Reminder: News of the World Essay Collection (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: 19th, 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: Robert Browning and Victorian Poetry at 200 (6/30/2012; 11/1-3/2012)

‘Robert Browning and Victorian Poetry at 200’, Nov 1-3, 2012. Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University.

To celebrate Robert Browning’s bicentenary in 2012, the Armstrong Browning Library is hosting an international conference that will focus on Browning’s importance within the broader field of Victorian poetry and poetics, and within Victorian studies more generally. Proposals are invited for short position papers, to be circulated in advance and discussed in seminars, on the themes detailed below. In addition to these theme-based seminars, conference attendees will also have the chance to participate in seminar discussions centered around particular Browning texts, led by notable Victorian poetry scholars.

Confirmed speakers and seminar leaders include Herbert Tucker, Yopie Prins, Isobel Armstrong, Daniel Karlin, Joe Phelan, Linda K. Hughes, Marjorie Stone, Donald Hair, Tricia Lootens, Warwick Slinn, Mary Ellis Gibson, Matthew Campbell, Charles LaPorte and Erik Gray. 

The Armstrong Browning Library is an internationally renowned research center for the study of the Brownings and nineteenth-century literature and culture, located on the campus of Baylor University in Waco, Texas: http://www.browninglibrary.org/

To assist graduate students and early career academics to attend the conference, the ABL is offering 5 bursaries of $200, open to participants who are either currently graduate students or are within five years of receiving their PhD. Staff holding tenure-track positions are unlikely to be considered for these bursaries unless there are special circumstances. If you wish to apply, please state this clearly when you submit your proposal and attach a 1-page CV.

2-300 word proposals should be emailed to browning2012@baylor.edu. Please specify in your email which seminar you wish to participate in.

Deadline for proposals: 30 June 2012

Deadline to submit 5-page position paper: 1 October 2012

Further details will be available on the ABL’s website in due course. Any queries should be sent to the lead organizer, Kirstie Blair, at the conference email address: browning2012@baylor.edu.

SEMINARS

‘Browning’s Beginnings and Endings’ with Mary Ellis Gibson.

This seminar invites participants to reflect on beginnings and endings.  How does Browning begin and end a career? or a volume of poetry? or an individual poem?  From large to small, from the shape of a career, to the shape of a volume, to the shape of a particular poem, what can we learn when we reflect on beginnings and endings in Browning’s work?  What kinds of disjunctions, what kinds of coherence, what kinds of surprises do we come upon by focusing on beginnings and / or endings?  Participants will pre-circulate 5-page papers in which they reflect on some feature of beginning or ending in Browning's poetry.

‘Browning’s Contexts’ with Charles LaPorte.

How does Browning look from the vantage of the twenty-first century? This seminar will address the importance of historical, cultural, and social contexts for understanding this most canny and modern of Victorian poets. It invites participants to consider Browning's poetry in relation to Victorian politics, economics, religion, science, secularization, transatlanticism, globalization, etc. Participants will circulate a 5-page paper that addresses a specific historical context and some theoretical reflections for our discussion of its importance to Browning studies today.

‘The Sound of Browning’ with Matthew Campbell.

Alfred Tennyson said to William Allingham, ‘it doesn't matter so much in poetry written for the intellect - as much of Browning’s is, perhaps; but in mine it's necessary to know how to sound it properly’. This panel will suggest that this seemingly-hoary topic is never incidental to the reading of Browning. Participants are invited to circulate 5-page papers which might address how it relates to old and new thinking about voice and performance as well as Victorian and contemporary phenomenologies of rhythm and rhyme. The panel will think not just about the sound of Browning's verse but also broader matters of intellectual matter and poetic form. It may suggest new ways to sound Browning properly, testing his innovations against the still-pertinent matter of Browning’s technique and its vexed aesthetic relationships with experiment, proportion and sense.

‘The Brownings and Love’ with Erik Gray.

A hundred years ago, both Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were thought of largely (and in EBB’s case, primarily) as love poets.  But the situation now is entirely different.  Partly in reaction to a surfeit of sentimental or biographical readings, Browning criticism has for many years consciously downplayed the significance of love in their poetry.  And yet it is not only biographical curiosity that might lead a reader to take an interest in this topic.  Love – divine, familial, but above all erotic – forms the central concern of many of the Brownings’ most important poems, and both poets made original and transformative contributions to the rich tradition of English love poetry. In the seminar, we will reconsider the Brownings’ treatment of love, with the aim, if possible, of tracing their mutual influence, as well as their response to the wider tradition. Participants will pre-circulate 5-page position papers relating to this topic.

Reminder: Victorian Literature and Culture special issue, The Nineteenth-Century Pacific Rim (10/15/2013)

Victorian Literature and Culture
Special Issue: The Nineteenth-Century Pacific Rim
Guest editor: Tamara S. Wagner
Deadline for submissions: 15 October 2013

Victorian Literature and Culture seeks contributions to a special issue on The Pacific Rim, with a focus on its Victorian culture and Anglophone literature by regional writers as well as British settlers and travellers. Were the Victorians aware of the significance that the expanding settler empire, its intersection with that of other colonial powers, business routes across them, and increasingly also, critical representations of the imperialist metropole from the vantage point of emergent colonial centres had for nineteenth-century culture on a new, more global scale? How did they represent the area and geopolitical space that we have now come to know as the Pacific Rim? What were the effects of cultural exchanges on nineteenth-century music, architecture, art, museums, religion, literature, and on theories of the aesthetic or of culture at large? Did these effects change perceptions of the region and of the British Empire’s, or British presence’s, position within it?


To address the literature as well as the social and political issues of the Pacific Rim as a whole may have become a standard strategy in the discussion of contemporary politics and culture. Similarly, the study of nineteenth-century transatlanticism is now established as an acknowledged and continuously widening field. But how did the Victorians conceive of and describe travelling, doing business, and living in a diverse geopolitical region that encompasses such vastly different areas as the settler colonies of Australasia, the British Straits Settlements in Malaya and Singapore, the special status of Hong Kong, and the less formalised presence of the British in Japan or Korea?


This special issue extends the interdisciplinary, transnational analysis prompted by nineteenth-century transatlantic studies to the Pacific Rim. It invites analyses of the cultural developments and interchanges within the region as well as of the changing forms in which these developments manifested themselves in Victorian culture.

Please send inquiries and electronic submissions of full-length papers as attached word documents to tswagner at ntu.edu.sg. The completed papers should be formatted according to MLA style.

All papers will be reviewed by the special topics editor, as appropriate by members of the editorial board, and by the editors of _Victorian Literature and Culture,_ Adrienne Munich and John Maynard. For further information about the journal see
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/english/journal/victorian

Disability & the Victorians: Confronting Legacies (7/30-8/1/2012)

Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies presents

Disability & the Victorians: Confronting Legacies

30th July-1st August 2012

Leeds Trinity University College


The nineteenth century was the period during which disability was conceptualised, categorised, and defined. The industrial revolution, advances in medicine, the emergence of philanthropy and the growth of asylums all played their part in creating what today’s society describes as the medical model of disability. Disability can be traced through many forms: in material culture and literary genres; scientific, medical and official inquiries; art; architecture; the history of disabled charities; disabled people’s experiences; the legacy inherited by disabled people today of the taxonomies and categories of disability – the ‘handicapped’; the ‘deaf and dumb’; the ‘feeble minded’; the blind; the ‘imbecile’ the ‘idiot’ and the ‘cretin’ – the legacy of the relationship between the body, the visual, the scientific and the literary text; the intersection of disability, theories of evolution, the emergence of the disciplines of statistics, social sciences and anthropology, eugenics and degeneration.  This conference seeks to address conceptualisations of disability in the Victorian period and their legacy(ies); the ways in which we can draw disabled voices and testimonies together to construct ‘the long view’, the intersection of disability studies and Victorian studies, and the conceptual, disciplinary, and pedagogical issues that arise as a consequence of this research.

Themes will include:      

• Resistance/conformity: subversion, transgression, agency and constraint.    
• The visibility and invisibility of disability: beggars, street sellers, hawkers, freak shows and circuses.    
• Victorian institutions: charities, asylums, schools and clubs.    
• Normalising practices: definitions, constructions, categories and taxonomies.    
• Victorian technologies: assistive and medical.    
• The emergence of specialisms: from audiology to psychiatry.    
• Disability as a moral force for improvement: theology and spiritual enlightenment/development, literature and the school of pain.    
• The formation of Victorian identities: nation, empire, ‘race’.    
• Disability and the fear of loss: national efficiency, eugenics and ‘degeneration’.    
• Medical and cultural histories: medical illustration and advertising, the relationship between the literary, the medical and the scientific text.    
• Acts: Victorian social policy and legal frameworks.    
• Work: employment, employability, the regulated employment and non-employment of disabled people    
• The spaces of disability: art, architecture, environment.    
• Pedagogy: teaching about disability and the disabled in the Victorian period.    
• Representing disability to non-specialist audiences: heritage interpretations, public histories, dictionaries.

This is an interdisciplinary conference, grounded in Victorian Studies, for which the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, being established since 1994 and home of the Journal of Victorian Culture, has a longstanding and influential reputation. Within Victorian Studies, and the humanities more broadly, disability studies has emerging significance (e.g. Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction (2006), Julia Miele Rodas, rev. essay, ‘Mainstreaming Disability Studies?', Victorian Literature and Culture 36.1 (2006), and the Special Issue on 'Victorian Disability' for the Victorian Review (Fall 2009)). The aim of the conference is to bring these two interdisciplinary fields together.

As the history of disability has tended so far to focus on social constructions of disability, in part a reflection of the available sources, a key aim of the conference is to offer a new direction by addressing the experiences or testimonies of those who are disabled and by considering the long-term impact of such social constructions, in order to construct ‘the long view’.   Confirmed Keynote Speakers include:  Joanne Woiak, Ph.D., Disability Studies Program, University of Washington; Professor Martha Stoddard Holmes, Ph.D., Professor and Chair of Literature and Writing Studies, Cal State University San Marcos, USA, 'Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture'; Professor Vanessa Toulmin, Director of National Fairground Archive, National Fairground Archive (Western Bank Library) University of Sheffield.

Over fifty papers have been accepted for this three-day international event. There is also opportunity to visit the Thackray Medical Museum, for an object-handling session, and I am pleased to inform you that the programme for the above conference has now been published on our webpage:  http://www.leedstrinity.ac.uk/NEWS_EVENTS/DISABILITY-VICTORIANS/Pages/ConferenceProgramme.aspx

If you anticipate that the conference registration fee might cause you financial hardship, please contact the organisers.  Prof Karen Sayer, DPhil, F. R. His. S.  Professor of Social and Cultural History Director of Programme: History Department of Humanities Leeds Trinity University College Brownberrie Lane Leeds LS18 5HD Tel: 0113 2837212

Edited Collection CFP: Pedagogies of the End: Teaching and Knowledge at the Fin de Siècle (8/1/2012)

Co-Editors: Dan Bivona, Arizona State University, and Helena Gurfinkel, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

500-word abstracts and 1-paragraph bios to dbivona@asu.edu and hgurfin@siue.edu by August 1st, 2012.

This collection explores a possible relationship between the fin in the fin de siècle (the turn of the nineteenth century) and pedagogy. We welcome essays about fin de siècle literature and culture that theorize

*teaching the end/decline, or teaching at the end

*the pedagogical/didactic, implications of catastrophic thinking

*teaching as inaugurating, offering (or not) a new beginning after the end.

Geographically and theoretically, this volume it is not limited to Britain, the US, and Continental Europe. We encourage submissions that leave the precincts of the “West.”

We invite contributions focusing on

• the reinventions of Foucault’s systems of power and knowledge as pedagogical strategies
• fin-de-siècle anxieties surrounding physical, moral, and intellectual decline
• didactic representations of a pending catastrophe and attempts to teach how to avoid it.

Examples include but are not limited to

• Max Nordau’s Degeneration
• Thomas Hardy, the Education Reform Act of 1870, and the dangers of literacy
• George Gissing and concerns about declining literary standards
• The didactics of social Darwinism
• Scientia sexualis as a teaching/didactic tool against perversion and degeneration Eugenics, colonialist education, and protecting the “healthy” national/racial body from decline
• The end of traditional womanhood and the fear of the New Woman.
• Fin-de-siècle approaches to paideia
• Religion, pedagogy, and eschatology at the fin-de-siècle.

"Who Owns the Legacy of Oscar Wilde?" conference and exhibition at Drew University

"Who Owns the Legacy of Oscar Wilde?"
An Interdisciplinary Conference
Drew University, Madison, NJ
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?

Join us for a two day conference where we attempt to answer these questions and others.

Presenters include: Susan Bernardo, Felicia J. Ruff, Fred Roden, Shelley Salamensky, Philip Smith, Patrick W. Bixby, Loretta Clayton, Margaret D. Stetz, Anne Margaret Daniel, Marylu Hill, Jonathan Rose, and Christine Kinealy.

To register & get more information, visit http://depts.drew.edu/grad/wilde/Main.html.


"Oscar Wilde's Legacy: A Selection from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection"
Exhibition at Drew University Library
2 May-2 June 2012

Oscar Wilde died in exile in France in 1900. But his writings, his plays, his wit, and his fame lived on. This display, drawn from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, on loan from the University of Delaware Library, focuses on how Wilde's friends and associates dealt with his legacy in the early twentieth century. Among the figures represented  by books and other items are Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde's lover; the artist Aubrey Beardsley; the caricaturist  Max Beerbohm; and the novelist Ada Leverson.

Birkbeck Forum for C19 Studies: Arts Week events (5/14-18/2012)

Birkbeck’s fifth annual Arts Week takes place 14–18 May. There are a number of events with a nineteenth-century focus:

Monday 14 May, 6.00 pm
Helen Cowie (York): ‘Doing a Roaring Trade: Travelling Menageries in Nineteenth-Century Britain’
Room B13, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD
Free, but register here: <http://romanticobjectscowie.eventbrite.com>

Tuesday 15 May, 7.45 pm
Reading of Virginia Woolf’s play Freshwater
Keynes Library, Room 114, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD
Free, but register here: <http://vwfreshwater.eventbrite.com>

Wednesday 16 May, 6.00 pm
Holly Furneaux (Leicester): ‘Dickens’s Gentle Soldiers: Fiction and Journalism of the Crimean War’
The lecture will be followed (at 7.30 pm) by a launch event for Dickens and Feeling, the new issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century guest edited by Bethan Carney and Catherine Waters <http://19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/issue/view/82/showToc>
Room 101, Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square, WC1
Free, but register here: <http://gentlesoldiers.eventbrite.com>

Thursday 17 May, 6.00 pm
Panel discussion on Victorian Sentimentality, with Nicola Bown, Vicky Mills, and Alison Smith
Room B06, Malet Street, WC1E 7HX
Free, but reigster here: <http://victoriansentimentality.eventbrite.com>

Further details about Arts Week events are available here: <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/about-us/our-events/arts-week-2012>.

Programme for Summer Term 2012
Our programme for the summer term includes Robert Bud (24 May), Garrett Stewart and Matthew Rubery (7 June), and Ellen Garvey (20 June). Further details can be found at <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/research_cncs/our-events/programme-for-birkbeck-forum-for-nineteenth-century-studies-summer-term-2012>.

Email <birkbeckforum@gmail.com> to join our mailing list, and follow us on Twitter @BirkbeckC19.

We look forward to seeing you at a Forum event soon!

CFP: The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today

The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today (ISSN 2049-3215) invites contributors to submit scholarly papers (8,000-10,000 or 3500-4000 words), ideas for book reviews, exhibition reviews, news and events, titles of publications and projects in progress, and creative work and abstracts related to John Ruskin and related nineteenth-century scholarship. Scholarly papers should be submitted at least six to eight months in advance to allow for the refereeing and revisions process.

The Eighth Lamp is an online and double blind refereed journal published by Rivendale Press, UK. It is led and managed by Dr Anuradha Chatterjee (Founding Editor and Co-Editor), Lecturer in History and Theory in Architecture and Design, University of Tasmania, and Dr Laurence Roussillon-Constanty (Co-Editor), Senior Lecturer in English, Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France. The journal is also complemented by a ten-strong Editorial Board that provides intellectual and pedagogical support and leadership to the journal. It is part of The Oscholars group of journals (www.oscholars.com) edited
by David Charles Rose.

The scope of The Eighth Lamp is multidisciplinary and it welcomes submissions related to art, religion, historiography, social criticism, tourism, economics, philosophy, science, architecture, photography, preservation, cinema, and theatre. The Oscholars site has a monthly audience of over 45,000. The journal is circulated to over 100 scholars and academics internationally. The journal is listed in key Victorian studies and nineteenth century literature, culture, and visual studies forums. Previous issues of The Eighth Lamp can be accessed via the following link: http://www.oscholars.com/Ruskin/index.htm.

Please email submissions directly to the editors at theeighthlamp@gmail.com.

CFP: Octavia Hill and the Remaking of British Society (6/1/2012; 9/27-28/3012)

'Nobler Imaginings and Mightier Struggles': 

Octavia Hill and the Remaking of British Society

Sutton House, London - 27-28 September 2012

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

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.

CFP: Going Underground: Travel Beneath the Metropolis 1863-2013 (7/13/2012; 1/17-18/2013)

Going Underground: Travel Beneath the Metropolis 1863-2013

A Conference to Mark the 150th Anniversary of the London Underground

http://www.history.ac.uk/events/london-underground

17 January 2013 - 18 January 2013

10 January 2013 will mark the 150th Anniversary of the public opening of the Metropolitan Railway in London. It was the world’s first urban rapid transport system to run partly in subterranean sections. As the precursor of today’s London Underground, it was not only a pioneer of technological and engineering advances, but also instigated new spatial, political, cultural and social realms that are now considered to be synonymous with London and modern urban experiences across the globe.

The Centre for Metropolitan History, Institute of Historical Research, is marking the anniversary by organising a two-day conference dedicated to the history and use of the London Underground.

Taking the construction and opening of the Metropolitan Railway as a departure point, this conference seeks to explore the past, present and future of the London Underground from a variety of perspectives that investigate its histories, geographies, cultures, politics and social characteristics.  

The conference organisers invite proposals for papers of 15-20 minutes in length. Submissions are welcome on any subject related to the general theme, but may benefit from connecting with one or more of the following sub-themes.

Underground Histories

• Micro-narratives and marginalised perspectives: individual or oppressed stories from the Underground
• Counter or unrealised histories: unofficial accounts or unfulfilled plans

Underground Geographies

• The relationship between the Underground, city and nation
• Subterranean places and cultural landscapes
• Private and public spaces

Cultures of the Underground

• Representations in literature, music, film, photography and art
• Heritage, identity and memory
• Enthusiasts, collectors, explorers, popular pursuits and pastimes

The Politics of the Underground

• Power and contestation: the Underground as a site of protest, control and propaganda
• The politics of transport planning policy
• The Underground as a platform for strikes and political manifestos

The Social Underground

• Security, surveillance and crime
• Mobility and technology
• Everyday life and experiences

While the focus of the conference is on the London Underground, we encourage papers that provide an international comparative perspective.

Organiser(s): Carlos Lopez Galviz, Sam Merrill, Centre for Metropolitan History

Event Location: Senate House, Malet Street, LondonWC1E 7HU, United Kingdom

Call for papers deadline: 13 July 2012. Please send abstracts and an author biography (including institutional affiliation) each of no more than 250 words by Friday 13 July 2012 by email to the Centre for Metropolitan History at ihrcmh@sas.ac.uk

Registration for this conference will open in September 2012

Contact details:

Olwen Myhill (ihrcmh@sas.ac.uk) Centre for Metropolitan History Institute of Historical Research Senate House Malet Street London WC1E 7HU

Contact phone:  +44 (0)20 7862 8790

Contact fax: +44 (0)20 7862 8793

Join Victorianists for "Summer Convivial" (6/8/2012)

Summer Convivial at Rath al Fresco (west lawn of Caltech's Athenaeum)
5:00-?, Friday, June 8

Join Victorianists in the Pasadena, California area for the inaugural "Summer Convivial" to help plan an on-going series of events for the remainder of the year. All topics are welcome for discussion. Arnold Schmidt (CSUS) and Kathleen Peck (Reader, Huntington Library) will have tables reserved based on the number attending. Please contact Kathleen Peck (kcpeck@earthlink.net) by Wednesday, June 6 if you wish to come.

CFP: M/MLA Special Session “Bernard Shaw and Debt” (6/1/2012; 11/8-11/2012)

Final call for papers for the special session on "Bernard Shaw and Debt" to be held at the 54th Annual M/MLA Convention will be held in Cincinnati, Ohio from November 8-11, 2012 at the Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza.

Sponsored by the International Shaw Society, this session seeks papers focused on borrowers and lenders in Bernard Shaw's plays, debts Shaw and/or his plays owe to other thinkers, writers, and political figures, or Shavian debts accrued by contemporary plays, playwrights, or theorists.

Please submit 300-400-word abstracts by June 1 to session chair Dr. Christopher Wixson, Eastern Illinois University, cmwixson@eiu.edu.

The call is posted at http://www.luc.edu/mmla/callforpapers.html#ss. For all the details on the conference, scroll to the top of the address above or go directly to http://www.luc.edu/mmla/callforpapers.html.

Reminder: special number of Victorian Periodicals Review on the theme of "Work and Leisure" (6/30/2012)

  

This is a reminder that the deadline to submit essays on the theme of Work and Leisure for special number of Victorian Periodicals Review is fast approaching. I also need to inform you of a change of email address to which you should send your essay. Please find again the CFP that was distributed last summer.


Essays of 6,000-7,000 words are sought for a special number of Victorian Periodicals Review on the theme of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals.

Much of the Victorian Press was built on an interdependency of work and leisure. But what was the “leisure” that the press promoted and how different was it from work? Reading the press itself is obviously an insufficient answer: reading could be work for teachers, reviewers or those trying to entertain children or colleagues. To what extent, indeed, was leisure but a ruse? How far did the Victorian press inscribe women’s domestic labour as a form of leisure, or male work as pleasurable? More generally, how did the press fit into the wider context of the entertainment industry: the theatre, travel, music, exhibitions, sport - and shopping?

Not all of the press was devoted to leisure and its limits. What of that enormous sector that unashamedly named their focus as work-related: the trade and professional press, newspaper pages devoted to the stock market and commodity prices, articles worrying over women in the workplace, over the masculinity of the civil servant, or over the demands of labourers on strike?

Finally, what of the “cultural work” of the Victorian press? What was the function of the press in and on society? How might that cultural work relate to the pleasures of leisure?

Please submit completed manuscripts by 30 June 2012 (for publication in 2013) in Word (no PDFs please) to andrew.king@canterbury.ac.uk. In the meantime, informal queries or expressions of interest are welcome.

Please submit completed manuscripts by 30 June 2012 (for publication in 2013) in Word (no PDFs please) to a.king@greenwich.ac.uk. (Please note my new email address as given here.)

I look forward to the pleasure of reading your submission.
With best wishes,

Andrew King

University of Greenwich

Colonial Girlhood Conference, University of Melbourne (6/13-14/2012)

Victorianists, especially those located in Australia and New Zealand, might be interested in attending the upcoming "Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls" conference at the University of Melbourne from 13-14 June.

Parallel conference sessions will include speakers from disciplines including English, history, cultural studies, art history, cinema and education. The program includes participants from across Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, South Africa, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, and the United States.

The conference includes keynote speeches by Professor Angela Woollacott (Australian National University) and Associate Professor Cecily Devereux (University of Alberta) and the launch of the online exhibition "Home & Away: Girls of the British Empire" (hosted by the Girl Museum).

The draft conference program and registration information are available at our conference website: http://www.avsa.unimelb.edu.au/colonialgirls.html

Reminder: Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Literature and Culture (5/30/2012)

CFP: Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Literature and Culture

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

The sixth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Greta Depledge (Royal Holloway), is dedicated to a reassessment of nineteenth-century constructions and understandings of sex, courtship and marriage. Although the heteronormative and companionate marriage was vital for economic and reproductive reasons - as well as romantic impulses - recent scholarship has illuminated its status as but one of several diverse paradigms of marriage/sexual relationship accessible to the Victorians
Across the nineteenth century, profound crises of faith, extensive legal reforms and the new insights afforded by the emergent discipline of anthropology all contributed to a culture of introspection about the practice of marriage, at the same time as advances in science and medicine opened up new interpretations and definitions of sexual practices and preferences.

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

• Victorian narratives of queer desire: text and subtext
• Representations of women’s sexuality (angels, whores and spinsters)
• Prudishness and censorship: “deviant” novels and scandalous dramas
• Adultery, bigamy, divorce and other affronts to the ideal of companionate marriage
• Transgressive relationships
• Nineteenth-century marriage law, including prohibited degrees of affinity, property reform and breach of promise
• Representations of sexual innocence and experience (virginity, puberty and prostitution
• Subversion of traditional courtship narratives
• Sex and class: adventuresses, mistresses, sex workers and blackmail
• Customs of the country: courtship conventions, betrothals and bridal nights
• Performance, stylization and parody: gender scripts, consumer culture, theatrical subversion

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. The deadline for submissions is 30 May 2012.

Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com
Website: http://www.victoriannetwork.org/index.php/vn

Reminder: 2012 Trollope Prize (6/1/2012)

The Trollope Prize at the University of Kansas is pleased to announce the judges for the 2012 essay contest, including two returning judges and one new panel member.  The Prize is also pleased to announce the expanded role of The Fortnightly Review in publishing the winning Prize entries for
this year’s contest.

Andrew H. Miller is Professor of English and Director of the Victorian Studies Program at Indiana University Bloomington, as well as the co-editor of Victorian Studies.  He has been a fellow of both the National Humanities Center and the American Council of Learned Societies.  His work has explored nineteenth-century texts by Dickens, Gaskell, and Thackeray, and his recent publications include The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Cornell University Press, 2008).

Deborah Denenholz Morse is Professor of English at the College of William and Mary.  She writes extensively on Trollope, and her monograph, Women in Trollope's Palliser Novels (1987), is credited as one of the earliest feminist studies of Trollope’s work.  She recently delivered a lecture on Trollope’s Doctor Wortle’s School at the University of Kansas and will present at the Trollope Bicentennial Conference in Belgium in 2015.  Her recent publications include The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope's Novels (Ashgate, 2009); among others, an essay on Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right and the work of John Henry Newman is forthcoming in Critical Survey.

Dorice Williams Elliott is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas.  Her work focuses on the Victorian novel, theories of class, and feminist theory.  She has recently received both a fellowship from the Hall Center for the Humanities and a W.T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence.  Her publications include The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England (University of Virginia Press, 2002).  She is currently researching Australian convict literature.

Additionally, the Prize is pleased to announce that The Fortnightly Review, which published last year’s winning graduate essay, will publish both the winning graduate and undergraduate essays from the 2012 contest.  Additionally, the Review will award a modest honorarium to both the graduate and undergraduate winners.

The deadline for entries to both the undergraduate and graduate essay contests is June 1, 2012.  Also please note that recent PhD recipients may enter the graduate contest.  More detailed information on the criteria for entering the contest is available on the Trollope Prize website.

Please see our website http://trollopeprize.ku.edu for more information on the Prize, or e-mail any questions to trollopeprize@ku.edu. You can also now follow the Prize on Twitter at @trollopeprize.

CFP: SAMLA 2012 Special Session: “Memsahib Memoirs: Women Writing the Raj” (6/10/2012; 11/9-11/2012)

Women occupied a unique social space in colonial India. Unlike British men, they did not make political decisions, build roads and bridges, or serve in the army. They were instead expected to manage the household and support their husbands in whatever way was needed to contribute to the maintenance of a smoothly-working imperial project. However, there were many British “memsahibs” who took their observations of empire a step further. Unburdened from the daily political and administrative pressures of running a colony the size of India and having more time to spend at leisure, socializing with other women and encountering Indian natives in the local markets and bazaars, many British women communicated these first-hand observations in a body of literature that has been undervalued by scholars who generally dismiss them as “lady romancers,” while ignoring what their works can tell us about how the British saw themselves and those they colonized.

In keeping with this year’s theme of “Text as Memoir: Tales of Travel, Immigration, and Exile,” this special session examines how these “lady romancers” can also be read as cultural commentators. What do their works tell us about the colonial presence in India? How did their observations of native peoples and landscape differ from traditional male narratives? In what ways do their personal reminiscences complicate the “official” history of the British in India? How can we read their work through the lens of postcolonial theory? Possible topics include subversive elements in Anglo-Indian popular romances, memoirs as cultural/political statements on the British presence in India, women’s travel narratives while journeying across the subcontinent, and housekeeping guides as cultural artifacts. Contributions that highlight the wide-range of women’s writing during the Raj period, from memoirs and personal journals to periodical publications and fictional works, are welcome.

The Convention will be held November 9-11, 2012, at the Sheraton Imperial Hotel and Convention Center, Research Triangle Park, Durham, NC. By June 10, please submit paper proposals of no more than 500 words (along with a short bio) to Melissa Makala, University of South Carolina, at edmundrm@mailbox.sc.edu.

Proposers need not be members of SAMLA to submit, but panelists must be members in order to present.


SAMLA: http://samla.gsu.edu/