CFP: Production and Consumption in Victorian Literature and Culture (9/30/2011)

Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed (from 2012) online journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies. 

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 alsonegotiating 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: 

• Literature of industrialisation  
• Victorian (global) spaces of production, forms and practices of consumption
• Images of the industrial city, the factory, factory workers, and machines
• Consumption as spectacle, the rise of the department store and the advertising industries
• Changing concepts of literary production and new agents in the literary marketplace: publishers, editors, book sellers
• Celebrity authors, audiences, and self-marketing in the literary sphere
• Economic theory, finance, and nineteenth-century literature
• Leisure, spare time and other modes of ‘unproductiveness’
• Productivist and consumerist ideologies and the politics of social class
• Reassessing Marxist perspectives on Victorian literature and culture

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. The deadline for submissions to our next issue is 30 September, 2011. Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com

CFP: Dickens! Author and Authorship in 2012 (11/15/2011; 7/27-29/2012)

In celebration of the bicentenary of Dickens's birth, the Dickens Project invites paper proposals for a conference on "Dickens! Author and Authorship in 2012," with keynote speakers Rosemarie Bodenheimer (author of The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans and Knowing Dickens) and Robert L. Patten (author of Charles Dickens and His Publishers and George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art). The conference will be held at the University of California, Santa Cruz, beginning on the evening of Friday, July 27 and concluding at lunch-time on Sunday, July 29; papers will be allocated to "threads" to facilitate developing conversations of specific themes and topics.

The conference will also include three book panels devoted to recent critical studies of Dickens: Jonathan Grossman's Charles Dickens's Networks: Public Transportation and the Novel (forthcoming from Oxford UP); Sarah Winter's The Pleasures of Memory: Learning to Read with Charles Dickens (Fordham UP, 2011); and Holly Furneaux's Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (Oxford UP, 2009). Submit 1-2 page abstracts and a short c.v. to John O. Jordan (dpj@ucsc.edu) by November 15, 2011.

Papers and panel proposals relevant to Dickens, Life Writing, and Victorian Authorship are welcome. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Biographies (of Dickens, his circle, other Victorians)
• Victorian Biographies and Responses to Them
• Family Memoirs and the Problem of Objectivity
• The Idea of the Author in Contemporary Critical Discourse
• Archives and Life Writing
• Victorian Autobiography
• Portraits of the Author (photographs, paintings, caricature)
• Letters (editions, annotations, interpretations)
• Biographical Criticism (limits, possibilities, new approaches)
• Victorian Afterlives
• Signature
• Celebrity
• Relics (material traces of the author)
• Houses (museums, homes, national heritage)

Participants in "Dickens! Author and Authorship in 2012" are cordially invited to spend all or part of the week following the conference in the redwoods of central California at the annual gathering of the Dickens Project, an international research group devoted to the study of the novels of Charles Dickens and Victorian literature and culture.

The Dickens Universe's study of Bleak House begins on July 29 and concludes on the evening of Friday, August 4. Academic participants in "Dickens! Author and Authorship in 2012" who wish to stay on for the Universe will have the opportunity to sign up for one of three established Working Groups which will meet Monday through Wednesday (see below). They may also convene their own Working Group or participate in the Dickens Universe's Nineteenth-Century Seminar. Scholars may thus use the week as an opportunity for extended discussion and scholarly exchange, either with established collaborators or with new acquaintances. Academic participants in the Universe will experience its wide range of scholarly and convivial events; they also have the opportunity to make a twenty-minute presentation about their current scholarly project in the Nineteenth-Century Seminar, a week-long research colloquium for scholars not affiliated with the Dickens Project.

Please consider the following options:

• Attend "Dickens! Author and Authorship in 2012" as a speaker or participant.
• Attend the Dickens Universe as a participant, with the option of joining the Nineteenth-Century Seminar. For further information about the Universe or the Nineteenth-Century Seminar, please direct your questions to Joanna Rottke (dpj@ucsc.edu).
• Attend the Universe as part of a working group (titles and names of conveners to be announced at a later date). You may also convene your own group and/or use the lovely Santa Cruz campus as a venue for meeting with established collaborators. For more information or to propose a group of your own, please contact John Jordan.

The Dickens Universe is offering three affordable packages, all of which include registration and room and board:

• $450. "Dickens! Author and Authorship in 2012" only. Arrive Friday afternoon between 2-4, depart Sunday at lunch.
• $925. "Dickens! Author and Authorship in 2012" and Working Groups. Arrive Friday afternoon, depart Thursday am.
• $1100. "Dickens! Author and Authorship in 2012" and the Dickens Universe (including the Nineteenth-Century Seminar). Arrive Friday afternoon, depart Sat. am, Aug. 4.

About the Dickens Project: The Dickens Project hosts a conference at the end of each July on the beautiful wooded campus of UC Santa Cruz above Monterey Bay; this event, the "Dickens Universe," traditionally brings together over 200 people to conduct an intensive study of a single Dickens novel. Of these individuals, roughly half are members of the general public, and half are faculty and students, post-graduate and undergraduate. Thirty-five universities are currently members of the Dickens Project Consortium, each sending Victorianist faculty and students to the Universe every year: members include Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, Indiana, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, and NYU in the United States; Exeter and Portsmouth in Great Britain; plus universities in Israel and Australia. The Dickens Project has earned a reputation as a leading research collective for both Dickens and Victorian studies, and, through its development of a range of events for post-graduates (including an annual winter conference for the delivery of their early academic papers), has established itself as a prominent supporter of the careers of junior Victorianists. Go to http://dickens.ucsc.edu/ for more information.

CFP: Gothic Studies Conference (11/1/2011; 3/16-17/2012)

First Annual Studies in Gothic Fiction Conference
March 16-17, 2012
National University, San Diego, CA

As interest in Gothic studies grows exponentially, what is considered Gothic and how we define it continues to evolve. At this conference we will explore not only the origins of the Gothic, but the evolution of the genre.

Papers which explore any aspect of the Gothic in literature, film, and other media are encouraged.

Topics which could be explored include:

• Origins of the Gothic
• Commercialization of the Gothic
• Trade Gothic
• Romanticism and the Gothic
• Victorian Gothic
• Domestic Gothic
• Continental Gothic
• Gothic in the media
• Gothic spaces
• Neo-Gothic
• The Goth culture
• Selling the Gothic
• Gothic Film

Abstracts (350 words max.) for 20 minute papers may be submitted to Colin Marlaire: cmarlaire@nu.edu until November 1st, 2011. Early submission of proposals is encouraged.


For information on the journal, Studies in Gothic Fiction, visit http://www.zittaw.com/. 

CFP: Robert Browning Bicentenary Conference on the Dramatic Monologue (1/31/2012; 6/28-30/2012)

Reassessing the Dramatic Monologue in the 19th and 20th Centuries:
Browning, Before, Beyond
Royal Holloway, University of London 28-30 June 2012

Organized by the London Browning Society in collaboration with Royal Holloway, University of London, the University of Westminster and the University of the West of England. Supported by the British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS).

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Isobel Armstrong
Daniel Karlin
Tricia Lootens
Cornelia Pearsell

Over the past two centuries, Robert Browning has been hailed initially as the co-inventor of the dramatic monologue, and more recently, as earlier origins of the genre have been proposed, as its most prominent practitioner. To celebrate the Bicentenary of Browning’s birth, the London Browning Society is hosting an international conference to reassess not only Browning’s work in what is arguably the defining genre of his oeuvre, but also the broader practice and theory of the dramatic monologue before, after and during his lifetime.

The conference remit of Browning, Before and Beyond proposes, in the first instance, to discuss the dramatic monologue in relation to Browning and other Victorian practitioners of the genre. The conference seeks to explore the reasons behind the rise of the genre during the Victorian era and the extent to which its formal and generic concerns with issues of performativity and spectacle, identity and subjectivity, text and ‘truth’ are illustrative of key concerns of the Victorian age.

Further, the conference hopes to extend critical discussion of the growth, profile, and generic nature of the dramatic monologue. The organizers welcome papers on pre-and post-Victorian poets and poems as a means of exploring the historical limits and reaches of the genre. Similarly, papers that explore the generic and disciplinary reaches of the form – its associations with drama, or connections to the Romantic lyric mode, for example – are warmly encouraged.

20-minute papers are invited on any topic relating to the dramatic monologue. Submissions may include, but are not restricted to:

• new approaches to defining the dramatic monologue and its significance
• reassessments of established approaches to the genre
• the origins/ predecessors of the genre
• Victorian variants of the genre
• issues of subjectivity and selfhood
• Post-Romanticism and the dramatic monologue
• the dramatic monologue and gender
• the genre’s relation to history
• hybrid versions of the genre
• twentieth-century and twenty-first century uses of the genre
• the dramatic monologue and performance poetry

Conference organizers: Dr Simon Avery, Dr Vicky Greenaway, Dr Britta Martens. Please submit 300-word abstracts to s.avery@westminster.ac.uk by 31 January 2012.

INCS 2012 "Picturing the Nineteenth Century" - Ready for Submissions (10/17/2011; 3/22-25/2012)

The 2012 Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies conference, "Picturing the Nineteenth Century," will be held March 22-25 at the University of Kentucky, Lexington Kentucky. Keynote speakers include Nancy Armstrong (Duke University), Julie Codell (Arizona State University), and Shawn Michelle Smith (Art Institute of Chicago).  We define the topic broadly and welcome submissions from all disciplines.

To find out more about the conference and submit a proposal, go to http://incs.as.uky.edu/. For more information, contact incs2012@uky.edu.

CFP:Victorian Media (10/1/2011; 4/26-28/2012)

The Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada invites proposals for a conference on Victorian Media. The conference, hosted by the University of Victoria, will be held from 26-28 April 2012 in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

We seek proposals for papers that focus on the theme of media in relation to Victorian culture and knowledge: that is, the relation of Victorian media to the culture of the period and the relation of new media to the study, dissemination, and archiving of Victorian materials.  In particular, we invite proposals on topics related to three main threads:

• Victorians, print media, and cultural production (the book, the newspaper, the broadside, the illustrated press, the serial novel, the gift book, etc);
• Victorians and visual/auditory/information media (the diorama, the phonograph, the photograph, the cinema, the panorama); and
• Victorian Studies and new media (Victorian studies in a digital age, the digitization of Victorian resources, indexing of Victorian materials, the digital journal and the new scholar, teaching in a digital age, the scholar in the age of social media, etc).

The conference's keynote speaker will be Matthew Rubery (Department of English at Queen Mary, University of London). Dr. Rubery is the author of The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (2009), which won the European Society for the Study of English First Book Award in 2010. He is currently at work on a monograph entitled The Untold Story of the Talking Book, a history of recorded literature since the invention of the phonograph in 1877.

The conference will also feature a workshop on Victorian print materials led by Brian Maidment (University of Salford), author of Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order 1820-1850, and Reading Popular Prints 1790-1870. This workshop will provide a hands-on opportunity to analyze original Victorian materials guided by an expert on print media and production methods.

Please submit proposals of not more than 500 words plus a 75-word biography and 100-word abstract to lsurridg@uvic.ca by 1 October 2011.

CFP: Imagining the Crusades in the Nineteenth Century (9/15/2011; 5/10-13/2012)

Imagining the Crusades in the Nineteenth Century, 

a panel at the International Congress on Medieval Studies

University of Western Michigan

May 10th-13th, 2012

Sponsor: Studies in Medievalism and Medievally Speaking
Organizer: Megan Morris

In the nineteenth century, the Crusades and their history acquired a newly material force.  As Patrick Brantlinger notes, the growing tourist industry drew increasing numbers of British citizens out of England and into the East.  In both conscious and unconscious imitation of their crusading ancestors, they visited the Holy Land and its surrounds, placing their modern pilgrimage in the imaginative context of the medieval past.  Travelers writing back from the East transferred the Crusades’ imaginative immediacy to their audiences at home. Consequently, the cultural resonance of the term "crusade" spiraled far beyond its medieval context.  Within both British and American culture, the term frequently assumed an internal, domestic significance that is meant to invoke the transformation of a society from within.  Suffragettes, proponents of the temperance movement, and other social reformers frequently appropriated crusading imagery in order to lend their causes historical weight.  England’s crusading history becomes a necessary backdrop to the evolutionary development of modern
Victorian society.  Historians, writers, and thinkers re-imagine the Crusades, allowing it to simultaneously serve as a representation of England’s semi-barbaric past—and thus a suitable locus for the restitution of an active Victorian masculinity—and a bridge to modern social reform.  In the nineteenth-century imagination, the Crusades, as an 1840 article published in The Knickerbocker suggests, were “justifiable wars,” the “culmination of chivalry,” and yet, as Charles Dickens indicates in A Child’s History of England,  also an embodiment of England’s barbaric past that caused strife abroad and disunity at home.

As a result, nineteenth-century literary representations of the Crusades cover a broad range of generic and thematic territory. They range from relatively well-known works by Sir Walter Scott and Benjamin Disraeli to an all-but-unstudied libretto by H. R. Bishop.  Scott’s highly romanticized medieval knights certainly dominate the literary scene, and yet crusaders also appear in William Makepeace Thackeray’s satirical Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo and in a turn-of-the-century Punch cartoon by Linley Sambourne.  Although much Crusades-themed literature, including the works of G. A. Henty, Paul Creswick, Emily Sarah Holt, and Charlotte Yonge, is aimed towards a young audience, others, including Disraeli’s Tancred and Major John Richardson’s erotic The Monk Knight of St. John, attempt to capture the fancy of an older demographic.

All of these works employ the motif of crusading to engage with a wide range of issues that are of central concern to students of nineteenth-century medievalism: nationalism, imperialism, domesticity, race, gender, and chivalry.  Nonetheless, nineteenth-century representations of the crusade have received relatively little modern critical attention.  This session invites panelists from a broad range of disciplines, including literature, history, music, and art history, to examine the Crusades’ place in the nineteenth-century historiographical imagination.

Proposals are due on September 15th, 2011. Please send proposals of 300-400 words to Megan Morris (megan.morris@rochester.edu) and Richard Utz (richard.utz@wmich.edu). Contact Megan Morris with any questions regarding the session.

Reminder: NeMLA Panel "Victorian Energy Crises" (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.

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

University of Delaware/Delaware Art Museum

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

Reminder: Popular News Discourse: Anglo-American Newspapers 1833-1988 (9/1/2011; 1/18/2012)

AHRC Research Network
Exploring the language of the popular in Anglo-American Newspapers 1833-1988
University of Zurich 18 January 2012

 

As part of the series of research seminars which will contribute to the Research Network we are inviting interested scholars to submit proposals of 300 words for a seminar to be held at the University of Zurich on 18 January 2012 entitled Popular news discourse: Anglo-American newspapers, 1833-1988. It aims to bring together scholars from linguistics, history, media and journalism studies, social sciences, and English to consider the important of historical pragmatics as a tool for exploring the content and context of Anglo-American newspapers between 1833 and 1988. There is no charge for the event and there will be a number of keynote speakers to be announced at a later date.

The dates 1833-1988 frame the research network project as they are key dates in the development of popular discourse within Anglo-American newspapers. 1833 sees the first development of the Penny Press and 1988 witnesses the peak in circulation of Murdoch’s British-based Sun. This long view will reinforce how important historical context is to the understanding of contemporary newspapers. Although this project will certainly seek to address some of the wider implications of the discourse of newspaper language it will proceed from a thorough textual exploration in the first instance. Proposals are invited which explore the ways in which popular newspapers during this period in either the USA or Britain have attempted to structure the language of their product to match particular aspects of the social experience of their readers. It is envisaged as a genuinely interdisciplinary forum for theoretical, empirical or methodological work at the intersection of pragmatics and historical linguistics which might include the historical and socio-cultural contexts of communication and/or sociolinguistic, discourse analytical or semantic approaches to historical texts. The proposals should be empirically-grounded and say something concrete about how language was structured and restructured in popular newspapers for commercial purposes during this period.

We plan to publish the best of the papers presented on the day in a special edition of the international, peer-reviewed journal Historical Pragmatics.

Please send your proposals or any questions you may have by the 1 September 2011 to the Research Assistant for the project Clare Burke: Clare.Burke@sheffield.ac.uk

Seminar organizers:
Professor Martin Conboy, University of Sheffield and Professor Andreas H. Jucker. University of Zurich

For further details of the project please visit the website for the Centre for the Study of Journalism and History at the University of Sheffield:
 http://www.journalism-history.dept.shef.ac.uk/

Details of the seminar can also be found on the University of Zurich web pages at:
http://www.popned.uzh.ch/

Registration Deadline Extended for the BAVS 2011 Conference (8/24/2011)

BAVS 2011 Conference: Composition and Decomposition

1-3 September 2011, University of Birmingham

To account for holiday times and Bank Holidays, registration for the BAVS 2011 Conference has been extended to Wednesday 24th August. The Conference website is here:
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edacs/departments/drama/events/bavs.aspx

There you'll find the Conference programme and Delegate Information (downloadable) with details of arrival arrangements, accommodation, travel, WiFi. We expect to be able to post Conference abstracts of all papers within the next few days. All this information will also be in your Conference packs.

For those delegates arriving on Wednesday, we are arranging an informal meeting on Wednesday evening – drinks and a meal (pay as you go) – at the Selly Soak, 556 Bristol Road, in Selly Oak, at 7pm on Wednesday 31st August.

A Google map of Conference locations (including the Selly Soak) is here:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=212294809852835789335.0004aa36166af9aef5daf&msa=0&ll=52.450308,-1.929646&spn=0.013234,0.036306

You can register via our online shop here:
https://www.bhamonlineshop.co.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&prodid=333&deptid=17&catid=3

Categories of registration:
Standard registration (at full or PG rate) with accommodation includes all meals from morning tea/coffee on Thursday to afternoon tea/coffee onSaturday, including the Friday night reception in the Muirhead Tower, plus accommodation (en suite, with breakfast) on Thursday and Friday nights. This registration includes the Conference dinner on Friday night.

Standard registration (at full or PG rate) without accommodation includes all meals from morning tea/coffee on Thursday to afternoon tea/coffee onSaturday, including the Friday night reception in the Muirhead Tower, but not campus accommodation. This registration includes the Conference dinner on Friday night.

Day registration at full or PG rate include morning & afternoon tea/coffee and lunch on the day/s of registration, including the Friday night reception in the Muirhead Tower, but NOT accommodation or evening meals. This registration does NOT include the Conference dinner on Friday night.

For delegates opting for the Day rate for Thursday and/or Friday, evening meals can be purchased separately by the registration deadline:
Dinner: Thursday night £15
Conference dinner: Friday night £35

All delegates must be financial members of BAVS. Registration for the 2011 BAVS Conference does not include membership of BAVS. To arrange membership subscription, please click on this link: http://www.bavsuk.org/membership.htm

We look forward to greeting delegates on Thursday, 1st September. The first event is a welcome for postgraduate students at 11:00, followed by Professor Tucker's opening keynote at 12 noon.

Reminder: Dickens and the Visual Imagination (9/30/2011; 7/9-10/2012)

Dickens and the Visual Imagination
An international two-day conference to celebrate the bicentenary of Charles Dickens in 2012

9-10 July 2012

This conference, hosted by the Paul Mellon Centre in London and the University of Surrey in Guildford, will explore the interfaces between art history and textual scholarship through the work of Charles Dickens.

Plenary speaker: Professor Kate Flint (Rutgers University). Other speakers to be confirmed.

Dickens is renowned for the richness of his visual imagination and his publications encouraged readers to interpret his words with and through their accompanying illustrations. Not only was Dickens deeply engaged with ideas of the visual in his writing, but his work has also provoked responses from artists across multiple disciplines within the Victorian period and beyond. The conference seeks to build on recent interdisciplinary work (such as that of Kate Flint and Isobel Armstrong) that illuminates nineteenth-century understandings of visual culture. By focusing the conference through a writer whose work is embedded in the visual imagination, Dickens will provide a test case for examining and theorizing the connection between text and image across two hundred years of cultural history.

We invite proposals for panels and individual papers from scholars across disciplines. Topics might include, but are not limited to:
 

• Dickens and illustration
• The visual arts in Dickens’s work
• Responses to Dickens in the visual arts
• Dickens and performance
• Dickens in the press
• Dickens and new media
• Sciences of vision
• Dickens and commodification
• Dickens and aesthetics
• Observation and spying
• Perspective
• Blindness and the difficulties of representation

Please submit proposals (of up to 250 words) by Friday 30 September 2011 to: g.tate@surrey.ac.uk

The conference programme will also feature a reception at the Watts Gallery in nearby Compton, Surrey, to coincide with the gallery's exhibition Dickens and Art.

For further information see on the conference and exhibition see:http://www.surrey.ac.uk/english/research/dickens2012/

CFP: Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls (9/15/2011; 6/13-15/2012)

Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls Conference
13-15 June 2012, The University of Melbourne, Australia

Settler colonies and colonies of occupation, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Ireland, South Africa, and the Caribbean, held out the possibility for girls to experience freedom from, and the potential to reconfigure, British norms of femininity.  ‘Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls’ seeks to draw together international scholars for a multi-disciplinary examination of howcolonial girlhood was constructed, and redefined, in both British and colonial texts and cultures. Since girlhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries extends from childhood to the age of marriage, it represents a complex category encompassing various life stages and kinds of femininity, as well as differences based on class and race.

Colonial girls occupy an ambivalent and sometimes contested position in British and settler societies, They are sometimes seen as a destabilizing force that challenges conventional expectations of girls or as a disruption that can, and must, be contained. The emergent writings of British-born settlers about and for girls, which were usually published in England, contribute a further degree of complexity to the developing picture of the colonial girl. These texts both perpetuate and occasionally challenge British imperial and gender ideologies, reflecting loyalties torn between “home” and new dominions.

Across national boundaries, the malleability of colonial girlhoods is evident. In British print culture, Indian girls were often represented as victims of an unenlightened culture that offered poor educational opportunities, and Irish girls were frequently ‘hot-headed’ and untamed. In each national context, the workings of colonialism produced different models of idealised girlhood, from which Indigenous girlhoods were often marginalised.

Crucially, the Empire itself was in a state of dramatic flux across what is often called Britain’s “imperial century”. The Empire grew substantially in size and in population in the nineteenth century and its expansion was integral to eventual movements toward independence for white settler societies. Imaginings of Empire and girlhood are both subject to radical change across the century, and reading the intersections and synergies in these transformations will prove mutually illuminating

Scholars from Art History, English, Cultural Studies, History, Indigenous Studies, Education and cognate fields are invited to submit proposals that engage with any aspect of the intersection of British colonialism and girlhood in the period 1815-1930. Papers may be inspired by, but are certainly not limited to, the following themes: 

• colonial girls as representative of British imperial ideals
• tensions between imperial and national/colonial identities
• the circulation of feminine ideals between colonies
• print culture and the development of gendered colonial ideals
• Indigenous girlhoods
• coming of age in the colonies
• colonial life as a threat to girlhood
• girlhoods and evolving nationalisms
• British representations of colonial femininity
• class and labour in the colonies
• the imagined role of colonial girls in the British Empire

 Please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief biographical statement to Dr Michelle Smith: msmith@unimelb.edu.au and Dr. Kristine Moruzi: moruzi@ualberta.ca by 15 September 2011.

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

Call for Papers

Spiritual Matters/Matters of the Spirit 

33^rd 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: Imagining Victorian Settler Homes: Antipodal Domestic Fiction, extended deadline (9/1/2011)

We invite original articles for an edited collection on settler homes in nineteenth-century Australian and New Zealand writing. The collection proposes antipodal domestic fiction as a distinct genre that had an important formative function in the development of nineteenth-century literature in English, while it participated in a discourse on settler colonialism that was to engender persistent clichés in the popular imagination, both “back home” in the metropolitan centre and in the new homes overseas.

Nineteenth-century literature and art created some of the most poignant and lasting images of settler homes. On both sides of the Pacific as well as the Atlantic pro-emigration posters, advice manuals for the future settler, cautionary tales, a widely circulated periodical press, as well as popular novels capitalised on a pervasive fascination with colonial expansion, with the frontier, the possibilities of the New World, and the difficulties of setting up home elsewhere. They helped establish images of ideal settler homes, meeting an urgent need for affirmative representations of the new lives that would-be settlers were planning overseas. At the same time, as settler authors frequently wrote with a twofold – colonial and metropolitan – readership in mind, they at once traded on and sought to rework popular representations of the wild, exotic, easily sensationalised “bush.” However, whereas tales of the gold rush, of adventures at the frontier, the bush, or during the New Zealand Wars played into readerly expectations in the metropolitan centre and simultaneously created ideologies of mateship that were to define settler masculinity, emergent genres of domestic settler fiction (predominantly, if not exclusively, by women writers) increasingly attempted to revise clichéd images of the wild bush. Children’s literature, women’s settler memoirs, and magazines specifically targeting the colonial girl, as well as domestic novels constructed and revised changing expectations of settler homes. Simultaneously, they helped create and circulate nineteenth-century literature on an unprecedentedly global scale.

While the collection’s main focus is domestic fiction about Britain’s geographical “antipodes,” comparative approaches to transpacific and transatlantic settler genres or to contrasting representations in metropolitan and colonial settler writing are also welcome.

Please submit abstracts of ca. 500 words, accompanied by a brief biographical note, to tswagner@ntu.edu.sg

The deadline for abstracts has been extended to 1 September 2011.


Completed essays will be due on 1 February 2012.

Tamara S. Wagner
Associate Professor
English Literature
http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/tswagner/tamarawagner.htm

Registration Open: William Makepeace Thackeray: A Bicentenary Symposium (10/6/2011)

Registration is now open for William Makepeace Thackeray: A Bicentenary Symposium to be held at the Houghton Library, Harvard University on October 6, 2011.

Held in conjunction with the exhibition “The Adventures of Thackeray in His Way Through the World,” on display at Houghton Library from July 18 – October 15, the one-day symposium will feature three speakers, a curator’s tour of the exhibition, and a closing reception.

Registration is free and open to all. For more information, and to register, visit the symposium website:

http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/events/thackeray_symposium.cfm

Questions? Contact Heather Cole hgcole@fas.harvard.edu 617.495.2449 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting            617.495.2449      end_of_the_skype_highlighting