CFP: M/MLA Travel Panel "The Debts of Travel" (4/15/2012; 11/8-11/2012)

M/MLA, November 8-11, Cincinnati, OH

Travel Writing/Writing Travel
Topic: The Debts of Travel

Travel is liable to produce financial debt, as travelers incur expenses far beyond those of their ordinary lives. But what of the less literal indebtedness that is inherent in the process of traveling? This panel seeks to explore the ways that travel leaves traveling subjects variously indebted. For example, they may be emotionally indebted to traveling companions or to individuals they encounter who help them along their way. They may return home ideologically changed, forever indebted to new cultural experiences and the sense of difference that is endemic of travel. Travelers may leave something of themselves behind and experience travel debts as a kind of loss; or they may experience the process of becoming indebted as freeing themselves from previous restrictions. Proposals may consider any aspects of how travel is predicated upon or results in various forms of indebtedness, whether in travelers or in the people/cultures they encounter. Proposals for perspectives on travel from any historical/literary period welcome, and those from Victorian studies are encouraged. If you, or a particularly promising graduate student of yours, are working on relevant Victorian material, please apply! Inquiries are welcome.

Please send 300-word abstracts by April 15 to Andrea Kaston Tange, Eastern Michigan University, akastont@emich.edu.

For more information on the conference itself, please see: http://www.luc.edu/mmla/annualconvention.html 

Mixed Methods Approaches to Dickens and Characterization (5/10/2012)

Mixed Methods Approaches to Dickens and Characterization

A symposium at the interface of language and literature

May 10th 2012 – University of Nottingham

Registration Deadline:  20 April

This symposium will illustrate innovative approaches to both Dickens Studies and studies of characterization more generally. Scholars from both language and literature will present cutting-edge research that suggests a mixed methods approach to the study of characterization in literary texts and specifically the novels by Charles Dickens. The talks will address the concept of character in the framework of cognitive poetics, Dickens’s characters in the context of popular culture, corpus methods and the tool CLiC for literary texts, psycholinguistic methods to investigate the reading process and the psychological reality ofcharacters, Dickens and book history, and the reading experience in the 19th century.

Confirmed speakers

• Professor Juliet John, Professor in Victorian Literature, Royal Holloway University of London
• Professor Peter Stockwell, Professor of Literary Linguistics, University of Nottingham
• Professor Josephine Guy, Professor of Modern English Literature, University of Nottingham
• Dr. Kathy Conklin, Lecturer in Psycholinguistics, University of Nottingham
• Dr. Michaela Mahlberg, Associate Professor in English Language and Applied Linguistics, University of Nottingham
• Dr. Catherine Smith, Technical Officer, Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing, University of Birmingham
• Dr. Simon Preston, RCUK Research Fellow, School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Nottingham

Introduction to the Symposium by Professor Brean Hammond, Professor of Modern English Literature, University of Nottingham

Registration fee:

£20 (this covers lunch and coffee breaks)

£10 (for students)

To register, please download a registration form from the Symposium webpage: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cral/events/dickens-symposium.aspx. A detailed programme will be available at the webpage shortly. Registration Deadline: 20 April 2012.

Exhibition: Dickens and Massachusetts: A Tale of Power and Transformation (3/30-10/20/2012)

This week major Dickens exhibition opens in Massachusetts (Mar. 30 - Oct. 20, 2012):

Dickens and Massachusetts: A Tale of Power and Transformation tells the story of a key moment in history, a moment of transformation for a man and for a nation. To be held at the Lowell National Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts, the interactive exhibition opens this Friday, March 30 and will run through October 20, 2012. We hope you will visit to Lowell to see this major exhibition!

The exhibition features a rich collection of rare Dickens artifacts, on loan from the Charles Dickens Museum of London, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the American Antiquarian Society, the New York Public Library, the Fellman Collection at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the Perkins School for the Blind, and other institutions. The 1842 portrait of the young Dickens, painted by Boston artist Francis Alexander, will receive its first public display in over 30 years. Also included are the charming 1841 Daniel Maclise portrait of the Dickens children (who were left at home when Charles and Catherine Dickens visited America), the Boston Line Type (raised letter) edition of The Old Curiosity Shop donated by Dickens to the Perkins School for the Blind in 1868, Lorwnzo Fowler's report on the 1842 phrenological examination of Dickens, original letters, first editions, and other special artifacts. Interactive elements throughout the exhibit allow visitors to engage actively with our materials.

The exhibition is free to the public, and we are offering 75+ programs over the seven-month run of the exhibition. We are also holding a symposium this summer (see previous blog post).  Please check us out at http://www.uml.edu/dickens.


More about the Exhibition:
In 1842 when Charles Dickens and his wife, Catherine Hogarth Dickens, traveled to North America, he had already achieved immense fame. Blockbuster hits such as Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and The Old Curiosity Shop had established the 29-year-old Dickens as the most popular writer of the era, and, in a new age of mass media culture, he was the first true celebrity. After this trip we see a new vigor and complexity in his writing and a heightened social consciousness. America changed him. He began to see that his role as a pop culture hero came with great accountability. It is no coincidence that the year after he returned home, he published his iconic Christmas Carol, a tale of radical transformation and social responsibility.

The exhibition “Dickens and Massachusetts: A Tale of Power and Transformation” focuses on several pivotal moments from the 1842 and 1867-68 trips to America, exploring these themes:

Dickens Finds His Power
       The Early Years and Literary Fame
       A Growing Family
       A Magnetic Personality: Mesmerism and Celebrity

Bridging Two Worlds
       Departure from Liverpool
       The Passage over Stormy Seas
       Arrival in Boston: "Here we are!"
       Cross-Atlantic Letters

Conscience and Controversy
       Harvard and the Unitarians
       Felton Friendship: "Our hearts are of the largest size"
       A Controversial Stand on Copyright

Models for Reform
       Perkins School for the Blind
       Lowell Mills: "A large, populous, thriving place"

Reading Dickens Reading America
       Capturing Dickens through Art and Phrenology
       Capturing America in a Travel Book :  "slavery, spittoons, and senators"
       The Scourge of Slavery: Dickens, Channing, and Longfellow

Dickens Returns
       Transformations: From 1842 to 1868
       Dickens on the Stage: The American Reading Tour
       The Great International Walking Match
       Farewell Friends

Dickens Lives On

“Dickens and Massachusetts: A Tale of Power and Transformation” is co-curated by Diana Archibald, Associate Professor of English at UMass Lowell and director of the 2002 "Dickens and America" project in Lowell, and David Blackburn, Chief of Cultural Resources and Programs at Lowell National Historical Park. Other contributing scholars include Joel Brattin, Professor of Humanities, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Natalie McKnight, Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development, Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning, and Professor of Humanities, Boston University; Lillian Nayder, Professor and Chair of English at Bates College; and Christie Jackson, Curator of Decorative Arts at the Old Sturbridge Village.

HTTP://WWW.UML.EDU/DICKENS
http://www.facebook.com/DickensinLowell
http://www.twitter.com/dickenslowell

Reminder: Dickens Symposium in Lowell, MA (3/31/2012; 7/13-15/2012)

Dickens Society Symposium

University of Massachusetts Lowell
July 13 – 15, 2012

As part of its Dickens in Lowell celebration, the University of Massachusetts Lowell will host one of the two 2012 Dickens Society Symposia being offered in this bicentennial year.  Scholars will present their work July 13–15, 2012 at the Tsongas Industrial History Center.

Hotel accommodations in downtown Lowell at the UMass Lowell Inn & Conference Center will provide easy access to a major exhibition at the National Park’s Boott Gallery, "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, the Daniel Maclise portrait of the Dickens children, and the Boston Line Type edition of *The Old Curiosity Shop* donated by Dickens to the Perkins School for the Blind in 1868.

The popular Dickens walking tour of Lowell (first offered at the Dickens and America conference in 2002) and an interactive workshop at the Tsongas Industrial History Center will also be featured offerings of the symposium. Evening events include participation in “Dickens and Steampunk” and other "Dickens in Lowell" community programming. For more information, see http://www.uml.edu/dickens.

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 by email, as an attachment, to Joel J. Brattin no later than March 31, 2012: jjb@wpi.edu.  Scholars at all stages of their careers are encouraged to submit proposals. Registration fee is $100 standard fee, $50 graduate students. The Dickens dinner is $25. Contact DickensinLowell@uml.edu for more information.  A downloadable registration form and symposium schedule information will be available soon on our website: http://www.uml.edu/dickens.

Announcement: The Partlow Prize may be awarded to one or two graduate students, independent scholars, or non-tenured faculty, in the amount of $300 to $500. Those who wish to be considered for the Partlow Prize should submit a cv and a proposal/synopsis of 500-1000 words. The Partlow Prize includes a monetary award, a waiver of the symposium registration fee, and the cost of the Dickens dinner. Dickens Quarterly has the right of first refusal for publication. The Secretary/Treasurer will inform the host(s) of the symposium of the sum available for support.

Reminder: “Extending Families” Special Issue: Victorian Review, Fall 2013 (4/1/2012)

We invite submissions for a special issue of Victorian Review mapping out new ideas of the family in the 19th century including:

• adoption and foster care
• cultural directives about proper filial behavior
• romantic marriage
• sibling relationships
• perceived threats to the family
• family formation in a colonial context
• the effect of changing marriage laws
• family unions
• narratives of unusual or idealized families
• discourses about primitive families
• primogeniture and inheritance
• incest and familial unions
• same-sex and non-normative couples
• lateral relations: cousins, uncles, aunts
• domestic fictions
• ex-spouses, love triangles, bigamous relations
• families without parents
• political/journalistic debates about familial roles
• servants, companions, governesses
• in-laws, poor relations, extended family

We aim to showcase the subjects not usually considered in the nuclear family: the servant, the grandparent, the poor relation, the foster child, the ex-spouse. What does family look like when we see it as a permeable, flexible, shifting configuration? Thus, we particularly invite essays that resist the privileging of the nuclear family and work against the teleological narrative of the (heteronormative) courtship plot.

The deadline is April 1, 2012. Submit essays of not more than 8,000 words (including endnotes), in MLA style to both guest editors by email attachment. Please consult the Victorian Review website (http://web.uvic.ca/victorianreview/submissions.html) for further submission guidelines.

Kelly Hager, Simmons College  
kelly.hager@simmons.edu           

Talia Schaffer, Queens College and Graduate Center, CUNY

talia.schaffer@qc.cuny.edu

Sensualising Deformity Conference Programme/Registration (6/15-16/2012)

The preliminary programme for the upcoming conference at the University of Edinburgh, Sensualising Deformity: Communication and Construction of Monstrous Embodiment, is now online at http://sensualisingdeformity.blogspot.co.uk/p/conference-programme.html, and registration is live. We are currently offering reduced rates for anyone who books before 15 April. For more details, visit http://sensualisingdeformity.blogspot.com.

Our keynote speakers include Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (George Washington University), Margrit Shildrick (Linköping University), Peter Hutchings (Northumbria University) and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Emory University). In addition, our programme features a number of fascinating papers pertaining to nineteenth-century constructions/conceptions of exceptional bodies, so we hope to see some of you there!

CFP: 'Nobler Imaginings and Mightier Struggles': Octavia Hill and the Remaking Of British Society (6/1/2012; 9/27-28/2012)

'Nobler Imaginings and Mightier Struggles': 

Octavia Hill and the Remaking Of British Society

A centenary conference organised by the National Trust and the University of Oxford, with the support of Octavia Housing

Sutton House, London, 27-28 September 2012

In September 2012 an interdisciplinary conference at Sutton House in London will mark the centenary of the death of Octavia Hill. Best known for her housing reform, Hill was also instrumental in founding such diverse present-day institutions as the National Trust, the Chartered Institute of Housing, the Army Cadet force, and Family Action (originally the Charity Organisation Society). In a political climate which once again emphasizes the kind of privately-financed social action that Hill applauded, and where the preservation of open space and the provision of homes are again contentious, a re-evaluation of her life and legacy seems particularly timely.

The two-day conference will incorporate talks from invited speakers Gillian Darley, Jane Garnett, Lawrence Goldman, Astrid Swenson, Robert Whelan, and William Whyte. William Whyte will also lead participants round some of the Southwark housing projects established by Hill. To complement these events, submissions are invited for academic papers to make up a day of interdisciplinary panel sessions exploring Hill’s life, work, writings, and legacy; as well as her contemporaries, and the contexts in which she worked.

Topics might include (but are not limited to):

• Housing reform: slum clearance and the model dwelling movement
• Mapping the slums
• ‘Professional beggars’ and the Charity Organisation Society
• ‘Lady visitors’: women in the slums and women’s voluntary work more widely
• Social work and the professionalization of relationships with the poor
• Conservative feminisms: anti-suffrage and maternal philanthropy
• Working-class leisure and the right to open spaces
• The Kyrle Society and culture for the poor
• The National Trust and the preservation/conservation movement
• Hill’s intellectual and social circle (including John Ruskin, Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, and F.D. Maurice)
• ‘Teaching en-masse’: Octavia Hill and Victorian women writers
• The Army Cadet force: its history and influence

Submissions are encouraged from graduate students, early-career academics, and senior academics, from any academic discipline, and from independent scholars. Hill’s influence and interests were extremely wide-ranging and our conference will reflect this diversity. 300-word proposals (for 20-minute papers) carrying a name and institutional affiliation, should be submitted to octaviahill2012@gmail.com by 1 June 2012.

Reminder: VanArsdel Essay Prize (5/1/2012)

Graduate students are invited to submit essays for the 2012 VanArsdel Prize for the best graduate student essay on, about, or extensively using Victorian periodicals. The winner will receive $300 and publication in Victorian Periodicals Review. 

Manuscripts should be 15-25 pages and should not have appeared in print. Send e-mail submissions to vpr@rs4vp.org by May 1, 2012. Submissions should be formatted as Word files in Chicago style with identifying information removed. In the accompanying e-mail, applicants should include a description of their current status in graduate school.

For more information, visit http://www.rs4vp.org/prizes.html.

CFP:Richard Marsh: Re-Reading the Fin de Siècle (4/20/2012; 7/20/2012)

Richard Marsh: Re-Reading the Fin de Siècle
A one-day symposium at the University of Brighton

Friday 20th July 2012

Richard Marsh is best-known for his 1897 novel The Beetle, a gothic bestseller at the time more popular than Dracula. Indeed Marsh was a prolific and extremely successful writer in the 1890s and the early 20^th century. Strikingly, however, his writing has until recently been mostly forgotten. With several of his novels and shorter fictions now being republished, this situation is set to change. The symposium seeks to harness renewed academic interest in Marsh towards a reappraisal of his significance for a fin de siècle culture that is often considered to offer a kind of mirror onto our own culture at the start of the 21^st century. It will bring together literary and historical specialists of the period to examine Marsh's oeuvre as a whole. A central concern will be to examine how Marsh's ambivalent fiction often works against the grain of more canonical texts and therefore has the potential productively to unsettle what it is thought is known about fin de siècle culture. Understanding late-Victorian / Edwardian questions about gender and sexuality, imperialism, science and the nature of history, surely remain incomplete without negotiating the complex terrain of Richard Marsh's writing.

We invite abstracts for papers on any aspect of Marsh's output, but in particular on the following themes:

• Gothic
• Fictions of crime and detection
• Romance
• Comedy
• Discourses of race, empire and eugenics
• The New Woman
• Homosociality and homosexuality
• Late-Victorian understandings of history / the use of the classical past
• The literary market-place

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to d.orrells@warwick.ac.uk and v.margree@brighton.ac.uk. We anticipate that speakers will have approximately 20 minutes to deliver their papers on the day. A small registration fee will be charged (details to be confirmed). We also welcome participants who wish to attend the event without delivering a paper, although places are limited.

Deadline for abstracts: Friday 20th April 2012

Reminder: Reconfiguring Authorship (3/31/2012; 11/15-18/2012)

Reconfiguring Authorship
Thursday, November 15-Sunday, November 18, 2012
Ghent University, Belgium

The ‘Research on Authorship as Performance’ project at Ghent University invites proposals for 20-minute papers as well as for complete panels, for a conference on the theme of ‘Reconfiguring Authorship’. This three-day conference will explore facets of authorship in the Anglophone world from the Middle Ages to the present; confirmed keynote speakers include Richard Wilson (Cardiff), Margaret Ezell (Texas A&M), Dame Gillian Beer (Cambridge), and Paul St Amour (Pennsylvania).

The conference program will include keynote talks and concurrent sessions as well as a conference dinner and an optional museum excursion on the final day of the conference. As it develops we will make information regarding the program and activities attached to the conference available on the conference webpage: http://www.rap.ugent.be/node/23

Proposals
The Romantic concept of the solitary genius (if indeed such an entity ever existed) has for decades now been the subject of intense critical scrutiny and revision. Recent work in the burgeoning field of authorship studies has turned to the analysis of cultural formations of ‘authoriality’ as they developed historically in a variety of geographical locations, in relation to cultural networks and social change, to transformations of the media, as well as to changing perceptions of gender and personhood. The notion of authorial agency is therefore now submerged within an elaborate tissue of critical feedback, textual instability, editorial intervention, and accidents of publishing, branding, and spin. And yet the Author persists, as a nomenclature, as a catalogue entry, as a biographical entity, as a popular icon, and as an assumed agent of creativity and innovation. As a result, current studies of authors and authorship have to contend with the complex issues of authorial authority, independence or interdependence, and self-fashioning in a large variety of historical and discursive settings.

‘Reconfiguring Authorship’ aims to showcase the latest, most exciting developments in authorship studies by providing a venue in which to debate theoretical and historical understanding of the complex ideological, technological and social processes that transform a writer into an author. For that purpose, we take a wide view of the notion of ‘authorship’ and the figure of the ‘author’ to include a broad range of approaches and topics. Possible topics that participants might discuss include (but are by no means limited to):

• Connections and differences between historical author concepts in various fields and empirical situations of writing;
• When does a writer become an author, and why is not every writer considered an author?
• Varieties of authors: dramatists, novelists, poets, journalists, sages, critics, humorists; authors as entertainers, public intellectuals, moralists;
• Authenticity, authority, agency, attribution;
• Authorship and the canon;
• Gender and authorship: interrogating putative ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ models of writing, self-fashioning, and getting published;
• Fame, infame, disfame, lack of fame; the self-creation, branding and reception of authors;
• Anonymity, pseudonymity, and authorial personae;
• Authors and collaboration; single and multiple authors; authors and cultural networks;
• The quotidian activities of writers as they relate to the public image of authors;
• Translation, editing, redacting, and reviewing considered as kinds of authorial performances;
• Authorship and the marketplace; authors and patrons; authorship and intellectual property;
• The textual re-creation of authors by editors, publishers, and printers;
• Authorship and/in the material book; authorship & new technologies (film, digital media, the internet).

Proposals for 20-minute papers are due via email (authorship.conference@gmail.com) by March 31, 2012, and should take the form of a 1-page abstract accompanied by a short CV; in the case of complete panels, proposals should consist of an abstract and short CV for every panelist together with a short CV for the chair (if different). We aim to inform participants in late April.

CFP: Essay Collection on News of the World (5/31/2012)

News of the World: ‘Journalism for the Rich, Journalism for the Poor’ 1843-2011

Editors: Laurel Brake, Chandrika Kaul, Mark W. Turner
Publisher: ‘Studies in the History of the Media’, Palgrave Macmillan

Founded in 1843, the News of the World was one of the UK’s longest-running and most popular Sunday newspapers when it came to its inauspicious end in the summer of 2011. As the UK’s Leveson Inquiry, due to report in 2013, continues to unravel details about the recent ‘hacking’ scandal, the News of the World will continue to make the news for some time to come.

We are organizing a volume of essays and seek articles of 7000 words on any aspect of the newspaper’s history, from the 19th century through the present, which help to deepen our understanding of this
title and of media history more generally.

Key themes and topics might include:

• The Genre of Sunday papers, in/since the 19th century
• Newspaper Form:  layout, multiple editions, departments, etc.
• Illustration and Photography: the New Journalism, Photojournalism, etc.
• Readerships and Circulations: ‘metropolitan’ and ‘country’; provincial editions/readers; international
• contexts
• Empire: decolonisation; popular cultures
• Comparative Readings: America, Empire, etc.
• Investigative journalism: 19th, 20th, 21st centuries
• Politics and the Popular Press: 19^th, 20th, 21st centuries
• The Economics of the Popular Press
• Crime and Court Reporting
• War and the Popular Press: e.g. Crimea, Boer, WWI, WW2, Falklands
• Celebrity
• Sports News, since the 19th century
• Sex and the Popular Press
• Proprietors and Media Moguls
• Practices of Newsgathering since the 19th century
• Press Freedom  and Press Controls
• The Closing of the NOTW: the rise of the Sunday Sun

Please send proposals of up to 250 words, for articles of between 6000-7000 words, to all the editors by 31st May 2012:
Laurel Brake:  l.brake@bbk.ac.uk
Chandrika Kaul: ck24@st-andrews.ac.uk
Mark Turner:  mark.2.turner@kcl.ac.uk

We aim to inform authors that they have been selected for the volume by the middle of June 2012. Completed articles will be due to the editors by the end of December 2012, and we expect publication in 2013. Please see the Palgrave Macmillan website for style guidelines.

Reminder: Race, Nation and Empire on the Victorian Popular Stage (3/23/2012; 7/11-14/2012)

Race, Nation and Empire on the Victorian Popular Stage

The Storey, Lancaster, 11-14 July 2012

A reminder that the call for papers deadline (23 March) is drawing near. This conference will be the third in a series of three organised as part of our AHRC-funded project on the 'Cultural History of English Pantomime, 1837-1902'. Please send proposals of up to 300 words, to arrive no later than 23 March, to Peter Yeandle (p.yeandle@lancaster.ac.uk).

https://sites.google.com/site/victorianpantomime/

Further info:
A number of studies, most recent of which is Marty Gould's Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter, have demonstrated ways in which Victorian theatres served as significant sites for the 'imperial encounter'. Across a variety of theatrical forms, particularly the non-canonical stage, the stage provided a series of visual narratives in which audiences were presented the landscapes, architecture, peoples, and religions of colonised territories.  Moreover, theatre often served as a site for propaganda, educating and enthusing audiences about Britain's vast empire.

On the one hand, we seek papers exploring theatrical representations of the landscapes, religions and peoples Britons encountered as part of their imperial project.  We are interested especially in discussing the ways in which popular entertainments brought the empire 'home' and how this affected patterns of popular culture, including the gendering of public imperial discourse, the formation of racial attitudes and the construction of national identities. Given recent scholarship on provincial theatre, we especially welcome proposals which investigate connections between the 'local' and the imperial and the role of performance cultures in promoting civic and municipal identities.

On the other hand, we seek proposals which engage the two-way traffic of imperialism: that is, how were Britons and their colonial project represented in overseas sites, both by Britons abroad and those people and landscapes who became the subject of the colonial gaze.

We welcome proposals which engage the following general themes and areas for exploration:

• The 'image' of empire: visual representations in performance (corporeal enactment; the movement of bodies and artefacts; costumes; props; set design and scene painting; etc) and print (playbills; posters; theatricalisation of visual metaphor in periodicals, literary and early film and radio culture)
• Variations and hybridisation of performance culture: intertextual crossovers between sites of representation (pantomime, melodrama, lantern shows, dioramas, minstrelsy, exhibitions, festivals, circus, zoos, etc)
• Performance cultures of celebrity, commemoration and exploration: representation of the military and the navy; of warfare, settlement and conquest; of adventure stories and the patriotic impulse
• Traffic - the mediation of cultural contact zones on the stage: touring companies; dynastic families; performance sites in the colonies; negotiation/subversion of dominant norms through performance.
• Race, Science and Identity: peripheral, metropolitan, national and global formations of culture and identity; stage engagements with evolutionary science and anthropology; gendering of theatrical discourse.

Keynote Speaker: John MacKenzie

Confirmed speakers:

• Jeffrey Richards (Lancaster): Drury Lane - epitome of Empire?
• Kate Newey (Birmingham): Theatrical Utopias
• Marty Gould (South Florida): The Crusoe Tradition/ Anglo-African cultural exchange
• Jim Davis (Warwick): Dynastic theatrical families
• Catherine Haill (V&A museum): W.S. Gilbert and the question of patriotism
• Ross Forman (Warwick): Exhibitions and Re-enactment
• Anne Witchard (Westminster): Representations of the Chinese on stage
• Jo Robinson (Nottingham): Seeing the world from the provinces
• Marah Gubar (Pittsburgh): Transatlantic children's touring companies
• Stuart Currie (Worcester): Mid-century warfare on stage: set painting/scenography
• Simon Sladen (Winchester): Race-relations and 20thC pantomime's Victorianism
• Jane Pritchard (V&A museum): Dancing the Empire: Imperialism on the ballet stage
• Veronica Kelly (Queensland): Australia

CFP: Edited Collection: Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture (5/15/2012; 6/30/2012)

How was the rise of scientific medicine in the Victorian era appropriated and adapted by popular culture? This essay collection explores the relationship between the increasingly specialized medical disciplines and a variety of texts and contexts, including popular (non-canonical) literature, journalism, advertisements, home medical and nursing manuals, and lectures and exhibitions at and mechanics institutes. The collection also offers perspectives on literature's reciprocal influence on diverse health care fields including nursing, pharmacy, medical philanthropy, health care missionary work, advertising, and quackery.

The proposed collection seeks to add to the growing body of scholarship on Victorian scientific and medical writing by considering representations of health care within specifically popular fields.  How can we understand the relationships that existed between consumerism, health care, and popular literature in the Victorian period? When and how was lay practice or its representation complimentary, and when was it a form of resistance to increasingly professionalized and scientific medicine?     How do popular texts and artifacts of the period represent medical and popular health care trends of the era, such as the scientific revolution in Victorian healthcare? How did visual iconography including advertisements reflect changing views of health care practitioners and consumers? We invite interdisciplinary scholarship and work drawn from a range of disciplines: art history, literature, history, anthropology, public health, sociology, and communications to broaden our understanding of the non-elite bodies of professionals, texts, and cultures that influenced Victorian health care policy and practice.

Please send abstracts to Louise Penner (Louise.Penner@umb.edu) or Tabitha Sparks (tabitha.sparks@mcgill.ca) by May 15, 2012, or complete essays (3,000-7,000 words) by June 30, 2012.

Reminder: UpStage: A Journal of Turn-of-the-Century Theatre summer 2012 issue (6/30/2012)

UpStage, a peer-reviewed online publication dedicated to research in turn-of-the-century dramatic literature, theatre, and theatrical culture, is seeking submissions for its Summer 2012 issue. 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 by Rivendale Press at www.oscholars.com, as part of our expanding coverage of the different cultural manifestations of the fin de siècle.

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 by June 30, 2012, as MS Word attachments only, to both

Dr. Helena Gurfinkel, Department of English Language and Literature, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Edwardsville, IL, USA at hgurfin@siue.edu and Dr. Michelle C. Paull, Drama Programme, St. Mary's University College, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, TW1, 4SX, England, at michelle.paull@smuc.ac.uk.

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.

Seminar: Making of Modernity (3/21/2012)

The Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity at the University of Birmingham is pleased to announce the first seminar in its new series, The Making of Modernity.  

The speakers are:

• Sue Currell (University of Sussex): Painting the Town Red:  New Masses Magazine and Communist Partying in the 1930s.
• Clare Pettitt and Mark Turner (King’s College, University of London): The Distance of Print: Global Networks in the Nineteenth Century

The seminar will be held on the Edgbaston Campus, 21 March 2012, 4-6pm, in Arts 103.

Full details are available on the Centre’s website here:
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/culturalmodernity 

You can download the poster here: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-artslaw/culturalmodernity/march-symposium.pdf

New at Victorian Poetry Network

Please visit us at www.victorianpoetry.net for new blogs on W. M. Rossetti's "Shelley's Heart", information on Robert Browning bicentenary celebrations, and Poetry/Ladies/Slang. We're also adding to the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry all the time (currently standing at 1759 poems and 684 poets).

Reminder: "The Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture" postdoctoral research fellowships (4/2/2012)

Applications are invited for 6 post-doctoral fellows to work on the European Research Council funded interdisciplinary, collaborative project entitled The Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture, to be located in the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge.

Applications are encouraged with regard to any relevant field including history, art history, classics, literary studies, Jewish studies, history of archaeology, history of education, cultural history, history of scholarship, theology, history of biblical interpretation, philosophy, history of science, Egyptology, Assyriology. Applicants may propose to work on any relevant aspect of the five major themes of the project: the bible in and as history; the bible in and as fiction; the bible and its institutions; the material bible; archaeology and the bible.

As well as completing the proposed research project, fellows will be expected to help develop, organize and contribute to further collaborative and interdisciplinary research on the themes of the project; help develop, organize and participate in the group's weekly reading group, termly seminars and colloquia, and yearly conferences; and help select, invite and organize the visits of termly visiting professors.

Applicants are strongly encouraged to read the further particulars, available on http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/page/1093/bible-antiquity.htm, where you will also find details of the project and how to apply. Applicants must hold a PhD in a relevant field by the application deadline of 2 April 2012.

Limit of tenure: Appointment is for five years, from 1 September 2012, and is non-renewable.
 

Closing Date: 2 April 2012

Please get in touch with Catherine Hurley (ch335@cam.ac.uk) if you would like any further information.

Call for Nominations: Perkins Prize for books published in 2011 (6/1/2012)

ISSN Perkins Prize

http://narrative.georgetown.edu/awards/perkins.php

The prize, awarded to the book making the most significant contribution to the study of narrative published in 2011, consists of $1,000 plus a contribution of $500 toward expenses for the winning author to attend the Narrative Conference where the award will be presented. For books published in 2011, please send inquiries or nominations (the name of the book is sufficient) to the Chair of the judging committee, Professor Brian Richardson: richb@umd.edu. Please send—or have the publisher send—a copy of the nominated book to each of the Committee members at the addresses listed below.  Publisher, third party, and self-nominations are appropriate.  Deadline for nominations is June 1, 2012. The winner will be announced at the Boston MLA Convention in January 2013, and the prize will be presented at the Narrative Conference in Manchester UK in June 2013.  

CFP: MLA 2013 special session "Nineteenth Century Classics" (3/10/2012; 1/3-6/2013)

MLA Convention, Boston 
3-6 January 2013
Special Session: 
Nineteenth Century Classics

Papers are welcome that examine the (aesthetic/poetological) relevance of Greek and Roman classics for nineteenth-century British literature. Please submit 200-word abstracts by 10 March 2012 to Wolfram Keller (wolfram.keller@staff.hu-berlin.de). 

CFP: 2012 Trollope Prize “Trollope and His World” (6/1/2012)

The Trollope Prize

Awarded annually to the best undergraduate and graduate essay on the work of Anthony Trollope

Call for Submissions: “Trollope and His World”

Submissions may include essays focusing exclusively on the works of Anthony Trollope; comparative essays on Trollope and other writers; essays examining Trollope’s work and career in the larger context of Victorian history, culture and society; historical or literary essays on topics central to Trollope’s work and illuminated by his work; or essays on the reception of Trollope’s work or on his larger cultural  influence.

Undergraduate Award: $1,000

Graduate Award: $2,000

There is a $500 award for the undergraduate's faculty mentor.

Deadline: June 1, 2012

For guidelines and submission criteria please visit www.trollopeprize.ku.edu

Sponsored by The English Department and The Hall Center for the Humanities at The University of Kansas

Reminder: Charles Dickens and the Mid-Victorian Press (3/28-31/2012)

Charles Dickens and the Mid-Victorian Press, 1850–70

Wednesday 28th March–Saturday 31st March 2012

Department of English, University of Buckingham, Buckingham MK18 1EG

In conjunction with the Victorian Studies Centre at the University of Leicester, the University of Buckingham is delighted to announce an international Dickens Bicentenary conference on 28-31 March 2012, featuring the launch of the Dickens Journals Online project (www.djo.org.uk). Our list of speakers includes: Laurel Brake, Iain Crawford, Judith Flanders, Holly Furneaux, Louis James, Gail Marshall, Robert Patten, Joanne Shattock, Michael Slater, John Sutherland, John Tulloch and Cathy Waters.

Household Words and All the Year Round are key mid-century weekly journals, showcasing the work of over 350 contributors as well as that of their illustrious founder and ‘Conductor.’ Critical analysis of their contents is an increasingly diverse and dynamic field, soon to be assisted by an open-access scholarly
online edition (see www.djo.org.uk) based at the University of Buckingham. This international conference aims to position Household Words and All the Year Round within the broader context of nineteenth-century periodical culture, through invited papers and contributions from experts in these and a range of rival publications, and website workshops.

For further information and to book full conference or individual day tickets, please visit: http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/djo

If you have any queries then please contact djo@buckingham.ac.uk.

Last Chance to register for Dickens's World (3/7-8/2012)

The free online conference 'Dickens's World' takes place this Wednesday and Thursday - don't miss out on your chance to register!

Register for free now at http://dickensworld.wordpress.com/

Video addresses will be presented by:

• David Paroissien: Looking Back and Looking Forward: Shifting Perspectives in Dickens's Fiction
• John Bowen: Beginning the World
• Anne Stiles: Psychology, gender, and the brain in Dickens scholarship

The event provides an opportunity for an international group of scholars to discuss the work of one of the world's most important authors. The emphasis is on illustrating the many ways in which Dickens influenced, and was influenced by, his contact with other countries. More broadly, we hope the conference will encourage online discussion about the social, cultural and technological milieu in which (and of which) Dickens wrote.

We're delighted to announce that the following papers will be featured at the upcoming online conference Dickens' World. These will be freely available and open for discussion:

• 'Dickens on the Chinese Screen', Ting Guo
• 'Global Dickens', John O. Jordan
• 'The Manly Mind? Revisiting the Victorian 'Sex in Brain' Debate', Rob Boddice
• 'Testing a Civilisation: Charles Dickens on the American Penitentiary system', David Wilson
• 'Victorian Print Culture, Journalism and the Novel', Matthew Rubery

An additional 20 articles will be available for free during the conference.

CFP: The Pre-Raphaelite Society Essay Prize (12/31/2012)

The John Pickard Essay Prize

You are invited to enter a monograph of not more than 2000 words for The John Pickard Essay Prize. The monograph may be on any individual related to the Pre-Raphaelite circle.

The winner will receive £100 prize and publication in the Spring 2013 Review and subsequently the essays of runners-up may also be published.  The final decision will be made by the Committee of the Pre-Raphaelite Society. Entries are to be received by the Editor by 31st  December 2012, and may be emailed to serena@serenatrowbridge.co.uk or serena.trowbridge@bcu.ac.uk.

Deadline Extended: VISAWUS 2012 Conference on Victorian Transnationalism (3/15/2012; 10/11-13/2012)

VISAWUS 2012 Conference

Victorian Transnationalism: The Atlantic Legacy in the Long 19th Century

The Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States (VISAWUS) announces its 17th annual conference to be held Oct. 11-13,  2012, during the height of the fall foliage season, on the campus of SUNY Plattsburgh in Plattsburgh, NY, which is situated on beautiful Lake Champlain (across from Burlington, VT), and an hour south of Montreal.

Our Keynote Speaker will be Amanda Claybaugh, Professor of English at Harvard University, author of The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (Cornell, 2007).

The focus of this year's conference is Victorian Transnationalism, with particular emphasis on the Atlantic legacy in the long 19th century.  As the site of a decisive American victory in the War of 1812, Plattsburgh is a testament to the fraught history of the “special relationships” between Britain and her neighbors across the pond. The town is home to an annual re-enactment of the Battle of Plattsburgh as well as historical sites relevant for scholars of the nineteenth century. We encourage papers across all disciplines exploring various aspects of the relations among and between the UK, Canada, the US, and other nations and regions across the Americas.

To submit: By March 15, 2012, email 300-word abstracts and a 1-page CV (name on BOTH) to: Genie Babb at gbabb001@plattsburgh.edu.

Please note: Graduate student papers are eligible for the William H. Scheuerle Graduate Student Paper Award ($300.00).

For more information, please see http://visawus.org/conferences.html

CFP: Building Ethnic and National Identities through Life Writing (3/8/2012; 1/3-6/2013)

Building Ethnic and National Identities through Life Writing

a panel of the Biography, Autobiography, and Life Writing  division

Historically and today, autobiographies and biographies have often been deployed to help construct ("imagine" in B. Anderson's terms) an ethic, national, or other  type of community in many places of the world. Please note that the submission must have to do with a how a life writing text has contributed to the building of a certain community.

Send 250-word abstracts and 1-page cv to Irene Kacandes (irene.kacandes@dartmouth.edu) by March 8. 

CFP: Hard Cash: Money, Property, Economics and the Marketplace in Victorian Popular Culture (4/30/2012; 7/11-13/2012)

Victorian Popular Fiction Association
4th Annual Conference, 11th – 13th July 2012
Institute for English Studies, University of London

Theme:  Hard Cash: Money, property, economics and the marketplace in Victorian Popular Culture

Keynote speakers: Regenia Gagnier: "The Globalization of Victorian Popular Fiction" and Deborah Wynne: ‘Hades! The Ladies! Male Drapers and Female Shoppers'

Guest Speakers:  David Waller, author of The Perfect Man: The Muscular Life and Times of Eugen Sandow Victorian Strongman and Helen Rappaport author of Beautiful For Ever: Madame Rachel of Bond Street– Cosmetician, Con-Artist, and Blackmailer

The VPFA conference is now an established event on the annual conference timetable and offers a friendly and invigorating opportunity for established academics and post graduate students to share their current research.  Our theme this year is Hard Cash: Money, property, economics and the marketplace in Victorian Popular Culture.  This theme enables us to develop the interdisciplinary study
of nineteenth-century popular culture, and changing attitudes to money and economics across the period.

Papers relevant to the theme may be drawn from any aspect of Victorian popular culture and may address literal or metaphorical representations of the theme.

We remain committed to the revival of interest in understudied female and male popular writers which is pivotal to the reputation this conference has established.   We invite proposals for 20 minute papers on any aspect of the above theme.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

• Money, Economics and literary production
• Literary contracts, agents, serialization, syndication, cheap editions, copyright law
• Advertising and the popular press
• Money and the popular press
• Money and class in Victorian popular culture
• New money in Victorian popular culture
• Business and the marketplace
• Inheritance
• Married Women’s Property and Divorce Law
• Public readings, stage adaptation
• Celebrity
• Theft, blackmail and swindling
• Financial scandals
• Banks and bankers
• Shopping and consumerism

Postgraduate students are particularly welcome.

Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words to either Jane Jordan (j.jordan@kingston.ac.uk) or Greta Depledge (depledgeg@aol.com) by: Monday 30th April 2012.

For further information about the Victorian Popular Fiction Association, see: http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/research/victorian/

Imagined Civities: Cities and Alternatives in the 19th Century (6/8/2012)

Imagined Civities: 

Cities and Alternatives in the 19th Century

Organised by ‘The Guild: Interdisciplinary 19th Century Studies’, at the University of Cambridge

English Faculty, 8th June 2012

Keynote Speaker

Prof. Peter Mandler

Faust comes to town:  The ‘creative destruction’ of the Victorian city

Ancient and Ruined Cities

Dr. Marcus Waithe

The reconstruction of cities

Lucila Mallart

The modern construction of a medieval image of Barcelona (1839-1897)

Catherine Redford

‘In every street is solitude’: The deserted city in Romantic Last Man literature

The City in Fiction

Dr. Bénédicte Coste

‘Beata Urbs’: Pater and the city

Ewa Szypula

Urban decay: Balzac and the debris of the everyday

Lili Sarnyai    

‘The huge oppressive amusing city’: late 19th century London in Henry James’s ‘The Lesson of the Master’

The Environment of the City

Prof. Dean Hawkes  

Sir John Soane and the climate of 19th century London

Dr. Oriel Prizeman

Imagining purity

Owen Holland

‘And dream of London, small, and white, and clean’: William Morris and the re-visioning of the metropolis

Living with the Past

Prof. Rosemary Sweet

Excavation, improvement and urban history in the 1840s

Dr. Kate Hill

The representation of the urban and urban history in museums, 1850-1914

Estelle Murail

Imaginative reconfigurations of the cityscape and belatedness: the case of Thomas De Quincey and Walter Benjamin

If you would like to attend, please send a cheque for £10 (£5 students) payable to ‘Austen Saunders’, to Austen Saunders, Wolfson College, Cambridge, CB3 9BB, with your name, email, title, and affiliation.  Please also let us know if you would you like to attend the conference dinner (at your own expense).  For more information on The Guild please visit: http://theguild.posterous.com/

CFP: 20th International Thomas Hardy Conference and Festival (3/31/2012; 8/18-26/2012)

20th International Thomas Hardy Conference and Festival

Dorchester, UK, 18-26 August 2012

We are soliciting papers from Hardy scholars around the world for the Twentieth International Thomas Hardy Conference and Festival which will take place in Dorchester, UK from 18-26th August, 2012. Proposals should take the form of an abstract not exceeding 250 words max for papers of 20 minutes duration. These will be delivered in chaired parallel sessions throughout the week as part of the academic program of lectures, seminars, talks and the postgraduate symposium. Proposals may address any aspect of Hardy’s life, work and thought but we are particularly keen to encourage papers focusing on the following areas:

• Hardy and Genre (particularly the short story)
• Hardy and the Visual and/or Plastic Arts
• Hardy and Intertextuality
• Hardy and Cultural Heritage
• Wessex and the wider world
• Hardy and international politics
• International responses to the work of Thomas Hardy
• Hardy’s influence on poets, writers and musicians (including popular musicians) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

Proposals should be addressed to: ‘Call for Papers’ – ( The Thomas Hardy Society) Dr. Jane Thomas, Department of English University of Hull, East Yorkshire HU6 7RX

Email: j.e.thomas@hull.ac.uk

All submissions will be read and adjudicated by an academic panel.

The closing date is 31st March 2012.

The best of the papers given at the Conference will be eligible for publication in the peer-reviewed Thomas Hardy Journal appearing in Autumn 2012. Conference delegates contributing to the panels will be required to register for the Conference and Festival (‘Day Rates’ can be negotiated) and will be responsible for finding their own accommodation, which they are advised to do as soon as possible as accommodation is likely to be scarce in August in view of the Sailing Olympics.

A small contingency fund is available to assist accepted speakers who are not affiliated to an Institute of Higher Education or who might require financial assistance to attend the Conference and Festival. Decisions will be made by the adjudicating panel on a case by case basis.