CFP: Taking Liberties: Sex, Pleasure, Coercion (11/1/2011; 6/15-17/2012)

Call for Papers

Taking Liberties: Sex, Pleasure, Coercion (1748-1928)

15-17 June 2012, Newcastle University

Keynote Speakers:

Helen Berry (Newcastle University) on Sex, Marriage and the Castrato

Joseph Bristow (UCLA) on Oscar Wilde’s Sexual Practices

Cora Kaplan (Queen Mary, University of London) on Rape, Representation and Slavery

Richard P. Sha (American University) on Romanticism and the Paradoxes of Free Love

From the publication of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1748) to D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), literature has imaginatively exploited the relationship between freedom, coercion and sexual pleasure, constantly pushing at the boundaries of what it is permissible to describe, represent and perform. At the same time, the history of print, film and theatre censorship has been told as a story of progressive unshackling from constraint. In this narrative, these ever-widening freedoms and challenges have been understood as positively beneficial to individuals and to societies. Yet the idea of sexual liberty as an unqualified good has increasingly come under scrutiny, giving way to the realization that freedom from sexual constraint can sometimes mean imprisonment in new and alternate structures of power, frustration and denial. This international, multidisciplinary conference seeks to complicate and enrich our understanding of the relation between sex, pleasure and coercion in a liberal context. It will explore the many ways in which literary and visual texts and performances can be understood to create, reinforce, question and/or dissolve these structures, as well as interrogate the complicity of publishing and the law in their framing and dismantling.

Key conference questions are:

• How are the complex relations between sexual licence, pleasure and coercion understood, represented and negotiated during the long nineteenth century?
• How did censorship and obscenity laws shape the literary/cinematic/theatrical landscape?
• How were sexually controversial texts – from erotica to triple-decker novels, from peep-shows to West-End theatre – produced, circulated, preserved and consumed?

 We are interested in literary and visual texts/performances from across the cultural spectrum. We welcome papers from English, Drama, Film & Visual Culture, History, Law, Modern Languages, Sociology and Geography.

Possible topics include:

• Sex, Sexuality and the Law
• Gender and the Law
• Obscenity/Pornography
• Censorship
• Rakes/Dandies/Mollies
• Prostitutes/Madams/Pimps
• Rape/Sexual Violence
• Sex on Stage/Screen
• Sex Manuals/Diaries
• ‘Lewd’ Behaviour
• The Politics of Pleasure
• Flirtation, Seduction, Exploitation
• Corrupting the Innocent
• Voyeurism/Striptease/Burlesque
• ‘Dirty’ Books
• Bowdlerization
• Advertising Sex/Abortion/Contraception
• Sexual Initiations
• Sadomasochism/Masters and Slaves
• Tyranny and Slavery

 Proposals of no more than 300 words should be emailed by 1 November 2011 to TakingLiberties@ncl.ac.uk. Other inquiries should be directed to the conference organizer, Dr Ella Dzelzainis, at ella.dzelzainis@ncl.ac.uk.

CFP: Urban Monstrosities (10/1/2011; 4/1/2012)

Call for Articles: Edited Collection Urban Monstrosities
Joseph Lamperez and J. Alexandra McGhee, University of Rochester

The contemporary city bears the trace of at least two seismic developments: the Enlightenment rationalization of urban space, marked by the twinned banishment of death to the urban periphery and the creation of a regime of spatial surveillance; and the emergence of the modern city as simulacrum, its widened boulevards and glossy surfaces allowing for the continual flow of commodities and capital. How do contemporary authors of speculative fiction figure and respond to these and other major urban transformations in their own work? We are seeking articles that explore the city as a space of monstrous potential, and which examine how the uncanny cityscape has (d)evolved since the Industrial Revolution. SF and weird fiction, for example, often depict the city as a living organism that is alternately transformative and malicious. How do these and other literary and artistic modes figure urban space as a site of bizarre experiences and subjectivities? What entity can be read in, and attempts to speak through, the oneiric facades of the architectural fantasia?  What are the ramifications of a sentient city? How useful are Blake's “dark Satanic Mills," Dickens's "Animate London," and Eliot's "unreal" cities as models for reading contemporary instances of urban monstrosity?

This collection attempts to posit the neglected but important link between the nineteenth and early twentieth century city as an unreal spectacle of overwhelming crowds, urban wilderness, and new social formations, and contemporary representations of the city as an incipient organism or fantastic bestiary, its space a site of chthonic splendor and ruinous allure. What new readings become possible when sophisticated modern fantasists like China Mieville and Jeff VanderMeer are placed in a tradition of urban representation stretching back to Wordsworth and Blake, Baudelaire and Poe? How can Mayhew's explorations or Benjamin's body of work on the flâneur and the urban phantasmagoria offer new ways of theorizing the global renaissance of street art, or the burgeoning documentation and aestheticization of derelict architectural structures known as "ruin porn"? Are areas of potential insurrection within the city—Bhabha’s “third space,” the urban carnivalesque—inimical to, or in league with urban monstrosity?

Please send a 500-word abstract, tentative title and brief (1-2 pp) CV to Joseph Lamperez at josephlamperez@gmail.com and J. Alexandra McGhee at alimcghee@gmail.com by October 1, 2011. Completed articles will be due April 1, 2012, and should be between 3500-5000 words.  For queries please contact Joseph Lamperez and J. Alexandra McGhee at the email addresses above.

CFP: Paranoia and Pain: Embodied in Psychology, Literature, and Bioscience (11/15/2011; 4/2-4/2012)

Paranoia and Pain: Embodied in Psychology, Literature, and Bioscience

University of Liverpool, 2-4 April 2012

Organising Chair:

Dr Maryam Farahani (School of English)

Organising Board:

Dr Neville Cobbe (School of Biological Sciences)

Dr Maryam Farahani (School of English)

Dr Ian Schermbrucker (School of Psychology)

Conference Chair:

Dr Nick Davis (School of English)

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Christopher Eccleston (Centre for Pain Research, University of Bath, England)

Dr Emma Mason (English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, England)

Dr David Miller (English Literature, University of Stirling, Scotland)

Professor Andrej Stancak (School of Psychology, University of Liverpool, England)

Dr Anna Szczepan-Wojnarska (Cardinal Wyszynski University of Warsaw, Poland)

Call for Papers:

Paranoia and Pain: Embodied in Psychology, Literature, and Bioscience (University of Liverpool, 2-4 April 2012) is an international cross-disciplinary conference, seeking to raise an awareness of various intersections of literature and  science. The conference aims to explore overlapping paradigms of paranoia and pain in psychology, biological sciences, and literary texts/contexts.

How is paranoia related to pain? How is pain expressed with/without paranoia? How are these two terms exposed in various contexts? How does our understanding of the psychophysiology of pain interrelate with literary accounts of paranoia and pain? What does research in the field of paranoia offer to literary studies surrounding this concept and vice versa? To what extent does pain echo paranoia; and is this echo physiological, stylistic, psychological, symbolic, or literal? How do these terms regulate our behaviour and expression of emotions in relation to broader concepts such as faith, ethics, and the value of human life? What does the study of these concepts offer today’s generation of intellectuals with regard to human relationships and the way we communicate with each other? This international conference brings together experts from different fields to address these questions by incorporating individual presentations and panels that focus on cross-disciplinary studies. Considering the diversity of themes and questions for this conference, individual papers as well as preformed panels are invited to examine the following three key areas, proposed by the conference organizers.

Other inter- and multi-disciplinary topics, relevant to the conference, will also be considered:

1- Impressions:

Expression of paranoia and pain in literary/scientific contexts; Metaphorical and literal exposition of pain and paranoia; Paranoid texts, painful contexts; The image of paranoia and pain in poetry, prose, and visual arts; Textual culture and the symbolics of pain; Stylistics of pain and paranoia in communication; How does the narrative of pain/paranoia identify with studies of affect?

2- Intersections:

The biology of pain and the emotional interpretation; The biology/literature of anaesthesia; Physical symptoms, emotional translations; Aesthetics and affective perspectives on pain/paranoia; How have cultural attitudes to the experience of pain and/or paranoia changed over the course of history?

3- Dissections:

Faith and the formation of our ideas on pain/paranoia; Side effects of pain-relief medication; Ethics and the questions of double effect; Is it ever appropriate to withhold pain relief in order to extend the life of a sufferer where analgesics have the side effect of shortening life?

Submissions:

Deadline for 250-300 word abstracts for 20-minute papers and a 50-100 word biography for individual presenters (including each presentation within potential panels): 15 November 2011

Deadline for full draft of accepted papers and registration: 25 February 2012

After the conference a selection of presentations, developed and edited, will be considered for publication. Please send submissions and enquiries to the organising board at: paranoia.pain@gmail.com and painpara@liverpool.ac.uk

After great pain a formal feeling comes--

The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;

The stiff Heart questions--was it He that bore?

And yesterday--or centuries before?

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Image thanks to the Art Renewal Center® www.artrenewal.org

CFP:Rural Geographies of Gender and Space, Britain 1840-1920 (8/15/2011; 9/23/2011)

Rural Geographies of Gender and Space, 

Britain 1840-1920

23rd September 2011, University of Warwick

CALL FOR PAPERS

Whilst discussions of gender and space in the nineteenth- to early-twentieth century have typically focused on “women and the city”, rural spaces offer equally productive contexts for exploring the intersections between gender and space in this period. As the socio-spatial relations of the country are impacted by the move into modernity, rural environments are revealed in literary and historical texts as sites of complex, contradictory and changing gendered codes.

This half-day symposium offers a long-overdue forum in which to resituate the rural as a vital context for understanding the meanings of gender and space in this period. By bringing together scholars from different disciplinary perspectives we aim to understand the diverse experiences of gendered rural spaces and contribute to discussions about theoretical approaches to the (rural)space-gender intersection.

Proposals are invited for short papers from scholars in literary studies, history, geography, and any other discipline; postgraduate and early career researchers are especially encouraged to apply. Themes for discussion could include:

• theories of gender and rural place: what do we mean by rural space, how do we theorise “the rural” as a spatial context, and how does gender intersect?
• the impact of modernity;
• mobility: walking, vagabonds, pedestrians, wayward women;
• labour, class and gender in the country;
• masculinities;
• different ruralities;
• visibility/ invisibility

*CFP DEADLINE EXTENDED– 15th August*

Please send a 300-word proposal for 15 minute papers to the conference organisers: Gemma.Goodman@warwick.ac.uk and c.e.mathieson@warwick.ac.uk.

CFP: Narrative Matters 2012 "Life and Narrative" (11/15/2011; 5/29 - 6/1/2012)

Narrative Matters 2012: Life and Narrative

The American University of Paris

May 29th to June 1st 2012 

DEADLINE FOR SUBMITTING ABSTRACTS: November 15, 2011

The American University of Paris, The University of Paris Diderot-Paris 7, and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Narrative at St. Thomas University, invite scholars from all disciplines to reflect upon the productive interplay between life and narrative. 

What is the relationship between life and narrative? As noted by Jerome Bruner in his article on “Life as Narrative” (1987), this is one of the central intellectual questions facing narrative inquiry and narrative practice across multiple disciplines – psychology, narratology and literary theory, digital media, sociology, history, sociolinguistics, philosophy, medicine, education, gerontology, communications, social work, ethics, religious studies, etc. Indeed, there is broad agreement that narrative representations (from novels to histories, biographies, websites, films, museums) and life are essential to each other. Narrative draws upon life for inspiration to create an imagined world that has substance, color, texture, and meaning. Meanwhile, life draws upon narrative for resources to imagine our identity and to interpret others, situations, and the “real” world. Both are involved in an intricate exchange, playing off one another, informing and creating one another. However, the relationship between life and narrative – between experience and story - is not merely theoretical in nature but practical as well. Narrative has a profound impact on our understanding of what it means to be human; of the choices we make as persons; of the nature of health and wellness, teaching and learning; of the meaning of history; of how social groups work through conflict; and of how the cultural and political world is ordered. 

Panels and papers: Scholars are invited to organize panel sessions and present papers on various aspects of the broad theme of “Life and Narrative.” Possible questions include:
 

• What is the relationship between telling and living?
• How can the narrative concept help us to better understand experience, interpretation and action?
• What does literature teach us about aspects of life, experience, mind, and social relationships?
• How can narrative research have a greater impact on the lives of real persons and institutions? How can narrative theory and practice better inform one another?
• Can there be a “true” narrative? What are the boundaries between fact and fiction, between autobiography and autofiction?
• How is identity storied, restoried, even de-storied across the lifespan?
• What is the effect of the media (new and old) on identity?
• What is the relationship between what is archived in individual memories and social institutions and the stories that we tell?

Conversations: Two plenary sessions will ask prominent scholars from different disciplines to present a short paper and discuss a central question related to life and narrative. Time will be given for debate and interaction between the presenters and the audience. 

Confirmed Plenary speakers:

• Mark Freeman, College of The Holy Cross
• Alexandra Georgakopoulou-Nunes, Kings College London
• James Phelan, Ohio State University

Comparing interpretations: A final plenary will compare and contrast approaches to the study of narrative. Our plenary speakers will discuss approaches to the study of research interviews and literature. The audience will be provided with the texts in advance of the plenary and will be given ample opportunity to exchange ideas with the panelists.

Language: Although the language of the conference will be in English, papers delivered in French are welcome. Scholars presenting papers in French are requested to bring a translated copy of their paper to the conference for distribution to the audience.

Workshops: Pre-conference workshops will be organized, principally for graduate students and beginning scholars, along the following themes:
1.     Translating narrative theory

2.     Doing narrative inquiry

3.     Digital narratives

4.     Narrative and social change

           
Guidelines for submissions: We welcome proposals for individual papers (20 minutes plus ten minutes for questions) and panels (90 minutes). Submissions should be in the language of presentation (English or French). Please submit your proposal, including an abstract of less than 250 words, on-line at: http://my.aup.edu/conference/narrative-matters-2012 <http://my.aup.edu/conference/narrative-matters-2012>

Abstracts are due on November 15, 2011.

Publications: An edited book will be published including the best submissions from the conference. If you would like your paper to be considered, please submit a complete draft no later than May 30, 2012. 
 
Contact information: If you have questions, please email us at narrativematters2012@aup.fr. Conference website coming soon. 

Organizing Committe:

• Brian Schiff. The American University of Paris.
• Sylvie Patron.The University of Paris Diderot-Paris 7. 
• Claudia Roda. The American University of Paris.
• William Randall. St. Thomas University.
• Elizabeth McKim. St. Thomas University. 
• Andrea Olguin. The American University of Paris. 

Extended CFP: Production and Consumption in Victorian Literature and Culture (8/15/2011)

The fifth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Ella Dzelzainis (Newcastle University), is dedicated to a reassessment of nineteenth-century investments in concepts of productivity and consumption. Accelerating industrialisation, the growth of consumer culture, economic debates about the perils of overconsumption as well as emerging cultural discourses about industriousness, work ethic and the uses of free time radically altered the ways in which Victorians thought about practices of production and consumption. Literary authors intervened directly in these economic and social debates while also negotiating analogous developments within a literary marketplace transformed by new forms of writing, distributing and consuming literature. We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words. Possible topics include but are by no means limited to the following:

• Productivist and consumerist ideologies and the politics of social class
• Victorian (global) spaces of production, forms and practices of consumption
• Changing concepts of literary production, authorship and the reading audience
• Biological and physiological models of productivity, attrition and idleness
• New agents in the literary marketplace: publishers, editors, book sellers
• Economic theory and nineteenth-century literature
• Reassessing Marxist perspectives on Victorian literature and culture
• Idleness, spare time and other modes of ‘unproductiveness’
• The effects of industrialisation: mechanization, work routine and ‘human motors’

 All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines <http://www.victoriannetwork.org/index.php/vn/pages/view/guidelines> . Please note the extended deadline for submissions to our next issue is 15 August, 2011. Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com

Nines Community Group: Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities

A NINES community group has just been formed to discuss topics related to nineteenth-century DH issues. This was in response to a perceived need discussed in THATCamp Victoria 2011. Please join us and enter the discussion!

http://www.nines.org/groups/28

Here are some of the issues we might discuss:

• What are the special issues for 19th-century DH scholars?
• How can we use digital tools to focus on the materiality of the text?
• How does TEI need to be improved to meet the demands of the print culture of the period?
• Explosion of digital texts makes access better, but how to cope with scholar overload and usability?

Update: BAVS 2011 Conference schedule and registration (9/1-3/2011)

The program and schedule for the BAVS 2011 Conference, hosted by the University of Birmingham, are now available for viewing and downloading from our Google Docs site.

We are very excited about this wide an interdisciplinary programme, in which we are hosting around 120 papers over three days at the University of Birmingham Business School, on our Edgbaston campus. We have also schedule special sessions at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts: http://www.barber.org.uk/ and the Cadbury Research Library, home of our Special Collections: http://www.special-coll.bham.ac.uk/index.shtml
 
Keynote speakers are:

• Professor Tracy Davis (Northwestern), “Amelia Chesson Enters the Fourth Estate: ‘She must, therefore, be considered a pioneer in lady journalism’”  http://www.communications.northwestern.edu/faculty/?PID=TracyDavis
• Professor Herbert Tucker, (Virginia), on  “Compost Happens: A Synthetic Analysis” http://www.engl.virginia.edu/faculty/tucker_herbert.shtml
• Dr Colin Cruise (Aberystwyth), on”'Arranging Meanings: Pre-Raphaelite Compositions and Narratives” http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/art/staff/coc/
• Professor Shearer West, and panel, “The Value of Victorian Studies” http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2011/110902.html

 
Overall Schedule: https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkfTzomljON2dDV6ajNmMFIyMmdiSjFMd0czaEZCSkE&hl=en_US

 
Panel schedule:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nB6XgldKTLTCvLSwfSzbJEbMh5mSc_RLSP2Q0wG85og/edit?hl=en_US

You can register for the Conference via our online shop at: http://bit.ly/oxnKHv

Updated CFP: INCS 2012 "Picturing the Nineteenth Century" (10/17/2011; 3/22-25/2012)

INCS 2012: Picturing the Nineteenth Century

March 22-25, 2012, University of Kentucky

Update: The website for the INCS 2012 Conference, "Picturing the Nineteenth Century," is  now available at http://incs.as.uky.edu/. 

CFP: Though its title foregrounds art and visual culture, this conference will treat "picturing" in all its many senses: imagining, representing, framing, mapping. We invite papers and panels that consider how the nineteenth century represented itself to itself – through depictions of subjectivity, history, and culture; through emerging technologies and disciplines; through self-conscious "meta" attempts to understand methods of representation. We also encourage papers that consider how our own technologies and disciplines create multiple pictures of "the nineteenth century." Interdisciplinary papers and panels are especially welcome.

Featured speakers include Nancy Armstrong (English Department, Duke University), Julie Codell (Art History Department, Arizona State University), and Shawn Michelle Smith (Visual & Critical Studies, Art Institute of Chicago).

Themes include but are not limited to

• "The visual turn" and its technologies
• Display, exhibition, and spectatorship
• Cartographies, real and imagined
• Modes of representation: narrative, image, statistics, chronology
• Urban geographies and ethnographies; mapping and tracking people
• Imperialism as visual practice; global mappings and re-mappings
• Representations of selves and bodies; life writing
• Canons, institutions, and practices of art and literature
• The materiality of the literary: illustrations, cover designs, advertising, publication
• Archives, libraries, and their histories
• Digitizing the nineteenth century
• Teaching the nineteenth century

Deadline: October 17, 2011. For individual papers, send a 250-word proposals; for panels, send individual 250-word proposals for each paper plus a 250-word panel description. Please include your name, affiliation, and e-mail address on the proposals. Accepted papers will be due in early 2012.

Contact incs2012@uky.edu for more information.

CFP: The Materials of Mourning: Death, Materiality and Memory in Victorian Britain (9/15/2011; 12/3/2011)

3 December 2011, Centre for Modern Studies, University of York

Timed to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Prince Albert's death, this one-day symposium seeks to investigate how grief was manifested and mourning facilitated in the Victorian period through literature, music, performance and the visual arts. Often satirised but rarely understood, this symposium aims to recover the rich culture of mourning in the Victorian period by showcasing current research and encouraging conversation, debate and
interdisciplinary exchange.

The day will conclude with a roundtable to which delegates are invited to bring an object or picture related to Victorian death culture, prompting discussion about the tangibility of grief and mourning and the impact of material culture on our own research.

We warmly invite proposals for twenty-minute papers from postgraduates and early-career researchers with backgrounds in history of art, history, literature, music, performance studies and other related humanities.

Topics for discussion may include but are not limited to:

• Ritual: ceremonies, funerals, masses, cremations.
• Commercialisation: dark tourism, souvenirs, celebrities and villains.
• Spaces of Mourning: cemeteries, churchyards, death chambers, mausolea.
• Craft and Fashion: embroidery, needlework, mourning costume and jewellery.
• Representations: death and mourning in literature, music, performance and the visual arts.
• Objects: how objects and texts were used in the mourning process (annotations, keepsakes, scrapbooks.)
• Class, Gender, Nationality: aberrant and conventional accounts of mourning from different social perspectives.

Please submit abstracts limited to 250 words to the conference organisers, Eoin Martin and Claire Wood, at materialsofmourning@gmail.com by 15 September 2011.

CFP: Production and Consumption in Victorian Literature and Culture (8/15/2011)

The fifth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Ella Dzelzainis (Newcastle University), is dedicated to a reassessment of nineteenth-century investments in concepts of productivity and consumption. Accelerating industrialisation, the growth of consumer culture, economic debates about the perils of overconsumption as well as emerging cultural discourses about industriousness, work ethic and the uses of free time radically altered the ways in which Victorians thought about practices of production and consumption. Literary authors intervened directly in these economic and social debates while also negotiating analogous developments within a literary marketplace transformed by new forms of writing, distributing and consuming literature.

We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words. Possible topics include but are by no means limited to the following:

• Productivist and consumerist ideologies and the politics of social class
• Victorian (global) spaces of production, forms and practices of consumption
• Changing concepts of literary production, authorship and the reading audience
• Biological and physiological models of productivity, attrition and idleness
• New agents in the literary marketplace: publishers, editors, book sellers
• Economic theory and nineteenth-century literature
• Reassessing Marxist perspectives on Victorian literature and culture
• Idleness, spare time and other modes of ‘unproductiveness’
• The effects of industrialisation: mechanization, work routine and ‘human motors’

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. Please note the extended deadline for submissions to our next issue is 15 August, 2011. Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com     

CFP: Re-launch of the Wilkie Collins Society Journal

The Wilkie Collins Society Journal will be re-launched as a new online journal entitled The Wilkie Collins Journal later this year. The publication will continue to be peer-reviewed and will be a rigorous academic resource. As well as a new edition scheduled for 2012, the full range of back issues will be available to subscribers to the Wilkie Collins Society.

We are currently looking for articles to feature in the first edition of the new, third series. The editor invites articles of between 6,000 and 8,000 words on any subject relating to the life and work of Wilkie Collins and/or related fiction. All manuscripts should follow the MLA Style and should not be under consideration for publication elsewhere. Email submissions are accepted: a.s.mangham@reading.ac.uk

Watch for an updated CFP once the site of the journal is active (i.e. when some back issues are available to read).

Andrew Mangham
General Editor, Wilkie Collins Journal
University of Reading, UK

CFP: “Hard Times” or “Great Expectations”? How the Victorians Saw Themselves (11/1/2011; 4/20-22/2012)

Midwest Victorian Studies Association Annual Conference

Bloomington, Indiana, April 20-22, 2012

In commemoration of the 200th anniversary of Dickens’s birth, we invited papers on his writings and influence, but the conference will also consider issues of Victorian reflexivity and self-representation. Among topics to be considered might be: Victorian ideas of progress and degeneration; social commentators, ethnologists and journalists; parliamentary reports and reform movements; mirrors, disguises, and masquerades; visions of heaven and hell; utopias/dystopias; photography and portraiture; autobiographies, biographies and histories; museums and exhibitions; and Victorian psychology and theories of identity.  The conference will include a panel on teaching the Victorians, and proposals for topics and speakers are also invited.

Our keynote speaker will be John R. Reed, whose many academic publications include Dickens and Hyperreality (2011), Victorian Conventions (1975), The Natural History of H. G. Wells (1982), Decadent Style (1985), Victorian Will (1989), and Dickens and Thackeray: Punishment and Forgiveness (1995).

Held on the beautiful campus of Indiana University, the conference will include unique evening entertainment honoring Dickens, including a special film screening of the 1917 A Tale of Two Cities with live piano accompaniment, and a “Charles Dickens Variety Show” including music and magic lanterns.  Accommodations will be on campus in the Indiana Memorial Union.

Please submit an abstract!  Papers or full panels are welcome, and should include 500-word abstracts and 1-page (only) vitas by November 1, 2011 to conferencesubmissions@midwestvictorian.org.


For more information, see our website http://www.midwestvictorian.org/.

CFP: The Other Dickens: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Contexts (11/20/2011; 7/6-8/2012)

International Conference:

6-8 July 2012
Centre for Studies in Literature,

University of Portsmouth

Keynote Speakers: Professor Jay Clayton (Vanderbilt University), Professor Ann Heilmann (University of Hull), Professor Cora Kaplan (Queen Mary, University of London), Professor Lillian Nayder (Bates College) and Professor Gail Turley-Houston (University of New Mexico)

“The Other Dickens: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Contexts” is an interdisciplinary conference which will form part of Portsmouth’s bicentenary celebrations of Dickens’s birth in the city on 7 February 1812. We invite scholars working in the fields of literature, film, history, cultural and media studies to consider the other Dickens – those aspects of Dickens (both of his life and work) that remain relatively unexplored, or require re-evaluation. Our objective is to foster interaction between Victorian and contemporary scholars in order to re-examine Dickens in his Victorian context; to assess his continuing importance in contemporary culture, in film and television adaptations, on the internet, and as a character in neo-Victorian fiction; and to explore the rising interest in Dickens’s family members and associated figures (e.g. Ellen Ternan, Catherine Dickens, née Hogarth) in biography and biofiction. Conference
participants will be invited to challenge popular perceptions of Victorian Dickens and to explore his cultural impact on new genres and technologies.

Papers will be selected with these criteria in mind and possible topics may include:

• Dickens and journalism
• Dickens and performance
• Dickens and the internet
• Dickens and adaptation
• Dickens and biography
• Dickens and biofiction
• Neo-Victorian Dickens
• Dickens as a character in fiction, film and TV
• Postcolonial Dickens
• Dickens’s family in fiction and biography

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words, together with a brief biographical note listing your affiliation, to theotherdickens@port.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is 30 November 2011.