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The North American Victorian Studies Association Conference for 2012, in Madison, Wisconsin, September 27-30, invites papers on the theme of networks. NAVSA itself is a network, a hub of activity that fosters connections among scholars, among disciplines, and among institutions. We invite conferees to attend a networking lunch, where they can cross paths with others interested in shared themes, such as transatlanticism, visual culture, or serialization; and we aim to provide ample and rich opportunities for contact across specializations and new approaches including digital networks. Keynotes include Amanda Anderson, Adam Phillips, and a visual networks panel with Caroline Arscott, Tim Barringer, Julie Codell, and Mary Roberts. Participants will also be able to sign up for networks seminars of 15 presenters of precirculated 5-page position papers on the topic. More information to follow.
Proposals for individual papers or panels should be submitted electronically by March 1, 2012. Proposals for individual papers should be no more than 500 words; panel proposals should include 500-word abstracts for each paper and a 250-word panel description. Applicants should submit a one-page cv. All documents should be submitted in .pdf format through the online form linked to the conference website.
Conference threads might include:
- Networks of artists, critics, consumers, scholars
- Networks of print (books, chapbooks, newspapers, magazines, letters, pamphlets), including relations among publishers, printers, editors, writers, readers
- Commodity culture networks and the circulation of things and bodies
- Networks of discourse (such as science, religion, nature, politics)
- The science of networks, then and now
- Textual networks (characters, plot, language, intertextuality)
- Networks of influence, production, reception
- Networks of display or exhibition
- Fashioning networks among otherwise unconnected authors and historical figures
- Transnational and other migrations: geographic, cultural, ideological, rhetorical
- Borders and “borders” — theorizing cultural connection, separation, entanglement
- Diasporic networks: cosmopolitanism, wandering, exile
- Clandestine networks such as spies, secret agents, and detection
- Networking technologies (transportation systems, postal or other communication systems like telephone, telegraph, cable)
- Network arts
- Social networks including leisure clubs and professional societies
- Family and kinship networks
- Victorian cities: streets, arcades, parks, or other networks of urban space
- Imperial networks
- Network forms: gossip, blackmail, suspense, serials, series, periodicals, epistolary or other genres
- Psychic and supernatural networks: seances, spiritualism, mediums
- Digital networks: twenty-first century reading practices, or Victorian culture and Facebook, Twitterature, Wikipedia
- Networked periodization: romantic/victorian/modernist
- Networks of resistance: feminist, ecological, queer
- Networks of iteration and translation (between image, text, adaptation)
