CFP: Interdisciplinary Conference on Oscar Wilde (1/15/2011; 6/1-2/2012)

Who Owns the Legacy of Oscar Wilde?

An Interdisciplinary Conference
History and Culture Program
Caspersen School of Graduate Studies
Drew University, Madison, New Jersey
1-2 June 2012

Who was Oscar Wilde?  An aesthete who subverted philistine values, or pandered to bourgeois taste?  The first modern dramatist, or the last of the Victorian playwrights?  An Irish nationalist, or an Anglophile?  A socialist, or a shrewd literary entrepreneur?  An immoralist, or a new kind of moralist?  A philosopher, or a court jester?  A misogynist, or a feminist?  A pioneer of “queer theory,” or someone who never quite came to terms with his sexuality?

This conference will present and debate diverse perspectives on Wilde and his work, from many disciplines and all points on the ideological compass.  Abstracts of panels or individual papers (one page/250 words maximum per paper) should be submitted by 15 January 2012 to the Program Committee Chair, Prof. Edward Baring (ebaring@drew.edu).  We welcome submissions from graduate students as well as faculty.

Direct all other queries to the Conference Co-chairs, Prof. Christine Kinealy (ckinealy@drew.edu) and Prof. Jonathan Rose (jrose@drew.edu).

Reminder: NeMLA 2012 panel on Victorian Ecofeminism (9/30/2011; 3/15-18/2012)

“Of Queen’s Gardens”: Victorian Ecofeminism

This panel invites ecofeminist readings of Victorian literature (novels, poetry, prose), wherein women are frequently given “natural” traits or are associated with the earth.  Ecofeminist interpretations may highlight the damaging consequences of this link, or celebrate women’s potential to reform cultural/environmental attitudes because of it.  In what ways does the woman/nature link function in Victorian literature?  What do these interpretations reveal about Victorian attitudes about gender and the environment, and the treatment of each?

Please e-mail abstracts of 300-500 words to Margaret Kennedy, mskennedy@ic.sunysb.edu.

Deadline:  September 30, 2011

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


http://www.nemla.org/convention/2012/index.html

CFP: 20th Anniversary British Women Writers Conference "Landmarks" (1/15/2012; 6/7-10/2012)

20th Anniversary British Women Writers Conference "Landmarks"

June 7-10, 2012

Boulder, Colorado 

In 2012, the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers Conference (BWWC) will commemorate its 20^th anniversary by focusing on the theme of “Landmarks.”  Rich in both physical and metaphorical significance, landmarks form loci by which we organize history and chart the development of individuals, nations, and cultures. We therefore invite papers that explore how women writers and their texts engage with an ever-changing geography that is both material and abstract. These conference papers could address the people, places, events, and texts that have made their marks on history, and/or the processes and implications of marking, mapping, reading, preserving, overwriting, or erasing. Likewise, we wish to investigate land as space and place, acts and effects of landing or arriving, marks of land upon people and cultures, geographical and imaginative landscapes, liminal no-(wo)man’s-lands, and the state of being landed (or not) with property.

Please send a 500-word abstract to bwwc2012@colorado.edu by January 15, 2012.  Panel proposals are also welcome. Papers should address the conference theme and apply it to 18th-century, Romantic, or Victorian texts.

Possible topics include:

• Landmark Events and Ideas: Historical moments; defining milestones;  turning points; crises or victories; anniversaries; stages; experiments; memories or visions; aesthetic debates; scientific discoveries; technologies
• Landmark Works: Publication and reception; authorship or readership; emerging genres; histories or chronicles; canon formation; travel writing
• Geographical Land Marks: Historical or tourist sites; borders and national boundaries; high points and burials; property and ownership; memorials, monuments, museums; ruins and traces
• Making Marks: Print culture; media; diaries and personal writings; glosses, annotations, and marginalia; building, development, or enclosure; landscaping and gardening; architecture; fashion and costume design; cosmetics and tattoos; creating space and place; epitaphs, cemeteries, tombs
• Reading, Interpreting, or Imagining Lands/Marks: Physiognomy or phrenology; psychics; reading practices; sciences of navigation; distance and time; fictional worlds
• Mapping/Preserving Marks: Maps and cartography; emblems; classification systems; libraries, museums, collections
• Marks of Land on People: Farming and agriculture; gentility and nobility; industry; food and foodways; defining the local, national, imperial, native, or foreign
• Contested Marks and Marks of Difference: Stealing/transplanting landmarks; marks of faith or creed; religious practices; the supernatural; commerce, currency, credit; ownership; identity politics or marginalization

http://www.bwwc2012.com/

CFP: Sentiment and Sensation in Victorian Periodicals (2/1/2012; 9/14-15/2012)

Sentiment and Sensation in Victorian Periodicals

Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Annual Conference
September 14-15, 2012

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) will hold its annual conference at the University of Texas at Austin, September 14-15, 2012. While papers addressing any aspect of Victorian periodicals will be considered, RSVP particularly welcomes proposals for papers on the discourse of sentiment and sensation in the newspaper and periodical press that variously promoted or targeted readerships, established journalistic networks or brands, and shaped, responded to, and/or addressed cultural and ideological concerns.

Suggested themes include but are not limited to:

• The serialization of sensation fiction
• Sentimental or sensational illustration
• Major scandals, legal cases, crimes, or controversies
• Affect, cognition, and readerly sensations
• Sentimental poetry or fiction in periodicals
• The rhetoric of sentiment/sentimentality
• Sport or theatrical sensations
• Gender and periodical genres
• Entrepreneurialism and fame
• Sensational formatting and headlines
• The feeling of print or the materiality of periodicals
• Physiology and psychology in the press

Please e-mail two-page (maximum) proposals for individual presentations or panels of three to rs4vp.2012@gmail.com.  Please include a one-page C.V. with relevant publications, teaching, and/or coursework. The deadline for submission of proposals is Feb. 1, 2012. Final papers should take 15 minutes (20 minutes maximum) to present.

The program will also include a plenary speech named in honor of Michael Wolff, a presentation by the winner of the 2012 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize, and workshops devoted to digital resources and to methods of teaching periodicals.

RSVP will announce travel grants for a few graduate students presenting papers closer to the time of registration. Graduate students interested in applying for travel grants should include a cover letter explaining how their conference proposal fits into their long-term research plans
as well as any other special considerations. Recipients will be notified in the spring of 2012.

For information about local arrangements, check the RSVP conference website, http://rsvp2012.org, or contact Conference Chair Kathryn Ledbetter, Ledbetter@txstate.edu.

CFP: a collection on H. Rider Haggard (10/31/2011)

Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925) was a novelist, country gentleman, social commentator, onetime colonial administrator and failed ostrich farmer whose prodigious output comprises a significant but under-examined contribution to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. While his two most famous works, King Solomon’s Mines (1886) and She (1887) have attracted a steady stream of articles in recent years, most notably from the fields of postcolonial and gender studies, a significant proportion of his oeuvre remains almost entirely unstudied, despite their considerable popular success in his lifetime. Following an initial call for papers we have assembled a strong line-up of essays including contributions on Haggard and science; historical romance; carnivorousness; Haggard’s Aztec writing; Haggard’s gorilla novels; authorship and textuality; Haggard and Modernism and a study of a  previously unpublished Haggard short story. 

We are now seeking to extend and enhance the collection with a small number of additional essays. Radical reappraisals of Haggard’s most noted texts are welcome, but we are particularly interested in articles that investigate less well-known works or that intend to explore Haggard’s diverse range of interests and under-estimated influence on and engagement with other, more celebrated authors. We aim for publication in late 2012.

Topics and approaches may include, but are not limited to:

• Spiritualism and the occult
• Egyptology
• Ecocritical readings
• Romance
• Cultural cross dressing
• Haggard, Freud and psychoanalysis
• Botany/ horticulture
• Haggard and his contemporaries
• Animal Studies
• Queer readings
• Literary topographies
• Fantasy
• Gender, space and the body
• Degeneration and urbanisation
• The fin-de-siècle
• Zionism/ anti-Semitism
• Anthropology/ ethnography
• The Best-seller
• The Nordic
• South African experiences
• Children’s Literature

Please send abstracts not exceeding 500 words along with a brief biographical profile to John Miller at jmiller1@unbc.ca by 31^st October.  Chapters will be 6,000 words in length and will be commissioned by 15^th November for delivery by 1^st March. Any queries are welcome. 

Position Opening: Professor of Victorian Literature and Science (11/11/2011)

The Department of English Language & Literature of the University of South Carolina (http://www.cas.sc.edu/engl/) invites applications for a tenured full Professor position in Victorian Literature and Science. Applicants should have a clear and strong record of scholarly achievement, a commitment to teaching excellence at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and a distinguished record of service to their institutions and the profession.

This position is supported through a university hiring initiative and recognizes the Department of English’s commitment to excellence through interdisciplinary scholarship. We welcome applications from candidates working in any area of Victorian literature and science. Scholars in this field who are now advanced Associates are encouraged to apply.

Applicants should send cv, letter of interest, and contact information for at least three people familiar with the candidate’s work and willing to provide a letter of reference to:

William E. Rivers, Chair

Department of English,

University of South Carolina

Columbia, SC 29208.

For full consideration, application materials must be received no later than November 11, 2011.

  

The University of South Carolina is ranked by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as an institution of "very high research activity;" it supports over 27,000 students with 350 degree programs and a nationally-ranked library system with exceptionally strong holdings in nineteenth-century British and American literature and science. Located in the state capital, Columbia (conveniently close to both the mountains and the coast), the university is often considered to be one of the most beautiful campuses in an urban setting. With a population of over 650,000 in the greater metropolitan area, Columbia is a dynamic city in the midst of major renewal projects, many driven by joint ventures between the community and the university.

The University of South Carolina is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer. Minorities and women are especially encouraged to apply. The University of South Carolina does not discriminate in educational or employment opportunities or decisions for qualified persons on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, or veteran status.

Reminder: Victorian Energy Crises (9/30/2011; 3/15-18/2012)

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)

Reminder: Fixing Foods in Literary Modernity (9/30/2011; 3/15-18/2012)

Fixing Foods in Literary Modernity
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

http://www.nemla.org/convention/2012/cfp.html
March 15-18, 2012--Rochester, New York

For better and for worse, modernity has surely left its mark on the food we daily eat.  Two hundred years ago in 1812, Bryan Donkin purchased from a London broker the patent for canning food items inside tin containers. Within the next decade canned goods were widespread in Britain and France (Robertson 123). One hundred and fifty years ago in the spring of 1862, Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard’s experiments with heating liquids eventually led to pasteurized drinks—first wine and beer and then, later, milk (Greene, Guzel-Seydim, and Seydim 88).

This panel explores how literature has addressed the last two hundred years of rapidly modernizing food—a path involving hybridization, preservation, pasteurization, synthesizing, and genetic manipulation.  If Brillat-Savarin’s aphorism is still telling today (“Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are”), what does literature tell us about the modern alimentary subject consuming and or pondering the foods altered by modernity?  Always already integrated into our lives on multiple levels, food could not be modernized without other far reaching implications.  When discussing food marked by modernity, what larger social or cultural preoccupations does literature engage?  How do different authors, historical periods, literary movements, or genres posit the “the mark of modernity” on food? How might literary explorations of modernity and food inform our own contemporary food concerns?

Please send 300-500 word abstracts and a brief bio to Michael D. Becker, mdbecker@my.uri.edu with “NeMLA 2012” as the subject.  Please include your name, affiliation, email address, and A/V requirements ($10 fee with registration).
Deadline:  September 30, 2011

Cited:
Greene, Annel K., Zeynep B. Guzel-Seydim, and Atif Can Seydim. “The Safety of Ready-to-Eat Diary Products.” Ready-to-Eat Foods: Microbial Concerns and Control Measures. Ed. Andy Hwang and Lihan Huang. Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis, 2010. 81-123. Print.

Roberts, Gordon L.  Food Packaging: Principles and Practice.  Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis, 2006. Print.

Reminder: Approaches to Adventure in the Late 19th Century (9/30/2011; 3/15-18//2012)

Approaches to Adventure in the Late 19th Century
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

http://www.nemla.org/convention/2012/cfp.html
March 15-18, 2012--Rochester, New York

This panel examines the burgeoning interest in adventure during the years 1880-1901. Joseph A. Kestner in his recent Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880-1915 has suggested that adventure texts are filled with “codes” such as “rescue, heroism, survival, courage, duty, isolation, voyaging” for audiences to “live up to” (1).  Papers that scrutinize late Victorian literary treatments of these codes, in addition to tropes such as travel, sailing, mountain climbing, and camping are warmly welcomed.  What is the cultural or historical significance of this attention to adventure and why should it be celebrated? Why are the codes of adventure important, for both the individual and for the state?  How do Victorian authors of adventure texts use their works to problematize empire?  Can adventure texts function as pedagogical tools for younger readers, colonial administrators, or emigrants?  Do adventure texts function at different levels for colonizing or colonized audiences? How do female authors treat the codes of adventure?  And what does this intense engagement with adventure reveal?  

Please submit 250-500 word abstracts (as an MS Word attachment, please) to Rebekah Greene, Rebekah_greene@my.uri.edu, with NEMLA 2012 as the subject heading.

Deadline: September 30, 2011
Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

Reminder - edited collection: 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  atjosephlamperez@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.

Call for Bibliographers: RSVP Bibliography 2009–2011

RSVP Bibliography 2009–2011

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals is seeking contributors to its biennial bibliography, which will be published in Victorian Periodicals Review in fall 2012. Contributors to the bibliography are asked to adopt 3 to 10 scholarly journals from a list, review articles published from December 2009 through December 2011, and compile a list of annotated entries. All contributors are acknowledged in the published bibliography. Journals will be assigned between October 2011 and January 2012 and will be due June 1, 2012. A complete set of guidelines will be distributed in November. If you are interested in contributing to this project or can recommend someone (e.g., a graduate student), please contact me at <kmalone@temple.edu>.

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Katherine Malone
RSVP Bibliographer

Assistant Professor (Teaching/Instructional)
Intellectual Heritage Program
Temple University
kmalone@temple.edu

NCSA 2012 Article Prize (12/15/2011)

The Nineteenth Century Studies Association announces the 2012 Article Prize, recognizing scholarly excellence in any discipline focusing on any aspect of the long 19th century (French Revolution to World War I). The winner will receive $500 at the NCSA meeting hosted this year by the University of North Carolina, Asheville, March 22-24, 2012. Articles published between September 1, 2010 and August 31, 2011are eligible. The author or publisher of a journal, anthology, or volume of independent essays may submit. Send three hard copies and email address to: Professor Maura Coughlin, Bryant University, 1150 Douglas Pike, Smithfield RI 02917. Questions: mcoughli@bryant.edu.

Applicants must provide verification from the editor of the venue documenting date of actual publication. One entry per scholar and three per publisher; note the entry's interdisciplinary focus. Foreign language essays must have English translations. Deadline: December 15, 2011.

Reminder: Special Issue of Women's Writing on Beyond Braddon: Forgotten Female Sensationalists (10/31/2011)

Beyond Braddon: Forgotten Female Sensationalists

The past thirty years have witnessed a transformation in our perception of the mid-Victorian literary field, due in large part to the extensive recovery of sensation fiction and a corresponding recognition of that genre’s importance in the literary debates, trends, and wider cultural practices of the period. As Andrew Maunder has recently suggested, “[i]t is now acknowledged that if sensation fiction is cut out of the picture it is impossible to gain an accurate sense of nineteenth-century literary historiography."

While scholarly work on sensation fiction has expanded greatly in the past few years, this work, until very recently, has focused on a narrow range of authors and works, with Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Ellen Wood retaining the preponderance of critical attention. This special issue of Women’s Writing aims to contribute to our current understanding of sensationalism by turning the spotlight on the many forgotten female novelists and dramatists who contributed to the Victorian understanding of literary sensation. By moving beyond the women sensation novelists who have come to represent the genre (especially Braddon and Wood) our objective is to gain a fuller, more nuanced, understanding of the spectrum of writing that collectively worked to construct the concept of ‘sensationalism’ for Victorian readers and critics.
We also hope to shed light on the specific concerns of female sensationalists, as the role of the ‘proper’ woman writer frequently conflicted with that of the supposedly immoral sensation author. Articles might address whether there existed distinct forms of female sensationalism and whether such categorisations remain useful or limiting to current critics. We welcome essays on authors who have begun to receive renewed attention, such as Rhoda Broughton, Florence Marryat, and Ouida, as well as those who remain largely forgotten. Writers we would particularly like to consider in the issue include, but are by no means limited to:

• Rhoda Broughton
• Annie Edwardes
• Amelia B. Edwards
• Mary Cecil Hay
• Catherine Hill
• Mrs. Mackenzie Daniels
• Florence Marryat
• Mrs. J. C. Newby
• Ouida
• Dora Russell
• Felicia Skene
• Mrs Gordon Smythies
• Annie Thomas
• Melinda Young

Please submit articles for consideration between 4,000-7000 words to Anne-Marie Beller, Loughborough University (a.m.beller@lboro.ac.uk) and Tara MacDonald, University of Amsterdam (T.C.MacDonald@uva.nl) by 31 October 2011.

Contributors should follow the journal’s house style, details of which are to be found on the Women’s Writing web site http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/0999082.asp) This is the new MLA. Do note that instead of footnotes, we use endnotes with no bibliography.

CFP: Shared Visions: Art, Theatre and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (11/15/2011; 2/11/2012)

Shared Visions: 

Art, Theatre and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Conference Date: Saturday 11th February 2012 (10am to 6pm)
CFP Deadline: 15 November 2011

School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies, Millburn House, Warwick University

This one-day conference, held in conjunction with the journal, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, will explore the connections between art, theatre, and visual culture in the nineteenth century. During this period, the ‘art of seeing’ challenged the traditional dominance of the written word. Vision, previously denigrated as deceptive, became considered as a universal language, accessible to all, and more authentic than text. Popular theatre, especially melodrama, led the way in exploring the possibilities of the new visuality. We invite papers that explore the visual culture of theatre and exchanges between theatre and the visual arts. We are particularly interested in contributions which explore the following topics:

• Theatre as visual culture
• The relationship between word and image
• Theatrical illustration
• Theatrical portraiture
• Audiences and reception of art/theatre/visual culture
• Posters/playbills
• Visual technology: panoramas; dioramas; phantasmagorias; magic lanterns
• Stage spectacle: set design, scene painting, lighting, special effects, costume
• Stage pictorialism/stage tableaux/realization
• Local colour
• Illusion
• Authenticity
• Theatricality
• Attitude and gesture
• Theatre architecture
• Caricature
• Narrative/temporality
• History as spectacle

Please submit abstracts (500 words maximum) to patricia.smyth@nottingham.ac.uk. Papers should be no more than 20 minutes long and will be followed by a panel discussion.

Lunch, tea and coffee will be provided.
Conference fee: £20 (£10 for postgraduate students)
For further information, please contact Patricia Smyth at the above e mail address.

Kate Newey and Jim Davis
Editors, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film

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

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

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

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

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

Curran Fellowship for Research on the Victorian Press (10/15/2011)

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) is pleased to announce the competition for the fourth annual Curran Fellowship, a travel and research grant intended to aid scholars studying 19th-century British magazines and newspapers in making use of primary print and archival sources. Made possible through the generosity of Eileen Curran, Professor Emerita of English, Colby College, and inspired by her pioneering research on Victorian periodicals, the Curran Fellowship is awarded annually in the form of two grants of $2,500 each.

The projected research may involve study of any aspects of the periodical press in any of its manifold forms, and may range from within Britain itself to the many countries, within and outside of the Empire, where British magazines and newspapers were bought, sold, and read during “the long nineteenth century” (ca. 1780-1914).

Applications for the Curran Fellowship for research to be undertaken in 2012 must be submitted in electronic form and sent to curranfellowship@rs4vp.org by October 15, 2011. Applicants should send a c.v., the names and contact information of two scholars who are familiar with the applicant and his or her research goals, and a description of the project to which these funds would be applied. Any queries about the application may be sent to the same address.

Applicants will be notified by January 15, 2012. Successful applicants will be required to submit a brief report to RSVP at the conclusion of the funded portion of their project, describing the results of their research, and are asked to acknowledge the fellowship in any published work based on that research.

The full call for applications may be found on the RSVP website at http://www.rs4vp.org/prizes.html
A set of additional guidelines for applicants may be found at http://www.rs4vp.org/curran_fellowship_guidelines.pdf

CFP: NeMLA panel "A Question of Education: Victorian Expectations, Practices, and Transformations" (9/30/2011; 3/15-18/2012)

NeMLA 2012 Convention Rochester, NY, March 15-18, 2012
http://www.nemla.org/convention/2012/

"A Question of Education: Victorian Expectations, Practices, and Transformations"

This panel invites papers on Victorian educational theories and practices. What were the major influences and debates, and how were they represented in contemporary literature? Topics to consider include: early vs. late century practices, gendered education, educational theories and proponents, literary representations of education, teachers and students, radical education. Please email 250-500 word abstracts to Kristin.LeVeness@ncc.edu.

The deadline for submission is September 30, 2011.

CFP: Mother/Nature interdisciplinary conference (10/15/2011; 3/16-18/2012)

Mother/Nature Conference

March 16-18, 2012
Thad Cochran Center
University of Southern Mississippi
Hattiesburg, MS

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Barbara Gates

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
John Muir

We live in a time of crisis in our homes and in our natural environment. From hurricanes to oil spills, we are linked to each other through the loss and degradation of regional and national habitats. Our selfhoods and the place we make for ourselves in the world are ultimately rooted in both our biological and ecological families.

The theme for this conference, Mother/Nature, seeks to discover interconnectedness and meaning through a study of shifting influences on the changing definition of motherhood. We welcome submissions that consider the conceptions of the intersection of motherhood and the natural world. Interdisciplinary approaches to motherhood and nature, especially interactions between the humanities and sciences, are invited. We encourage scholars to think creatively about this conference theme and invite papers and panel proposals that consider topics including but not limited to:

The Science of Motherhood

• Theories of childbirth in the United States
• Psychologizing nature: nature deficit disorders
• Health and motherhood

Contemporary Sustainability

• Finding balance in the modern world
• Conceiving renewable energy
• Domesticated landscapes

The Nature of Motherhood

• Nature vs. nurture
• Biological determinism

Non-Biological Motherhood

• Foster/adoptive parenting
• Masculinity and motherhood
• Single parenthood
• Educators as “mothers”

Interrogating Conservation

• Parenting the natural world
• Protecting endangered species and landscapes
• The birth of the modern environmental movement

Mother/Nature in Literature

• Literary Darwinism
• Defining women’s health through ecocriticism
• Representations of mother/nature in children’s literature

Modern Motherhood

• Redefining motherhood in pop culture
• Representing mother/nature in film

We welcome papers from faculty members and graduate students. Strong undergraduate submissions will also be considered. Please send abstracts (250-300 words) and a brief biography (100 words) to mothernatureconference@gmail.com by October 15, 2011. Include abstracts and biographies in the main text of the email and attach as a .rtf or .doc file. Also indicate whether you have any technology needs. Individual sessions will last 15-20 minutes.

We also welcome the submission of creative works (a selection of 3-5 poems or 3,000 words for fiction or creative non-fiction). Please submit these works following the above guidelines by October 15, 2011.

A monetary prize will be offered to the best student paper. To be considered for this award, please submit the full copy of your paper by February 1, 2012.

Registration fee: none. 

CFP: Gale Dissertation Research Fellowship in Nineteenth-Century Media (10/15/2011)

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) is pleased to announce the third annual Gale Dissertation Research Fellowship, made possible by the generosity of publisher Gale, part of Cengage Learning, in support of dissertation research that makes substantial use of full-text digitized collections of 19th-century British magazines and newspapers. A prize of $1500 will be awarded, together with one year's passworded subscription to selected digital collections from Gale, including 19th Century UK Periodicals and 19th Century British Library Newspapers.

Purpose: The purpose of the Gale Dissertation Research Fellowship is two-fold: (1) to support historical and literary research that deepens our understanding of the 19th-century British press in all its rich variety, and (2) to encourage the scholarly use of collections of full-text digital facsimiles of these primary sources in aid of that research.

Eligibility: Eligible for this award is any currently enrolled postgraduate student, in any academic discipline, who by the end of 2011 will have embarked on a doctoral dissertation or thesis that centrally
involves investigation into one or more aspects of the British magazine and newspaper press of the 19th century. Preference will be given to projects that are interdisciplinary in approach, and that propose to use innovative methods of exploration that are uniquely possible with online collections. The digitized collections used in this research may include those created by any publishers or projects, whether commercial or non-commercial.

Applications: Applicants should send a c.v. and the names and contact information of two scholars who are familiar with the applicant and his or her dissertation project; it is expected that one of these will be the student's dissertation director. The project description (approx. 500-800 words) should concisely explain the aims of the proposed research and the key importance of the role of full-text digitized collections in that research. Applications for the Gale Fellowship for dissertation research to be undertaken in 2011 must be submitted in electronic form and sent to galefellowship@rs4vp.org by October 15, 2011. Any queries about the application may be sent to the same address. Applicants will be notified in January. The successful applicant will be expected to submit a brief report to RSVP at the conclusion of the funded portion of the project, describing the results  of the research.

For more information and news about the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, please visit its webpage at www.rs4vp.org

CFP: Special Issue of Women's Writing on Dinah Mulock Craik (2/1/2012)

Special Issue of Women's Writing: Re-evaluating Dinah Mulock Craik
Guest Editor: Karen Bourrier, Consulting Editor: Sally Mitchell

Throughout her lifetime and since her death, Dinah Mulock Craik (1826-1887) has been considered either ahead of her time or a touchstone for all things Victorian. Henry James, for example, assessed her work as “kindly, somewhat dull, pious, and very sentimental.” At the other end of the spectrum, Elaine Showalter found that she excelled at a “peculiar combination of didacticism and subversive feminism.”¹

This special issue of Women's Writing seeks to re-evaluate Dinah Mulock Craik's life and work, moving beyond assessments of her work as either too sentimental or subversive. Recent scholarship on Craik has contributed new contexts to the appreciation of her work. The rise of disability studies has spurred scholars to re-consider the role of invalids in Craik's work, and her complicated relationships with Ireland and Scotland have led to a re-evaluation of the role of the nation in her novels. Her personal involvement in and fictional treatment of controversial topics such as adoption and the Deceased Wife's Sister's Act, along with her widely-cited series of essays, “A Woman's Thoughts on Women,” continue to act as a touchstone for scholars considering women's roles in Victorian family life. This issue aims to interrogate what was idiosyncratic in her views and writings and what was more representative of Victorian thought, in order to gain a fuller understanding of her work and multi-faceted career.

Topics might include but are by no means limited to:

• Craik and disability
• Craik and nationality
• Craik and marriage / adoption
• re-evaluating the woman writer's career
• Craik's posthumous reputation
• Craik and children's literature
• the twentieth-century reception of Craik's work
• Craik's relationships with other women writers; women's systems of mentorship
• Craik's relationships with male publishers and artists
• transatlantic publishing strategies and Craik's American audience
• Craik and the periodical publishing system
• Craik as poet
• Craik and class

Please submit articles of 4,000 to 7,000 words for consideration to the Guest Editor, Dr. Karen Bourrier, University of Western Ontario, karen.bourrier@gmail.com, by 1 February 2012.

Contributors should follow the journal’s house style, details of which are available on the Women’s Writing website http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/womenswriting.

¹See Henry James, “A Noble Life” in Notes and Reviews, Cambridge: Dunster House: 1921, page 172. Elaine Showalter. “Dinah Mulock Craik and the Tactics of Sentiment: A Case Study in Victorian Female Authorship” in Feminist Studies, 2:2/3 (1975), page 6.

Last Call: NCSA Conference "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: UpStage: a journal of turn-of-the-century theatre

UpStage, a peer-reviewed online publication dedicated to research in turn-of-the-century dramatic literature, theatre, and theatrical culture, seeks submissions year-round. This is a development of the pages published under this name as part of The OScholars, and is now an independently edited journal in the Oscholars group published at www.oscholars.com, as part of our expanding coverage of the different cultural manifestations of the fin de siècle. UpStage has recently combined with Shavings, a journal of Shaw studies, and is planning to publish an issue dedicated exclusively to Shaw during the summer of 2012.

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the work of Shaw, Schnitzler, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, von Hofmannsthal, and their contemporaries in Western and Eastern Europe and beyond.

UpStage welcomes a variety of theoretical and critical methodologies. We are interested in receiving:

• Scholarly articles of approximately 3000 words
• Book reviews of approximately 500 words
• Reports on work in progress (book manuscripts, Master’s theses, and doctoral dissertations) (approximately 500-1000 words)
• Reviews of contemporary productions of turn-of-the-century plays (or plays about the turn of the nineteenth century) and announcements of future productions (approximately 500 words)

Please e-mail your submissions, as MS Word attachments only, to

• Dr. Helena Gurfinkel, Department of English Language and Literature, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Edwardsville, IL, USA at hgurfin@siue.edu
• Dr. Michelle C. Paull, Drama Programme, St. Mary's University College, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, TW1, 4SX, England, at paullm@smuc.ac.uk
• Dr. Lawrence Switzky, Department of English and drama, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, at lawrenceswitzky@gmail.com

Submissions should conform to the latest version of the MLA style. In order to undergo masked peer-review, scholarly articles must be submitted in the following way: the author’s contact information and brief bio should appear in the body of the e-mail, while the Word attachment should contain no identifying information.

CFP: The Social Semiotics of Popular Journalism (9/15/2011; 3/28/2012)

AHRC RESEARCH NETWORK
Exploring the language of the popular in Anglo-American Newspapers 1833-1988
University of Cardiff 28 March 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 Cardiff on 28 March 2012 entitled ‘The social semiotics of popular journalism: a long view’. It aims to bring together scholars from media and journalism studies, social sciences, linguistics and English to consider the important of semiotics 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: how these newspapers have functioned as social semiotic. This might include the structuring (within the confines of commercial appeal) of themes such as, for example, social class, national identity, political partisanship, gender, domestic duty, recreational identities, conflicts between group identifications such as trade union membership and individualist consumerist aspirations. Explorations of the sociopolitical significance of representations of the everyday will also be particularly welcome. The proposals should be empirically-grounded and might draw upon textual analysis, discourse analysis, the political economy of newspapers, ethnography or combinations of these and/or other methods, to say something concrete about the nature of life in the societies represented by popular newspapers 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 Social Semiotics.

Please send your proposals or any questions you may have by the 15 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 Dr David Machin, University of Cardiff

For further details of the project please visit the website of the Centre for the Study of Journalism and History:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/journalismhistory

CFP: Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Annual Meeting (11/15/2011; 3/9-11/2012)

The Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies (PCCBS) invites paper and panel proposals for its thirty-ninth annual meeting, to be held at the Huntington Library, from March 9-11, 2012. Located in the quiet enclave of San Marino and surrounded by its world-renowned botanical gardens, the Huntington offers one of North America’s most valuable research collections, particularly in the fields of history, literature, art, and religion.

The Pasadena Hilton, located less than two miles from the Huntington Library, will serve as our conference hotel. An attractive conference room rate of $119 (single or double occupancy) will be available through the Pasadena Hilton. The closest airport to the Hilton is Bob Hope (Burbank) airport, 17 miles away. Los Angeles International Airport lies approximately 30 miles west of the conference hotel.

The PCCBS invites papers representing all fields of British Studies–broadly defined to include those who study the United Kingdom, its component parts and nationalities, as well as Britain’s imperial cultures. We welcome proposals from scholars and doctoral candidates in a wide range of disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, and the arts, including History, Literature, Political Science, Philosophy, Religion, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Theater Studies, and Art History.

Proposals for individual papers, partial panels, or complete panels are all welcome, although complete panel proposals are preferred. We encourage the submission of proposals dealing with interdisciplinary topics, as well as panels on new pedagogies and technologies associated with British Studies.

The deadline for submission of proposals/panels is November 15, 2011. Proposals should include a 200-word abstract for each paper plus a 1-page c.v. for each participant. Those submitting full or partial panel proposals should include a brief description of the panel plus a 1-page c.v. for the panel chair as well as for its commentator. Please place the panel proposal, its constituent paper proposals, and all vitae in one file, making certain that your contact information, especially email addresses, are correct and current. Proposals should be submitted via email attachment by November 15th, 2011, to:

Professor Lori Anne Ferrell, PCCBS Program Committee Chair
Department of English, Claremont Graduate University
lori.ferrell@cgu.edu