Bowdoin post-doc in digital humanities (4/8/2013)

Bowdoin College, in support of its Digital and Computational Studies Initiative, invites applications for a Post-Doctoral Fellow position in the humanities starting Fall 2013. The appointment will be for two years with the possibility of renewal for one additional year. The ideal candidate could come from any humanities discipline but must have a commitment to using digital and/or computational methodologies in their scholarship or artistic creation, and instruction.

Responsibilities will include (1) assisting in the creation of new courses that introduce students to multi-disciplinary approaches to digital and computational studies, (2) offering courses in his or her own discipline or area of specialization, and (3) helping to craft and launch the new program in digital and computational studies. For more information see: http://www.bowdoin.edu/academic-affairs/curriculum-teaching/recruit/humanities-postdoc.shtml

Bowdoin College accepts only electronic submissions. Applications should consist of a completed application profile, cover letter, curriculum vitae, statement of research and/or professional activity plans, statement on teaching philosophy, and the names of three references who have agreed to provide letters of recommendation. Please visit https://careers.bowdoin.edu to apply. Review of applications will begin Monday, April 8, 2013, and will continue until the position is filled.

Registration Open: NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA in Venice, Italy (6/3-6/2013)

If you are interested in joining the NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA conference in Venice, Italy (June 3-6, 2013), it's not too late to get involved. There are still a few openings for panel chairs, for example, or you could just come for the conversations.  Registration is now live.  You can find out more here:

http://glocalvictorians.wordpress.com/about-us/

Registration goes up by 50 euros starting April 15.

Over 300 Victorianists will be descending on Venice for the event.  

Plenary speakers and headliners include: Murray Baumgarten, Alison Booth, James Buzard, Nicholas Daly, Kate Flint, Regenia Gagnier, Pamela Gilbert, Eileen Gillooly, Pat Hardy, Robert Hewison, Barbara Leckie, Ruth Livesey, Jock Macleod, Franco Marucci, Rohan McWilliam, Andrew Miller, Lynda Nead, Cornelia Pearsall, Alan Rauch, Dianne Sadoff, Emma Sdegno, Sally Shuttleworth, William St. Clair, Marjorie Stone, Beverly Taylor, Paul Tucker, Lydia Wevers, Sue Zemka, and Rosella Mamoli Zorzi. 

Lecture: "Forgiving Janey" (3/26/2013)

"Forgiving Janey: A New View of a Remarkable Woman"

A lecture by Frank Sharp

Tuesday, 26 March, 6 p.m.
Room 523, Butler Library
Columbia University, 535 West 114th Street, New York

Reception to follow

Sponsored by Columbia University Libraries & the William Morris Society in the United States

Free and open to the public

Jane Morris has traditionally been treated harshly by scholars writing on William Morris. When not the subject of outright attack, she has been dismissed as unintelligent, or unimportant. Frank Sharp will discuss his work with Jan Marsh on The Collected Letters of Jane Morris (Boydell Press, 2012) and how the wealth of new information provided by the letters reveals a politically engaged (though disenfranchised), culturally aware woman who was involved and assisted in most of William Morris's endeavors. Her ability to recreate herself given her childhood of dire poverty was accomplished through her own keen intelligence. Sharp will argue for a major reevaluation of Jane Morris in light of this new evidence.

Frank Sharp is an independent scholar who has written extensively on Morris and his circle.

For more information: Michael Ryan (mtr2109@columbia.edu) or Mark Samuels Lasner (marksl@udel.edu).

William Morris Society website: www.morrissociety.org

Spring Lecture Series: University of Southampton (4/2013-5/2013)

University of Southampton

Centre for 19th-Century Research

Spring Lecture Series

All lectures are free and open to all. Lectures will be held in Building 65, Room 1097, Avenue Campus, University of Southampton: http://www.southampton.ac.uk/visitus/campuses/avenue.html

Weds 17 April, 4-6pm:  Prof. Michael Wheeler (University of Southampton) Redefining Liberalism in the 19th century (65/1097)

Weds 1 May, 3-5pm: Prof. David Mayer (University of Manchester) "Trouble at t'Millpond: an early film and the late Victorian stage. (65/1097)

Weds 8 May, 4-6pm: Dr. Andrew Mangham (University of Reading) 'Murder Will Out!': Forensic Medicine, Popular Literature and Royal Scandal in the Early Nineteenth Century. (65/1097)

CFP: Bicycles / Bicycling in Literature and Culture (proposals 8/1/2013; essays 2/1/2014)

The following CFP might be of interest to my fellow Victorianists. The editors hope that the collection will contain a strong Victorian presence--the Victorians invented the bicycle, after all. Entries on precursors to the bicycle (velocipedes, the "Dandy-horse," etc.) are certainly welcome. 

Bicycles / Bicycling in Literature and Culture (proposals 8/1/13; essays 2/1/14)

The American author Charles Morley once said: “The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.” As Morley’s quote suggests, many people have perceived an intimate connection between cycling and literature, and this edited collection aims to further reflect on that relationship between bicycles and art. We are seeking interdisciplinary essays from scholars interested in analyzing the role and significance of the bicycle in the novels, poems, short stories, plays, memoirs, films, television shows, songs (etc.) of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Essays on texts other than
literature and mass media will be considered, so long as they are primarily still engaging in textual or literary analysis. Since the bicycle is becoming increasingly important and relevant given our world’s growing environmental and economic troubles, we intend for this collection to make a timely and useful foray into understanding the historical and current significance of these fascinating machines.

Possible topics include but certainly are not limited to cycling / bicycles and

• class mobility, socialism, depressions and economic “cycles”
• environmentalism, nature, wilderness
• modernism (Hemingway, Beckett, Joyce, etc.)
• the Victorians (Wells, Conan Doyle, etc.)
• perceptions of time, speed, and space
• the country and the city
• urban design, contested urban space, suburbia
• gender, masculinity, femininity
• race studies, postcolonialism
• cycling memoirs
• travel writing, cyclotourism
• sexuality (heteronormativity, queerness, etc.)
• childhood, children’s literature and culture
• film: “cycling films” (Breaking Away, Quicksilver, etc.), cycles in film
• (E.T., The Wizard of Oz, etc.), documentary (Bicycle Dreams, B.I.K.E., etc.)
• bike (sub)cultures: racing, bike messenger, tall bike, etc.
• music, song, performance
• leisure and labor
• cycling periodicals: poems, stories, travelogues, photo essays, zines, comics
• ghost bikes: the influence of bikes in cycle-less texts.

Abstracts due:  August 1st (250-300 words; include contact info and short bio or CV)
Final essays due: February 2014

Please direct all questions and submissions to the editors:
Jeremy Withers, Iowa State University (withers@iastate.edu)
Daniel Shea, Austin Peay State University (shead@apsu.edu)

CFP: Victorian Body Parts (5/31/2013; 9/14/2013)

St Bartholomew’s Pathology Museum, Clerkenwell, Saturday 14th September 2013

Keynote Speakers: Dr Katharina Boehm (Universität Regensburg), Dr Kate Hill (Lincoln) and Dr Tiffany Watt-Smith (QMUL)

“Mr Wegg, if you was brought here loose in a bag to be articulated, I'd name your smallest bones blindfold equally with your largest, as fast as I could pick 'em out, and I'd sort 'em all, and sort your wertebrae, in a manner that would equally surprise and charm you.” (Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 1865)

Why were the Victorians so interested in atomizing the body? What was causing nineteenth-century bodies to come apart at the seams? From articulated bones to beating hearts, from wooden legs to hair bracelets, from death masks to glass eyes, the Victorian body was chattering with its own discorporation. 

The results of this fragmentation are successors to the recent scholarly work on material culture in examining the atomisation of the body as a symptom of being surrounded by the commodities generated by the nineteenth century. From objects under glass domes to pieces of the body in glass cases (authentic specimens of which fill St Bartholomew’s Pathology Museum), commodification and dissection have much in common.

This conference thus seeks to explore, develop and enrich perspectives on the numerous and varied ways in which the Victorians approached their anatomy, bringing together postgraduate, early career and established researchers to consider why body parts provided such an urgent and stimulating focus within the nineteenth-century cultural imagination.

Possible topics could include, but are by no means limited to:

• Mementos of the body and the culture of mourning
• Disability and the “substitution” of the body part
• Dress and the exaggeration of, or emphasis on, elements of the body
• Darwin and bodily means of expression in science
• The “queering” of the body part
• Measuring the body: deviation from the standards of Western patriarchy
• Preserving the body: collecting and museum cultures

Proposals of up to 300 words should be sent to victorianbodyparts@gmail.com by Friday 31st May 2013.

Blog: victorianbodyparts.wordpress.com                          

Twitter: @victbodyparts

CFP: Australian Panel at 2013 NACBS Meeting (3/25/2013; 11/8-10/2013)

Panel Proposal: Australia
2013 North American Conference on British Studies meeting
Portland, Oregon, November 8-10, 2013

Peter H. Hoffenberg is seeking proposals for a panel on Australia. He will probably propose a paper on the Australian colonies of N S W and Victoria and exhibitions, let's say, mid- to later-19^th—century shows and ideas about those shows.

The deadline is March 25, so please Peter H. Hoffenberg (peterh@hawaii.edu) within the week of March 17. 

CFP: Hotels and Inns in the Long Nineteenth Century (6/7/2013)

Hotels and Inns in Britain and in the United States in the Long Nineteenth Century

We invite submissions for a collection of essays on the hotel in literary works, in journals and correspondences, in travelogues, or in other texts written or published during the long nineteenth century. Our predominant focus is on literary and cultural studies.

We want to concentrate on the long nineteenth century. Inns offering a bed and food to the weary traveler have existed since antiquity, yet textual accounts of the hotel or the inn as a space in which travelers from various social, regional, or national backgrounds, men and women, the old and the young, met and mingled became central to the traveling experience as a locus of self-discovery and self-assertion or of alienation and instability from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. In the long nineteenth century, traveling was facilitated by technical innovations (improved roads, railways), international and especially transatlantic travel became more frequent, and at the end of the century, an increased awareness of types of accommodation existed. The kinds of guesthouses one could stay in had become more differentiated: grand hotels, urban hotels, rural inns, and small pensions offered very different sorts of comfort and of human encounters. Literary and non-literary texts abound with accounts of real and fictitious hotels.

Our collection of essays seeks to examine this under-researched field. We invite fresh looks at old and new material, at real and fictitious hotels, splendid abodes as well as Gothic dwellings. The collection will be geographically restricted to Britain and the United States. Papers with a transatlantic focus (e.g. British travelers in American hotels, American travelers in British inns) are particularly welcome, but excursions of Anglo-American travelers to the Continent and their experiences with Continental accommodations are also of interest.

Possible topics:

• Types of hotels and guests:
• hotel, inn, grand hotel, guesthouse
• country inns vs. urban hotels
• hotels in various surroundings: seaside, mountains, cities, villages
• institutions (how can Habermas's concept of the public sphere be applied?)
• the hotel in contrast with other institutions
• splendor vs. the back doors
• encounters between different strata of society, men and women, individuals belonging to different nations/ethnicities
• cultural contact, especially transatlantic contact
• African Americans in hotels
• hotels and war (e.g., the Civil War)
• soldiers, merchants, travelers, explorers as guests
• national cuisine and hotel menus

Real, virtual, and emotional spaces:

• What does it mean to enter the threshold of a hotel—what does one leave behind, what kind of temporary home does one create, what elements of nostalgia arise, how does a sense of loss coexist with the draw of the new?
• How does the hotel or inn offer a liminal space for exploration in the life of the author (or his/her protagonists)?
• transitions (staircase, back doors), threshold spaces, liminality
• architecture of inns: rooms, windows (looking out, panorama, seeing obstacles)
• staircases (symbols of upward movement?)
• spatial theory and the hotel
• alienation, alterity
• home away from home, homesickness
• fleeting moments of enlightenment
• judgmental attitudes towards the different, new, or other
• suitcases full of memories, or souvenirs as kitsch (the hotel in a nutshell)
• boundaries between self and other

The hotel, class, and the family:

• attitudes towards servants or other travelers in hotels
• elites and non-elites
• the privilege of travel
• the kitchen help/the landlady as family
• status: class structure and class distinctions in hotels (rooms, eating arrangements)
• children's experiences in hotels
• chaperones and ladies in hotels
• love stories in hotels

Unusual hotels:

• the unspeakable in hotels
• unmade beds, lost suitcases, unwelcome intruders, lost keys, unpaid bills
• ghosts, haunted or Gothic hotels
• unexpected encounters
• assignations in hotels

We invite two-page proposals by the deadline of June 7, 2013. Please also include a short bio. If your proposal is selected, the final essay will be due on December 15, 2013. Please email the proposals to both of the following addresses:

Prof. Monika Elbert (Montclair State University, New Jersey), elbertm@mail.montclair.edu
PD Dr. Susanne Schmid (from April 2013: guest professor, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany), suschmid@aol.com.

Reminder: BAVS 2013 "Nineteenth-Century Numbers" (3/28/2013; 8/29-31/2013)

Nineteenth-Century Numbers

British Association for Victorian Studies Annual Conference 2013
29-31 August 2013 at Royal Holloway, University of London

Keynote Speakers: Alice Jenkins (University of Glasgow); Michael Hatt (University of Warwick); Mary Poovey (New York University); Theodore Porter (University of California, Los Angeles)

The BAVS conference 2013 will be held at Royal Holloway, University of London which was founded by the Victorian entrepreneur and philanthropist Thomas Holloway at Egham, Surrey in 1886. The College and the nearby former Holloway Sanatorium are products of surplus wealth accumulated in the course of Holloway’s activities as financier, in the large-scale manufacture of patent medicines, and in mass marketing – including advertising to Britain’s overseas colonies. While its theme reflects these institutional origins, the Conference aims to explore the relevance of numbers to nineteenth-century studies in a wide variety of ways. We welcome proposals for papers and panels which speak to the interdisciplinary conference theme broadly and innovatively.

Call for Papers

• Mass culture, mass politics and reform; crowds, population, over population; Malthus and Darwin; proliferation and extinction; the residuum and the best circles.
• Collecting and cataloguing; replication; periodicals and serials; prosody and metre; music and rhythm; architecture and proportion; sequence and sequels.
• Mathematics; statistics; geometry; time and technology; timetables and navigation; mass mobility; computation; money; finance and economics.
• The one and the many; duration; the infinite; age and aging.
• Research methodologies in the digital era; quantitative and qualitative; corpus linguistics; periodization; information overload.

Deadline for abstracts: 28th March 2013. Please submit all abstracts to BAVS2013@gmail.com. Visit our bloghttp://BAVS2013.wordpress.com for regular updates, downloads, and discussion pages. Enquiries about proposing themed panels can be sent to ruth.livesey@rhul.ac.uk or juliet.john@rhul.ac.uk.

For regular updates remember to check our website, http://bavs2013.wordpress.com.

CFP: Southern Conference on British Studies (3/29/2013; 11/1-2/2013)

2013 Meeting

St Louis, Missouri

The Southern Conference on British Studies solicits proposals for its 2013 meeting to be held November 1-2, 2013 in St Louis, Missouri. The SCBS will meet in conjunction with the Southern Historical Association at the Millen.

The SCBS invites participation by scholars in all areas of British history and culture, including that of the Empire or Commonwealth and the British Isles. Interdisciplinary approaches and proposals which focus broadly on teaching British studies are especially welcome.

Proposals may consist of individual papers or of papers grouped for a session. For session proposals, two, or, preferably, three papers should relate to a common theme, not necessarily bound by the usual chronological framework.

For each paper proposed, please submit an abstract of 200 to 300 words, indicating the thesis of the paper, the sources and methodology employed in research, and how it enhances or expands knowledge of its subject. Papers should have a reading time of twenty to twenty-five minutes. Also, please submit a curriculum vitae for each participant.

March 29, 2013 is the Deadline for submissions either by post or e-mail:

Dr. William Anthony Hay, Department of History, P.O. Box H, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS 39762.  wilhay6248@aol.com.  Feel free to contact by e-mail with inquiries.

CFP: Special Issue of Women's Writing “C19th Women Writers & the Rise of the Bestseller” (9/2/2013)

'Queens of the Marketplace’: nineteenth-century women writers and the rise of the bestseller'

Guest editors: Clare Clarke & Clare Gill

Women writers occupied a highly significant space in the genealogy of nineteenth-century popular literature, not only because of the extraordinary sales their books achieved, but also in terms of women writers’ role in redefining the parameters of authorship at this time. Some of the bestselling works of the nineteenth century were authored by women: from the sensation novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon in the 1860s to Marie Corelli’s romances in the 1890s, women writers carved out a lucrative share of the marketplace in the second half of the century. Bestselling works by women cut across literary genres (children’s literature, sensation fiction, detective stories, gothic literature, the romance, religious literature, New Woman fiction, cook books, and journalism), and in terms of audience, bestsellers also cut across social lines too.

The journal Women’s Writing invites papers for a special issue dedicated to the exploration of the diverse role of women writers in the rise of the bestseller in the nineteenth century. How did women writers contribute to the reshaping of authorial practice in the nineteenth century? In what ways did women writers address concerns or anxieties about professional authorship within their work? How was popular fiction by women writers shaped by the contemporary critical response to female bestselling authors? In what ways did female authors contribute to traditionally ‘masculine’ genres – such as the adventure and detective story? How and why did bestsellers by female authors appeal to readers across gender and class lines? In addition to reflecting the complexity and diversity of women writers’ contribution to the bestseller phenomenon in the nineteenth century, this special issue will also endeavour to answer some broader conceptual questions about the study of popular works of fiction and non-fiction. Why do some bestsellers have ephemeral popularity while others enjoy enduring appeal? What can we learn about culture more broadly from the study of bestsellers? How does the separation of popularity and value come about?

We welcome contributions on any nineteenth-century female authors of bestselling popular fiction and non-fiction, particularly overlooked and critically-neglected writers. Possible authors include:

• Mrs Henry Wood
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon
• Mrs Humphry Ward
• Florence Marryat
• Charlotte Yonge
• Rhoda Broughton
• Ouida
• Marie Corelli
• Mrs Beeton
• Eliza Lynn Linton

Please submit articles for consideration between 4,000-7000 words to Clare Gill, University of Southampton (c.gill@soton.ac.uk) or Clare Clarke, Trinity College Dublin (clarkc11@tcd.ie) by Monday 2 September 2013. 

Contributors should follow the journal’s house style details of which are to be found on the Women’s Writing web site http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/0999082.asp. This is the new MLA. Do note that instead of footnotes, we use endnotes with NO bibliography. All bibliographical information is included in the endnotes. For example, we require place of publication, publisher and date of publication in brackets after a book is cited for the first time.

Pre-Raphaelite, Aesthetic, or Fin de Siècle Children's Books (3/15/2013; 1/9-12/2014)

The William Morris Society in the United States is collaborating with the Children's Literature Association on a panel proposal for MLA 2014 in Chicago. Please send abstracts on any aspect of text, illustration, or design of Pre-Raphaelite, Aesthetic, or Fin de Siècle children's books. 15 March 2013 deadline, to florence-boos@uiowa.edu and philnel@ksu.edu.

CFP: London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar postgraduate day (3/25/2013; 4/20/2013)

The London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar will hold a one-day postgraduate conference on Saturday 20 April at Senate House, University of London.

The purpose of the day is to enable graduate students across London who are working on topics in the long nineteenth century to meet each other, learn more about each other’s work, and discover shared interests in a friendly and collegial setting.

We invite proposals from postgraduate research students registered at any of the Colleges and Institutes of the University of London, for short (ten-minute) papers which present an overview of your PhD project. (We welcome papers which focus primarily on a particular aspect, so long as that aspect is contextualized to some extent by the framework of an overall project.)

Please send 200-word proposals to the organizing committee, c/o James Emmott (Birkbeck) <james@emmott.org> by Monday 25 March. We will confirm your inclusion in the programme shortly afterwards.

Ana Parejo Vadillo (Birkbeck)
Chair, London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar
<a.parejovadillo@bbk.ac.uk>

2013 Postgraduate Day Organizing Committee:

• Alice Conde (Goldsmiths)
• Eliza Cubitt (UCL)
• Melissa Dickson (KCL)
• James Emmott (Birkbeck), Chair
• Angharad Eyre (QMUL)
• Jessica Hindes (RHUL)

CFP: The Weird: Fugitive Fictions/Hybrid Genre (8/1/2013; 11/8/2013)

The Weird: Fugitive Fictions/Hybrid Genre

http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/events/ies-conferences/TheWeird

A one day research conference in association with the Centre for Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck, exploring the weird literary tradition and the many facets of weird writing.

Keynotes: S.T. Joshi / Professor Roger Luckhurst / more TBA

Friday 8th November 2013 / Senate House, London

Until recently weird fiction, if acknowledged at all, was usually considered to be a marginal mode in the already lowly Gothic tradition - less a genre than a particular affect. In the last ten years, however, it has come to be regarded as a separate and distinct form with an increasingly important role to play in the theory of popular genre. The debate has broadened its scope to perceive and explore connections with discourses, literary traditions and cultures not previously associated with the Weird. This call for papers invites contributions that engage with weird fiction in its various aspects, including, but not limited to, the following topics and authors:

• The weird cosmic horror tradition of H.P. Lovecraft and his ‘Weird Tales’ contemporaries
• The recent New Weird advocated by China Miéville and others
• The evolution of the Weird
• The global Weird - weird fiction in translation
• Genre theory and fugitive forms
• Modernism and the Weird
• Weird Philosophy and Weird Theory

We would be delighted to receive abstracts on any aspect of weird fiction from the long nineteenth century, including, but certainly not limited to, the weird fiction of Poe, Stevenson, Kipling, Conan Doyle, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, M.R. James, William Hope Hodgson and Ambrose Bierce.

Please send 250 word abstracts for 20 minute papers, together with a brief biography, to theweirdconference@gmail.com by 1st August 2013.

Thursday 7th November 2013 (evening event): weird fiction reading (details TBC)

Follow ‘The Weird’ on Twitter: @WeirdConference

This conference is supported by the Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck School of Arts, and the Institute of English Studies, University of London.

Reminder: British South Africa, 1795-1919 (3/10/2013; 1/9-12/2014)

MLA 2014, Chicago, 9-12 Jan.
British South Africa, 1795-1919

Proposals welcome that address the question: How was British identity constructed in or in relation to southern Africa? Please send abstract (250-500 words) and CV by March 10, 2013, to Melissa Free (mfree@bingahmton.edu).

CFP: Social Fabrics (5/15/2013; 9/14/2013)

Social Fabrics: Utopias and Dystopias in relation to the Work of William Morris and H. G. Wells

A Conference Jointly Run by the H.G. Wells Society and the William Morris Society

Saturday 14 September 2013, The Coach House, Kelmscott House, London, UK

10.00am-4.30pm

We are delighted to invite papers on the full range of topics indicated by the title of the conference. Please email abstracts of 500 words to Emelyne Godfrey emelynegodfrey@yahoo.com, Helen Elletson, curator@williammorrissociety.org.uk, Patrick Parrinder, j.parrinder064@btinternet.com, and Sylvia Hardy sylviahardy@btinternet.com.

Deadline for Paper Proposals: 15 May 2013

Location of Conference:

Kelmscott House,

26 Upper Mall,

Hammersmith, W6 9TA

Nearest tube stations: Ravenscourt Park (10-minute walk) and Hammersmith (15-minute walk).

H.G. Wells Society Giles Hart Prize (4/30/2013)

The H. G. Wells Society is pleased to announce the 2013 Giles Hart Prize, in memory of the Society's former chairman, for an essay that makes an outstanding contribution to Wells studies. The prize will be awarded to the piece of work on Wells submitted to, and published in, the 2013 issue of The Wellsian the annual, peer-reviewed, learned journal of the H. G. Wells Society.

Papers concerning any aspect of Wells's life and work are invited. Possible themes might include: Wells's science fiction; Wells and the novel; Wells, utopia, politics and the World State; Wells and science; Wells and his contemporaries; Wells and gender; Wells and the Empire; Wells and the history of the book.

Essays should not exceed 6,000 words including all footnotes and should not have been previously published. Please see http://www.hgwellsusa.50megs.com/UK/wellsian.html, and refer to recent issues of The Wellsian, for style guidelines; work that presented at a low standard will not be considered for the prize. Essays should be submitted electronically, no later than 30th April 2013, to d.f.kinsinger@durham.ac.uk; please direct any queries to s.j.james@durham.ac.uk.

The value of the prize is £250.00. The committee of the H. G. Wells Society will judge the competition, and runners-up will be published alongside the winning essay in The Wellsian. The competition excludes individuals serving on the Executive Committee of the H G Wells Society.

For details on joining the H. G. Wells Society, see http://www.hgwellsusa.50megs.com/.

CFP: Future Directions in Byron Studies (3/25/2013; 1/9-12/2014)

MLA 2014 CFP: Future Directions in Byron Studies

The Byron Society of America solicits paper proposals featuring new research and fresh methodologies applied to any aspect of Byron’s life or works for the 2014 MLA. Paper proposals should demonstrate a desire to expand the field of Byron studies by placing the poet and his works in conversation with understudied aspects of Romanticism and/or innovative approaches. Topics may include but are not limited to: material culture studies, object-oriented criticism, cosmopolitanism, nationalism, theories of empire, the “spatial turn,” digital humanities, and/or the history of the book.

Preference will be given to junior faculty and graduate students.

A 250-word abstract and brief autobiography (one paragraph) are due by 25 March. Please send materials and inquiries to: Halina Adams (halinaad@udel.edu).

Last Call: VISAWUS 2013 "Victorian Modernities" (3/15/2013; 11/14-16/2013)

Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies of the Western United States announces the theme of its 2013 conference:

Victorian Modernities
Nov. 14-16, 2013

Courtyard by Marriott, Portland City Center

Portland, Oregon

“Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly.” – Oscar Wilde

VISAWUS 2013 explores the Victorians’ enthusiasm and apprehension regarding modern progress and innovation.We encourage papers across all disciplines, including (but not restricted to) art history, literature, gender, history of science, history, material culture, political science, performance, life writings, journalism, photography, popular culture, and economics.

Keynote Speaker: Joseph Bristow (English, UCLA), author and editor of numerous works on Victorian and modern literature and theories and histories of sexuality, including Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (1995), Sexuality (1997), The Fin-de-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s (2005), and Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend (2009), is currently working on a project on “The Sex of Victorian Poetry” and editing the Journal of Victorian Culture and the Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture series.

Papers are solicited for topics such as:

• Urbanization, urbanity, and the flux of modern life
• New nationalisms
• Modern understandings of the global and the cosmopolitan
• Class mobilities and new professions
• Progressive Victorian social reform movements
• New Victorian types: New Women, dandies, Decadents, swells
• Anticipations of modernist formal styles
• New media: audio and visual technologies
• Advances in Victorian drama
• New sciences and pseudo-sciences
• Modern illnesses and modern medicine
• The novel and novelty
• Commodity culture and consumerism
• Modern understandings of sexuality and desire
• Resistances to modernity: nostalgia, pastiche
• New religions
• The apex of empire
• Modern warfare
• Neo-Victorianism and steampunk aesthetics

To submit: By March 15, 2013, email 300-word abstracts and a 1-page CV (name on BOTH) to visawus2013@gmail.com.

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

The most up-to-date information about the 2013 Conference can be found on our Facebook page:  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Victorian-Interdisciplinary-Studies-Association-of-the-Western-US/148139335285338?ref=stream.

CFP: Forms of Freedom: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Liberal Thought (3/15/2013; 1/9-12/2014)

MLA 2014, Chicago, 

9-12th January 2014

Special Session

Forms of Freedom: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Liberal Thought

This session will explore the ways that poetry responds to the rise of liberalism during the long nineteenth century. The past decade has seen a revival of interest in liberal philosophy and culture as contexts for the nineteenth-century novel. This panel aims to expand this conversation via a consideration of liberalism’s poetics, addressing the influence of European liberal thinkers on the poetry of the nineteenth century.

Papers might address:

• Poets as readers and/or practitioners of liberal philosophy
• The poetics of the liberal subject
• Liberal ‘form’
• Mill’s poetic education
• Liberalism’s discontents: the poetry of radicalism and communitarianism
• Poetry and the state

Abstracts of 250 words should be sent to a.j.barton@sheffield.ac.uk by 15th March 2013.

New NAVSA Blog: Member Publications

NAVSA is pleased to announce the launch of its new Member Publications blog at http://navsapub.blogspot.com/. If you are a NAVSA member and you have a book or collection published in 2012 or one that is forthcoming, please email Dino Franco Felluga (felluga@purdue.edu) with the details and an accompanying image.  As with NAVSA’s CFP blog, Of Victorian Interest, anyone can subscribe to the Member Publications blog, either via RSS feed or email.

In the meantime, please check out the 2012 and 2013 titles that have already been posted: http://navsapub.blogspot.com/

To join NAVSA, please visit: http://www.navsa.org

2013 VISAWUS Panel Proposal (3/12/2013; 11/14-16/2013)

Panel Proposal 

2013 VISAWUS conference: Victorian Modernities
Courtyard by Marriott, Portland City Center, Portland, Oregon USA

November 14-16, 2013

http://visawus.org/ 

Among the scientific discoveries and emerging new disciplines that contributed to a palpable sense of Victorian modernity, some of the most intriguing involved new understandings of the physical basis of mind as discoveries were made about the structure and operation of the nervous system and the brain. This proposed panel seeks papers that investigate how the emergence of new understandings and interpretations of the mind/body relationship manifested in Victorian fiction. Those interested should email Genie Babb (gbabb001@plattsburgh.edu) and Judy DeTar (jsdetar@sbcglobal.net) by March 12.

CFP: Neo-Victorianism and Globalisation (10/15/2013)

Neo-Victorianism and Globalisation:

Transnational Dissemination of Nineteenth-Century Cultural Texts

2014 Special Issue of Neo-Victorian Studies

(http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/)

This special issue seeks to explore the rise and the scope of the globalisation of neo-Victorianism. We are witnesses today to a transnational spread of all things Victorian verging on 'Victorianomania', where different elements of nineteenth-century literature and material culture are continuously translated, adapted and recycled for contemporary use. On the one hand, the re-visioned revival of popular genres of the nineteenth century is evident in a spate of neo-Victorian novels that re-visit Victorian fiction in terms of style and content as well as rethink the narrative format of the eponymous 'loose, baggy monsters'. Whether they are playful investigations of cosmopolitanism within the history of globalised economy - as depicted in Amitav Ghosh's The Sea of Poppies - or of transatlantic narratives and cultural connections between Victorian London and the contemporary US cityscape - as in HBO's TV series The Wire - neo-Victorian fictions engage not only with nineteenth-century narrative pace and plotting but also with the period's cross-fertilised popular genres. At the same time, the plethora of TV, film, video games, graphic novels, fashion and interior design adaptations and appropriations of Victorian art, literature and culture are clearly influenced by the global market, testifying to the impact of the ever-spreading 'participatory culture' (Jenkins 2006). This special issue aims to chart the patterns and politics of neo-Victorianism's transnational production and dissemination.

Some of the key questions Neo-Victorianism and Globalisation seeks to
address are:

• To what extent can we talk about the process of translating elements of nineteenth-century literature and culture into contemporary media as 'neo-Victorianism' outside of the Anglo-American context?
• How does nostalgia inform/deform the relationship between appropriated Victorian narrative forms and their global circulation?
• What political dynamics underlie the transnational dissemination of the '(neo-)Victorian', both as a term and concept, and what are its ideological implications?
• How broadly can 'neo-Victorian' be expanded as a generic term before it loses its critical value?
• Does neo-Victorianism run the risk of being construed as a form of cultural imperialism?
• How does postcolonialism contest and/or intersect with trans- and multiculturalism in neo-Victorian remediations of the nineteenth-century past?
• How can attention to multiple (national, ethnic, and cultural) publics and markets avoid totalising 'neo-Victorianism' as a monolithic concept?
• Which particular Victorian genres (such as Gothic, detection or sensation fiction), predominate in different neo-Victorian media and cultural contexts and why?
• What unacknowledged, potentially discriminatory or disabling mechanisms may be discerned in neo-Victorian critical discourse (e.g. Anglo-American/Euro-centrism, Western-focused trauma discourse, new forms of sexism, etc.)?

Please address enquiries and expressions of interest to the guest editors Antonija Primorac at primorac@ffst.hr and Monika Pietrzak-Franger at pietrzak@anglistik.uni-siegen.de. Completed articles and/or creative pieces, along with a short biographical note, will be due by 15 October 2013 and should be sent via email to the guest editors, with a copy to neovictorianstudies@swansea.ac.uk. Please consult the NVS website (submission guidelines) for further guidance.

PhD Funding Opportunities (3/18/2013)

Edge Hill University, UK, has just launched its annual Graduate Teaching Assistant scheme: the PhD studentship package includes full waiver of tuition fees, a monthly stipend, free accommodation or money in lieu, and regular teaching experience on BA degree programmes. Twelve studentships will be awarded across the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, and the English subject area has advertised the following themes:

• Nineteenth-century print culture
• Digital humanities: Gothic studies
• Romanticism / the long eighteenth century
• New media: gender and sexuality 
• English language: critical discourse studies employing corpus-based techniques (gender and sexuality, asylum/immigration, religion, politics) 
• Film studies: Hollywood cinema in context, fantasy and fairy-tale cinema, American Civil War films and popular culture 

http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/graduateschool/phd-studentshipsgraduate-teaching-assistantships/

http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/graduateschool/phd-studentshipsgraduate-teaching-assistantships/english/

The closing date is 18 March (2 p.m.), and interviews will be held in April.

CFP: Uneasy Neighbours?: Rural-Urban Relationships in the Nineteenth Century (4/2/2013; 9/20/2013)

University of Southampton

Centre for 19th-Century Research

Uneasy Neighbours?: Rural-Urban Relationships in the Nineteenth Century

An International Interdisciplinary Conference
20 September 2013

Keynote Speaker: Keith D.M. Snell,

Professor of Rural and Cultural History, University of Leicester

The relationship between urban and rural communities in the nineteenth century was increasingly strained by the unprecedented rate and scale of social, industrial, technological and economic change worldwide. Cities demanded ever more from agriculture, while rural populations decreased; country life and work were changed by mechanisation and industrialisation, while newcomers to the cities had to adjust to alien ways of living and conditions of employment; poverty was commonplace in both the countryside and the cities, while the newly wealthy became landowners and urban leaders. This 1-day interdisciplinary conference aims to consider evidence of the tensions, anxieties and experiences resulting from the changing dynamic between rural and urban life, to examine how this shaped the perceptions of the country and the city, and
to explore how these are articulated in different global contexts.

Suggested topics might include (but are not limited to): The rival attractions of rural and urban living; the rise of the suburb; changing ideals of national identity; representations of rural/urban
life and work in art, literature and science; women’s lives and work in the country and city; rural and urban health/wealth/poverty; utopianism; urban/rural perspectives in the contemporary press; the role and influence of religion; landowners, businessmen and entrepreneurs; the lives of children; philanthropy; the greening of the city (garden cities); industrialisation of the countryside. Abstracts (200 words) for proposed 20 minute papers to be submitted by e-mail to W.B.Sloan@soton.ac.uk and E.M.Hammond@soton.ac.uk by 2 April 2013.

Reminder: Victorians and the Law (4/1/2013)

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

The eighth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Cathrine Frank (University of New England), will take a fresh look at the interfaces between literature and legal cultures in the Victorian period. From the Reform Acts through the growth of colonial law to the establishment of divorce courts, nineteenth-century legislature shaped and responded to the same cultural developments – the rise of the middle class, industrialisation, imperial expansion, and shifting ideas about gender, to name but a few – that were also eagerly debated by literary writers. The politics and aesthetics of many nineteenth-century novelists, poets and playwrights were informed by a sustained engagement with legal debates and practices. Their works often reflected on, and sometimes challenged, the law’s construction of civic, social and gender identities, while also casting a critical (or appraising) eye over the bureaucratic apparatus on which legal practice was built.

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

• wills, trusts and guardianship accounts: the materiality of the legal archive
• Victorian trials, sensation and theatricality
• criminal law, lawlessness, realist epistemologies and the detective plot
• Victorian law and gender
• the reaches of the law: imperialism and the legal & literary creation of colonial identities
• intersections between genres of legal and literary writing
•  “brought up a barrister”: nineteenth-century authors, legal training, professionalization and the bar
• radical politics, social change and the working class in Victorian literature and the law
• debates about rights to intellectual and literary property
• the spaces and cultural venues of legal practice

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. The deadline for submissions to our next issue is 1 April, 2013.

Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com