CFP: MVSA 2013 "Victorian Belief/Victorian Doubt" (10/31/2012; 4/12-14/2013)

Midwest Victorian Studies Association (MVSA) 2013 Conference

Victorian Belief/Victorian Doubt

April 12-14, Cleveland, Ohio

For our 2013 conference we invite presentations, panels, and entertainments from scholars of art, music, history, history of science, and literature on topics related to Victorian belief and doubt. These could include religions, superstitions, and convictions of all sorts, and their obverse: skepticisms, denials, and uncertainties. With its single, shared session format, MVSA offers a unique opportunity to present work to an undivided audience. Participants are also invited to submit essays for an edited volume of articles based on conference proceedings.

Sample topics might include, but are not limited, to the following:

• Religious controversies; conversion and de-conversion
• Musical or artistic expressions of faith, belief and doubt
• “The invisible hand,” political economy, and “faith in the market”
• Ethics and morality
• Death and the afterlife
• Missions and missionaries
• Secular faiths: agnosticism, Positivism, the “religion of Socialism”
• Science as a system of belief; skepticism; the “unknowable”
• Folk beliefs: medicine, superstitions, witchcraft, magic
• Eclectic faiths: Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, etc.
• Social class and religion

We encourage submissions for sessions of varied formats; panels devoted to teaching the Victorians; and proposals relating to digital Victoriana. Proposals for 20-minute papers or longer panels should submit 500-word abstracts and vitae by October 31, 2012, to conferencesubmissions@midwestvictorian.org; if you do not receive a reply within 3-5 days, please re-send.

We are pleased to have as our 2013 plenary speakers Timothy Larsen, McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College and author of Crises of Doubt: Honest Faith in 19th-Century England (2006) and A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (2012); and Julie Melnyk of the University of Missouri-Columbia, author of Women’s Theology in 19th-Century Britain (1998) and Victorian Religion: Faith and Life in Britain (2008).

Even if you do not submit a paper, please plan to attend!  For more information, please visit www.midwestvictorian.org.