. McKelvy, Clare Pettitt, Catherine Robson, Andrew Stauffer, Herbert F. Tucker, Athena Vrettos, Julia M. Wright, and many more.

Please submit articles directly to the Victorian editor, Dino Franco Felluga: felluga@purdue.edu

Submission guidelines can be found here:
http://www.ravon.umontreal.ca/submission.html

The journal normally provides readers’ reports and a publication decision within two months. 

CFP: Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento (6/20/2011; 10/28/2011)

‘Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento’

A one-day conference at the Italian Cultural Institute, London

Friday, October 28, 2011

Keynote Speaker: Professor Lucy Riall (Birbeck, University of London)

To mark the 150^th anniversary of Italian unification, the Italian Cultural Institute in London, in conjunction with the University of Wales, Newport, and the Association for the Study of Modern Italy, will host a one-day conference on the theme of ‘Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento’ on Friday 28 October 2011. The purpose of the conference is to allow for a critical examination of old assumptions and interpretations regarding British and Irish responses to the Risorgimento, and to map out new ways of understanding the impact of the ‘Italian Question’  on UK politics, society, commerce and culture (broadly defined). The conference will also examine the British-Irish influence on mid-century Italian politics, society, commerce and culture. 

Themes that participants may wish to address include:

• The Irish and Italian Questions compared
• Irish nationalism and the Risorgimento
• The Risorgimento in Scotland and/or Wales
• Religion and the Risorgimento
• Class and the Risorgimento
• Gender and the Risorgimento
• The idea of Italy in the British/Irish literary imagination
• The Grand Tour and the Risorgimento
• Romanticism and the Risorgimento
• Trade and the Risorgimento
• Art and the Risorgimento
• Radicalism and the Risorgimento
• Liberalism and the Risorgimento
• Conservative responses to the Risorgimento
• Britain and/or Ireland as seen from Italy
• Italian exiles in Britain and Ireland

The focus of the conference is on the period 1848-1861. However, papers that cover subjects outside of these dates will be considered. Interested parties should send proposals of no more than 300 words to the conference organiser Dr Nick Carter at nick.carter@newport.ac.uk. The deadline for proposal submissions is Monday 20 June 2011.

               

2011 BAVS Conference: Postgraduate and Post-doctoral Bursaries (6/16/2011)

BAVS is pleased to announce the details for BAVS Postgraduate and Post-doctoral Conference Bursaries for the 2011 Conference:


BAVS offers up to 12 bursaries worth £150 each to help post-graduate students or post-doctoral scholars who are either UK-based or members of BAVS to meet the costs of attending the annual conference at the University of Birmingham in 2011. There are usually 2 bursaries for observers who will report on the conference for the BAVS newsletter, and around 10 bursaries for postgraduate or post-doctoral paper presenters whose papers have been accepted for the Conference.

Post-doctoral bursaries are available to those who have recently submitted doctoral theses, but do not hold an academic post. Observer’s bursaries are open to all postgraduate or post-doctoral students including those who are not giving a paper.

Application is via letter, brief CV of no more than 2 pages, and (for paper presenters) the title of your conference paper abstract. Applications are assessed by a panel that includes member(s) of the BAVS Executive Committee and member(s) of the conference organising committee.

If you want to be an observer, your letter of application should say what interests you about the conference and what makes you a suitable observer. If you want to apply as a paper presenter, your letter of application should explain how your paper relates to your research and to the conference theme, and why attendance at the conference will be of benefit to you. The criteria for selection are the relevance of your proposal to the conference theme, the originality of your ideas, the presentation of your argument, and the benefits likely from your attendance at the conference.

Bursary-holders will be expected to pay all registration and other fees for the conference in advance, and will receive their bursary cheques at the conference.

Applicants should send their applications electronically to the 2011 Conference organising committee at:  bavs2011@gmail.com

The deadline for applications is 16th June 2011.

Preference will be given to those who have not previously held a BAVS conference bursary. Applicants will be informed of the outcome of the competition by the end of June 2011.



BAVS: http://www.bavsuk.org/index.htm

2012 Fellowship in Pre-Raphaelite Studies (10/15/2011)

2012 Fellowship in Pre-Raphaelite Studies 
The University of Delaware Library, in Newark, Delaware, and the Delaware Art Museum are pleased to offer a joint Fellowship in Pre-Raphaelite studies. This short-term, one-month Fellowship, awarded annually, is intended for scholars conducting significant research in the lives and works of the Pre-Raphaelites and their friends, associates, and followers.  Research of a wider scope, which considers the Pre-Raphaelite movement and related topics in relation to Victorian art and literature, and cultural or social history, will also be considered. Projects which provide new information or interpretation--dealing with unrecognized figures, women writers and artists, print culture, iconography, illustration, catalogues of artists' works, or studies of specific objects--are particularly encouraged, as are those which take into account transatlantic relations between Britain and the United States.

Receiving the Fellowship
The recipient will be expected to be in residence and to make use of the resources of both the Delaware Art Museum and the University of Delaware Library. The recipient may also take advantage of these institutions' proximity to other collections, such as the Winterthur Museum and Library, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Princeton University Library, and the Bryn Mawr College Library. Each recipient is expected to participate in an informal colloquium on the subject of his or her research during the course of Fellowship residence.

Up to $3,000 is available for the one-month Fellowship. Housing may be provided. Personal transportation is recommended (but not mandatory) in order to fully utilize the resources of both institutions.

The Fellowship is intended for those who hold a Ph.D. or can demonstrate equivalent professional or academic experience. Applications from independent scholars and museum professionals are welcome. By arrangement with the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, scholars may apply to each institution for awards in the same year; every effort will be made to offer consecutive dates.

Important Dates
The deadline to apply for the 2012 Fellowship is October 15, 2011. Notification of the successful applicant will be announced by November 15, 2011. The chosen candidate will then be asked to provide a date for assuming the Fellowship by December 1, 2011.

About the Delaware Art Museum
Founded in 1912, the Delaware Art Museum is home to the largest and most important collection of British Pre-Raphaelite art in the United States.  Assembled largely by the Wilmington industrialist, Samuel Bancroft, Jr., at the turn of the century (with significant subsequent additions), the collection includes paintings and drawings by all the major and minor Pre-Raphaelite artists, as well as decorative arts, prints, photographs, manuscripts, and rare books.  The Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives, with a reference collection of 30,000 volumes, holds Samuel Bancroft’s papers and correspondence, a rich source for the history of collecting and provenance which also contains significant manuscript material by and about the Rossettis.

About the University of Delaware Library
The University of Delaware Library has broadly based and comprehensive collections—books, periodicals, electronic resources, microforms, government publications, databases, maps, manuscripts, media, and access to information via the Internet—which provide a major academic resource for the study of literature and art.  Many printed and manuscript items related to the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates are in the Special Collections Department, including major archives relating to the Victorian artist and writer, George Adolphus Storey, and to the bibliographer and forger, Thomas J. Wise.  The Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, associated with the Special Collections Department, focuses on British literature and art of the period 1850 to 1900, with an emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelites and on the writers and illustrators of the 1890s.  Its rich holdings comprise 7,500 first and other editions (including many signed and association copies), manuscripts, letters, works on paper (including drawings by Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti), and ephemera.

To Apply
To apply, send a completed application form, together with a description of your research proposal (maximum 1 page) and a curriculum vitae or resume (maximum 2 pages) to the address given below. These materials may also be sent via email to:fellowships@delart.org. Letters of support from two scholars or other professionals familiar with you and your work are also required. These must be sent by mail to:

Pre-Raphaelite Fellowship Committee
Delaware Art Museum
2301 Kentmere Parkway
Wilmington, DE 19806

For an application form and more information go to:
www.delart.org/education/fellowships.html

CFP: W.T. Stead: Centenary Conference for a Newspaper Revolutionary, deadline approaching (5/20/2011; 4/16-17/2012)

The call for papers for ‘W.T. Stead: Centenary Conference for a Newspaper Revolutionary’ ends this Friday, 20 May 2011. Stead was the most famous Englishman to die on board the Titanic. This conference will be held at the British Library, 16-17 April 2012 (the centenary of both Stead’s death and the sinking) to discuss his life, his diverse interests, his contributions to the newspaper and periodical press, and the period more broadly.

The full call for papers is here: https://sites.google.com/site/stead2012/cfp

CFP: 2011 Trollope Prize, judges announced (6/1/2011)

The Trollope Prize at the University of Kansas is pleased to announce the judges for the 2011 essay contest.

Andrew H. Miller is Professor of English and Director of the Victorian Studies Program at Indiana University Bloomington, as well as the co-editor of Victorian Studies.  He has been a fellow of both the National Humanities Center and the American Council of Learned Societies.  His work has explored nineteenth-century texts by Dickens, Gaskell, and Thackeray, and his recent publications include The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Cornell University Press, 2008).

Helena Michie is Professor of English and the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor in Humanities at Rice University.  Her work focuses on feminist theory, Victorian literature and culture, and the Victorian novel.  She has been awarded fellowships by both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation.  Her latest monograph is Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Dorice Williams Elliott is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas.  Her work focuses on the Victorian novel, theories of class, and feminist theory.  She has recently received both a fellowship from the Hall Center for the Humanities and a W.T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence.  Her publications include The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England (University of Virginia Press, 2002).  She is currently researching Australian convict literature.

The deadline for entries to both the undergraduate and graduate essay contests is June 1, 2011. Also please note that recent PhD recipients may enter the graduate contest.

Please see our website -- http://trollopeprize.ku.edu -- for more information on the Prize, or e-mail any questions to lkiehna@ku.edu.

Art, Literature, the Press, and Exile: Relationships between the United Kingdom and the Italian Risorgimento (9/9-11/2011)

Registration is now open for Art, Literature, the Press, and Exile: Relationships between the United Kingdom and the Italian Risorgimento, an international conference to be held 9-11 September 2011 at Bagni di Lucca, Italy.

The conference commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy the Fondazione Michel de Montaigne, based in Bagni di Lucca, in collaboration with the University of Pisa and the Historical Institute of Lucca, and will take place in the former Anglican Church (now the Municipal Library) of Bagni di Lucca. It considers the representation of Italy in the work of nineteenth century British writers and examines perceptions and rationalizations of Italian aspirations for unity by British writers, artists, journalists and politicians. This is one of a series of Conferences at Bagni di Lucca which have concentrated upon nineteenth-century British literary figures who lived in Tuscany and particularly those associated with Bagni itself.

Presentations include, but are not limited to

• “'Stirring the waters roughly' Charles Lever, Blackwood’s Magazine and the Risorgimento"
• "Lord Byron fails to finish 'The Prophecy of Dante'"
• "George Eliot’s Romola as an expression of a cultural Risorgimento"
• "British Women Writers and the Risorgimento: Isabella Blagden between salons and political involvement"
• "Friends of Italy: The Risorgimento in Victorian Great Britain"
• "'Italy for the Italians': Jessie White, the Italian Risorgimento and the Formation of Victorian Identity
• "'Buy it, buy it! Fine statue! … very cheap'- Emigration to Great Britain from the Lucca Province in the 19th Century"
• "Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Francesco Dall’Ongaro"
• "Arthur Hugh Clough and the Roman Republic of 1849"
• "Caricatures of leading figures of the Risorgimento as seen by the original Vanity Fair (1869-1878)"
• "Dickens and Gissing in Italy before and after the Unity"

For the full program, visit http://www.fondazionemontaigne.it/files/montaigne__programma_2011.pdf

For registration information, visit http://www.fondazionemontaigne.it/index.html

CFP: Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology (8/15/2011)

Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology

We are seeking contributors for a collection of critical essays on Steampunk. Steampunk remains an elusive topic even among its admirers and practitioners, but at its heart, it re-imagines the Victorian age in the future, and re-works its technology, fashion, and values with a dose of anti-modernism. From sci-fi and fantasy to websites catering to a Steampunk lifestyle, this multi-faceted genre demands greater scholarly analysis.

The editors of this anthology seek contributions in the following suggested subject areas: Steampunk film, technology, fashion, literature, art & design, gender and steampunk, steampunk fan culture, steampunk as culture and lifestyle, and critiques of existing analyses of steampunk.

Submission Guidelines: Send a 1000 word abstract in Microsoft Word by email attachment on or before August 15, 2011; include a brief biography or vita. International submissions are welcomed and encouraged.

Abstracts chosen for inclusion in the anthology will be considered “conditional acceptances” – the editors will secure the submission in the volume, but the editors reserve the right to reject any full essay that does not meet the standards (of style/content, etc) agreed to between the editors and authors. Endnotes are mandatory; illustrations are encouraged and must be secured (along with permissions) by the author and submitted with the final draft.

Editorial Team:

• Dr. Julie Anne Taddeo, History Dept., University of Maryland (Taddeo@mail.umd.edu) 
• Dr. Cynthia Miller, Institute for Liberal Arts, Emerson College (cynthia_miller@emerson.edu)
• Dr. Ken Dvorak, Distance Education, Northern New Mexico College (krdvorak@nnmc.edu)

CFP: Art versus Industry? (6/17/2011; 3/23-24/2012)

Art versus Industry?
Leeds City Museum, 23 and 24 March 2012


This two-day international and transdisciplinary conference aims to re-evaluate the intersections between the visual arts and industry in Britain during the long nineteenth century. The complexity and variety of nineteenth-century industrial culture and responses to it remain under appreciated. The idea that an  ʻindustrial cultureʼ might have existed in nineteenth-century Britain seemed paradoxical in the wake of Raymond Williamsʼ Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958) and Martin Wienerʼs English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit  (1981). Both suggested a seemingly non-negotiable opposition between culture and industry. They privileged the writings of John Ruskin, and later William Morris, which resisted the incursion of mechanised production into the sphere of the fine and applied arts. 


ʻArt versus industry?ʼ invites papers that look beyond Ruskin and Morris to modify these characterisations. Recent studies of nineteenth-century literary culture have identified the 
development of a pro-industrial rhetoric in the early nineteenth century. How was this articulated in the visual arts? Debates over design reform in particular suggest the permeable boundaries between the artist, designer, artisan and operative, matched by a taxonomic conflation of art with design. Meanwhile, the prospect of widening the franchise of  ʻtasteʼ often correlated with the embrace of new industrial technologies, as much as with the repudiation of them.  ʻArt versus industry?ʼ seeks to uncover the complexities of the nineteenth-century ʻindustrial cultureʼ.


Topics for discussion might include, but are not limited to:

• Exhibitions and the display of science and art
• Taste formation and circulation
• The role of the periodical press and print culture
• Industrial art collectors and collections
• The education of the artist and artisan
• Material processes and conditions of production; deskilling and reskilling
• The principles and practice of design
• Historiographic approaches to the debate
• Mechanicsʼ Institutions and the ideology of self-improvement
• Centralisation and regional specificity
• The impact of trans-national communication and manufacture upon art or upon concepts of 
• national style
• New reproductive technologies and art

Confirmed speakers include Dr. Tom Gretton (University College London), Dr. Mervyn Romans (independent), Dr. Colin Trodd (University of Manchester) and Professor Lara Kriegel (Indiana University). 


Please email a title, 300 word abstract and CV to Rebecca Wade (r.j.wade@leeds.ac.uk) by 17 
June 2011.