CFP: NAVSA 2014 “Victorian Classes and Classifications” (3/1/2014; 11/13-15/2014)

North American Victorian Studies Association Conference 2014

London, Ontario, Canada

November 13-15, 2014

Deadline: March 1, 2014 

“Victorian Classes and Classifications”

Victorian Britain belonged to the classifying age. Imperial expansion and new techniques of observation and production confronted Britons with an expanding universe of natural and man-made phenomena.  In response, scientists, writers, artists, and educators sought to articulate some underlying sense of order through ever more complex systems of organization, arrangement, and tabulation. Natural philosophers vastly extended and revised the taxonomies of Linnaeus. Medical professionals developed new diagnostic tools and coined a broad range of new pathologies and diseases. Criminologists gathered biometric data that allowed them to constitute and apprehend criminal types. Literary critics debated the rise of new classes of literature, from the penny dreadful and sensation fiction to the naturalist novel. Librarians set out the protocols for indexing the classes and sub-classes of literature that resulted from the vast outpouring of printed matter. Teachers began to organize their classrooms into distinct groupings of students by age and ability. But with these efforts came, too, a new concern and fascination for that which exceeded classification, the anomalous, the mutation, the hybrid, the monstrous, and class struggle emerged as a theory of history and as a basis for political organization. 

Conference threads might include: 

• Varieties, species, genera, and types of living organism and inanimate object
• Literary genres, parts, classifications, and forms of publication
• Social class and its material embodiment in modes of travel, commodity culture, fashion, and the built environment
• Pedagogy and the classroom
• The sciences and pseudo-sciences of human classification: racial science, criminology, and sexology.
• Character types and body types
• Breeding, rank, and class
• Museums, exhibitions, shops, libraries, schools, and other sorting institutions
• Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and the organization of knowledge
• Varieties of religious experience and affiliation
• Cultural forms that exceed classification: the gothic, the grotesque, the monstrous, the absurd, the nonsensical.

The organizers of the North American Victorian Studies Association’s 2014 conference welcome papers studying any aspect of the Victorians’ self-organization, organization of culture, and organization of the natural world. Proposals for individual papers or panels should be submitted electronically by March 1, 2014. Proposals for individual papers should be no more than 500 words; panel proposals should include 500-word abstracts for each paper and a 250-word panel description. Applicants should submit a one-page cv. For further information on the conference or to submit a proposal for a paper or a panel, please visit www.navsa2014.com.

CFP: IAWIS/AIERTI "Curves of Life: Spirals in Nature and Art" (12/6/2013; 8/11-15/2014)

10th IAWIS/AIERTI TRIENNAL CONFERENCE

Riddles of Form: Exploration and Discovery in Word and Image

University of Dundee, Scotland:

August 11-15, 2014

Deadline: December 6, 2013

"Curves of Life: Spirals in Nature and Art" 

From the organic spiral found in living organisms such as plants, shells, DNA or nebulae to the aesthetic spirals used in many bas-reliefs or medieval carvings and artworks, the spiral form stands out as one of the most fundamental structures of our universe, a view certainly shared by D'Arcy Thompson when he devoted a long chapter to the study of the form in his book, On Growth and Form. Following in the scientist's footsteps our session will explore occurrences of the spiral pattern throughout the ages and across many disciplinary fields, from natural history, biology, mathematics to architecture, literature and the arts. 

In the wake of Liliane Louvel's innovative text-and-image studies (Poetics of the Iconotext, Ed. Karen Jacobs, trans. Laurence Petit. Ashgate, 2011), we would first like to reflect on the various modalities of the spiral in literature. When only described in a given literary text, how does the spiral shape become visible other than in "the mind's eye"? Does it necessarily have to be a visual element in the text (in calligrams for instance) in order to be perceived by the reader or can it be evoked through channels other than vision? Can the spiral form model the endless play between text and image? Bearing in mind the intertextual focus of the conference, we welcome papers that focus specifically on how the spiral form travels between word and image allowing readers/viewers a new perspective. 

Suggested topics may include, but are not limited to:

• spirals in painting and poetry
• spirals in botany and shells and scientific illustration
• the spiral form in design and the decorative arts
• spirals in specific art movements or periods
• theories of inter-media translation
• spirals in fractal art, digital art, and screen media
• Organisers: Laurence Roussillon-Constanty (University of Toulouse, France), Karen E. Brown (University of St Andrews, UK), Liliane Louvel (University of Poitiers, France)

Useful links:

Conference homepage

http://www.scottishwordimage.org/conferences/iawis2014/

List of sessions and abstracts

http://www.scottishwordimage.org/conferences/iawis2014/list_of_sessions.htm

Lecture: Richard McDougall Lecture “Walter Crane and the Arts and Crafts Watercolor” (12/10/2013)

Richard McDougall Lecture, Autumn 2013

The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House,

London WC2R 0RN

5.30pm, Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre

December 10, 2013

Dr Morna O'Neill (Wake Forest University)

“Walter Crane and the Arts and Crafts Watercolor”

In a critique of the Royal Academy published in 1885, the artist and designer Walter Crane described watercolour, “that peculiarly English and home grown art”, as a neglected medium. Yet the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, formed in 1887 in the wake of Crane’s remarks, did not address this concern. This lecture will consider the marginal position of watercolour painting in histories of the Arts and Crafts movement and examine the vital place it occupied in Crane’s own art. As Morna O’Neill will discuss, a consideration of artistic craft and “truth to materials” makes watercolour painting something of an Arts and Crafts paradox: it is central to the movement but incidental to its objects.

Inaugurated in May 2011, the Richard McDougall Lecture series is delivered biannually at The Courtauld Institute of Art on the topic of British watercolour painting post-1750.

Open to all, free admission

Special Event: Romantic Heirs "An Evening of Romantic Music" (1/17/2014)

An Evening of Romantic Music

Presented by Romantic Heirs: Receptions, Legacies, and Dialogues

Original settings inspired by Romantic poetry

Sheffield Cathedral, doors open 7pm

January 17, 2014

The Darkling Thrush

Thomas Hardy

Mark McCombs

The Tyger

William Blake 

John Tavener

He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

WB Yeats

Fraser Wilson

He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

To a Child Dancing in the Wind

The Stolen Child

WB Yeats

John Tavener

I am malicious because I am miserable

Shelley, from Frankenstein (attached)

Ben Gaunt

Porphyria

Robert Browning

Mark McCombs

Song, on a faded Violet

PB Shelley

Jak Laight

The Lamb

William Blake

John Tavener

Event: Birkbeck University "Steampunk: A Symposium" (11/30/2013)

Steampunk: A Symposium
The Guildhall Art Gallery

Birkbeck University
November 30, 2013
1:00-5:00pm

Steampunk is one of the more peculiar genres to mutate out of Neo-Victorianism. Although tethered to an aesthetic idea of the past, it has severed any link to authenticity, freely reinventing and repurposing Victorian technology and culture in order to imagine a counter-factual world of hybridity and playfulness. Ranging across media from film to fashion, literature to design, its identity is fluid but unmistakable. But do these impossible pasts and futures tell us something about our present reality?

Programme
1.00-1.15: Welcome

1.15-2.45: Panel discussion: Steampunk: remaking the past and the future
Jeanette Atkinson – ‘Top Hats, Corsets and Tea Duelling: the Well Mannered World of Steampunk’
Tony Venezia – ‘Science and Monsters:  A Guide to Steampunk Comics’
Anna Powell – ‘Mixing the Planes in Hellboy’

2.45-3.45: Viewing of the exhibition

3.45-4.15: Q&A with Steampunk artist Ian Crichton (aka Herr Döktor) and Guildhall curator Katty Pearce

4.15-4.45: Discussion of the exhibition

4.45: Closing remarks and thanks

This symposium is free to attend but please reserve a place using our online booking form found here:http://www.bbk.ac.uk/events-calendar/steampunk-a-symposium

There will be a concessionary £5 charge for entry to the Guildhall's exhibition on the day.

This event forms part of our Victoriana series, which includes an exhibition and film screenings - see full details here: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/news/victoriana-the-art-of-revival-exhibition-and-film-series

Extended Deadline: INCS 2014 "Nineteenth-Century Energies" (12/6/2013; 3/27-30/2014)

Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies

University of Houston

March 27-30, 2014

New Deadline: December 6, 2013

Featuring Keynote Speakers

   Tom Gunning: Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Art History and Department of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago
   Tim Morton: Professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair of English, Rice University

“We do not exactly know what energy is, but we recognize it,” wrote engineer William Carpenter in 1883. For INCS 2014, the committee solicits proposals that recognize nineteenth-century energies in all their multiple, mutable forms. What made the nineteenth century move, tick, and turn? How were its energies instigated, exchanged, conceived, and converted? Who was most animated, and who sought lethargy? What shapes—literal, figurative, material, textual, painted, embodied—did its energies assume? And how were nineteenth-century energies contained? Proposals might focus on the following topics, but are not limited to these:

• Currency and currents
• Hurricanes, storms, and weather
• Evolution and devolution
• Eruptions, real and imagined
• Electromagnetism and wave theory
• Dynamism and cosmology
• Photosynthesis
• Environmental effects and anthropocenic ages
• Geography and geology
• Fossil fuels
• Radiation
• Conservation
• Narrative rhythms
• Prosodic energies
• Punch cards and digitized text
• Time and temporality
• Cartography and mapping
• Circuitry
• Rain, Steam, and Speed (Turner or otherwise)
• Circulation: of people, of molecules, of money
• Diasporas
• Technologies of vision
• Political energies
• Sweated labor and radical movements
• Steam(punk) and industry
• Urban construction and destruction
• Architectural tensions
• Bodies in motion: working, exercising, performing
• Protoplasm and vital energies
• Libido
• Virility and vigor
• Lassitude, ennui, paralysis, inertia
• Opiates and opioids
• Stimulants and tonics
• Animal magnetism, mesmerism, sensations
• Telekinesis, spiritualism, mental telepathy
• Enervation and innovation
• Sleep

For individual papers, send 500-word proposals; for panels, send individual 500-word proposals for each paper plus a 250-word panel description.

Please include a one-page cv and your name, affiliation, and email address on your proposal. Proposals that are interdisciplinary in method or panels that involve multiple disciplines are especially welcome. Submit proposals at incs2014.org; send questions to info@incs2014.org.

Travel subventions are available for graduate students; please contact Chris Vanden Bossche, INCS Executive Director (cvandenb@nd.edu), for further information.

CFP: “The Afterlives of Pastoral” (1/10/2014; 7/4-5/2014)

“The Afterlives of Pastoral”

University of Queensland

July 4-5, 2014

Deadline: January 10, 2014

Since William Empson published his landmark Some Versions of Pastoral in 1935, the ancient mode that is pastoral has been re-visioned and re-analysed, and a range of scholarly readings has confirmed there is no easy or comfortable way of pinning down just how pastoral operates either in Virgil’s Eclogues or in the literature the poem has inspired since the Renaissance. Annabel Patterson in her Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (1987) focused on why Virgilian pastoral has echoed and continues to echo through western literary history, arguing “it is not what pastoral is that should matter to us”; what is far more useful is to consider “how writers, artists, and intellectuals of all persuasions have used pastoral for a range of functions and intentions that the Eclogues first articulated” (7; emphasis in original). In 1996, pastoral scholar Paul Alpers referred to “a happy confusion of definitions,” and with a linguistic nod to Empson, confirmed “there are as many versions of pastoral as there are critics and scholars who write about it” and that “‘pastoral’ can still be a word to conjure with” (What Is Pastoral? 8).

Over the last twenty-five years, there has been a resurgence of interest not only in the theory and criticism of pastoral but in literature that in various ways is in dialogue with the mode. For instance, Seamus Heaney self-consciously writes back to Virgil, and Stanley Fish has noted telling elements of pastoral in Suzanne Collins’s blockbuster trilogy The Hunger Games (2008–2010). Environmental criticism, too, has found a dialogue with this tradition to be a productive way of thinking about the human/nature relationships in which so many current environmental issues are embedded.

This symposium invites a dialogue on the afterlives of pastoral. It is inspired by the recent pastoral turn, by the questioning title of Alpers’s book, and by Patterson’s focus on the pastoral as literature in action. As Alpers reminds us, the pleasures of nymphs and shepherds and their herds are only ever the vehicle for a quite different, darker discourse: “the very notion of pastoral . . . represents a fantasy that is dissipated by the recognition of political and social realities” (24).

In this spirit, the organizers seek participants from a wide range of fields, including literature, the performing arts, music and other forms of cultural discourse that engage with the core of this ancient tradition.

For more information please visit: http://www.emsah.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=204907&pid=177854

CFP: BWWC 2014 "Victorian Studies and the Brontës 'Gleaming Mirror'" (12/15/2013; 6/19-21/2014)

British Women Writers Conference Panel 

Binghamton University

June 19-21, 2014

Deadline:  December 15, 2013

The Brontës’ collective oeuvre simultaneously represents and explodes the boundaries of the Victorian period’s historical, ideological, and stylistic concerns. Their writing engages the most significant cultural issues of their time and has helped to define subgenres and an array of formal techniques since the nineteenth century. Perhaps this begins to explain why major critical shifts have often centered on the work of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—consider, for example, Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic and Spivak’s “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” In anticipation of the bicentennial of Charlotte Brontë’s birth in 2016, we invite paper proposals for a panel reflecting on how the field of Victorian studies has been shaped by the work of any or all of the three sisters, analyzing how their prose and/or poetry provide a mirror for understanding the critical issues of the era. Papers might alternatively address how the shifting critical fortunes of the Brontës’ work reflect the dynamic changes in the field of Victorian studies. Proposals should clearly situate the paper within the larger British Woman Writers conference theme of “reflections.”

Please submit a 300-word abstract and a short bio (in a single .doc or .pdf attachment) to Lauren Hoffer and Elizabeth Meadows at brontereflections2014@gmail.com no later than December 15, 2013. Panel subject to approval.

Reminder: Edwardian Culture Network 2014 "Edwardian Premonitions and Echoes" (12/2/2013; 4/10-4/11/2014)

Call for Papers: "Edwardian Premonitions and Echoes"
University of Liverpool
April 10-11, 2014
Deadline: December 2, 2013

"Edwardian Premonitions and Echoes" is the second annual conference of the Edwardian Culture Network.  The two-day conference will be hosted by the University of Liverpool on April 10-11, 2014. 

At the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, how useful is it to think about the Edwardian era as ending decisively in 1914? Indeed, how helpful have conventional boundaries of periodisation been in our understanding of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century British culture?

Rather than viewing ‘the Edwardian’ as a fixed and isolated historic moment, this conference seeks to open up new ways of thinking about the premonitions and echoes of the Edwardian age. Just as the 1880s and 1890s can be interpreted as ‘proto-Edwardian’, so too the Edwardians can be seen to have anticipated many issues and debates of the present day, from coalition governments to trade unions, immigration acts to women’s rights.

The conference organizers invite papers on any aspect of British culture, based on varied temporal definitions of the ‘Edwardian period’.  Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Proto-Edwardians: how far back can we trace the spirit of the Edwardian age? The Victorians? The Regency? Beyond?
• 21^st Century Edwardians: to what extent have the social reforms, political activities and cultural developments of the Edwardian era shaped contemporary society?
• Between Two Wars: what is the relationship between war and the Edwardians? How significant is it that the Edwardian era is frequently perceived to have been bookended by the Boer War and the First World War?
• Old versus new: how helpful is Samuel Hynes’s observation that the Edwardian era was one in which ‘old and new ideas dwelt uneasily together’? Was the Edwardian period an unusually heterogeneous cultural moment?
• Uncanny Edwardians: how did the Edwardian preoccupation with séances, emergent psychological theories, and theological developments, influence their perception of themselves in terms of their historical moment?

Please send 300 word abstracts to edwardianculture@hotmail.co.uk by no later than Monday December 2, 2013. For more about the conference and the Edwardian Culture Network, see www.edwardianculture.com

CFP: Decadence and the Senses: An Interdisciplinary Conference (12/31/2013; 4/10-11/2014)

“Decadence and the Senses: An Interdisciplinary Conference”
Goldsmiths, University of London,

April 10-11, 2014
Deadline: December 31, 2013

Keynote Speaker: Catherine Maxwell (Queen Mary, University of London).

This interdisciplinary conference explores the relationship of Decadence and the senses, and the ways in which Decadent writers attempt to capture fleeting sensations.  It is an opportunity to trace common visual, aural and “perfumed” motifs in Decadent works, and to reflect on the extent to which the senses are important to our understanding of the tradition. 

We welcome proposals on any aspect of Decadence and the senses. Papers should be about 20 mins in length. Abstracts of 500 words plus brief biography should be sent to: decadence2014@gold.ac.uk by December 31, 2013.

Email us or visit http://decadence2014.wordpress.com/call-for-papers-2/ for more information.

Reminder: Victorian Network "Victorian Bodies and Body Parts" (11/30/2013)

"Victorian Bodies and Body Parts"
Victorian Network
Deadline: November 30, 2013

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

The ninth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Professor Pamela K. Gilbert (University of Florida), is dedicated to a reassessment of the place of the human body in the Victorian literary and cultural imagination. Rapid medical and scientific advances, advancing industrialization and new forms of labour, legal reforms, the rise of comparative ethnology and anthropology, the growth of consumer culture, and the ever changing trends of Victorian fashion are just a few of the many forces that transformed how Victorians thought about the human body and about the relationship between the embodied, or disembodied, self and the object world.

Nineteenth-century configurations of the body have long been of interest to Victorian scholars. However, recent years have seen the field reconfigured by the emergence of a range of exciting new and theoretically sophisticated approaches that harness the insights of the new materialism, thing theory, cultural phenomenology and actor-network theory to explorations of Victorian embodiment, bodies and body parts.

The editorial board 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:

• embodied experience and the senses
• the body in stillness and in motion: practices of confinement and mobility
• consumerism, fashion and the stylized body
• the body and technology
• bodies of empire and colonialism
• bodies and body parts on display: anatomical museums, ethnological shows, hospital ward tours
• sciences of the body: medicine, biology, ethnology, statistics, etc.
• bodies, sex and gender
• health and illness
• affective bodies and embodied emotions
• labour power and the body as property
• the poetics and aesthetics of the human body
• human and animal bodies before and after Darwin

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-housesubmission guidelines.
 Deadline for submissions: November 30, 2013. Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com

CFP: Sights and Frights: Victorian Visual Culture, Horror and the Supernatural (12/16/2013; 6/19/2014)

"Sights and Frights: Victorian Visual Culture, Horror and the Supernatural"
University of Sussex

June 19 2014
Deadline: December 16, 2013

“Sights and Frights” is a one day interdisciplinary conference, aimed at both academics and post-graduate students, whose aim is to explore and interrogate cultural cross-currents between nineteenth-century visual culture, science and social practice, particularly where these concern attitudes to, and instances of, the supernatural and horrific.

The image of Victorian Britain in popular culture is synonymous with discipline, propriety and sentimentality, yet there was also a dark, subversive undercurrent to these mainstream ideals, manifest in such cultural phenomena as Gothic and ghost literature, freak shows, drugs cults and quasi-religious movements such as spiritualism and theosophy.

At the same time, the Victorians were engaged, more than ever before, in attempting to make the invisible world visible to the eye. Improvements in the manufacture of lenses led to the increased circulation of microscopes and telescopes, which, along with the invention of photography, led to a growth in empirical discovery and scientific innovation. The new visual technology of the panorama, diorama and magic lantern also proved to be highly popular forms of entertainment, enabling large numbers of Victorians to witness images, both real and imaginary, never seen before. In particular, the public demonstrated a voracious appetite for visual entertainment relating to ghouls, ghosts and Gothic horrors. Whilst the new ‘magic’ of optical technology appeared to promote scientific claims, it also served to stimulate a belief in the existence of invisible and occult forces.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers from anybody working in this field. Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Spiritualism and spirit photography
• Images of demonology and witchcraft
• Parapsychology, the paranormal and the occult (i.e. mesmerism, hypnotism, alchemy, astronomy)
• Death and mourning practices, memento mori, and death masks
• The iconography of ghosts, hauntings and ghost stories
• The Gothic in literature, art, photography, visual and wider culture
• Imaging of supernatural beings such as fairies, vampires etc
• Visual entertainment (magic lanterns, phantasmagoria, panorama/diorama) focusing on supernatural subjects
• The visual presentation of horrific aspects of science and medicine
• Images (photographs, illustrations, art) of opium dens and the drugs underworld
• Violent crime, crime scene photography and the figure of the serial killer

We are fortunate to have two keynote speakers for this event: Dr. Tatiana Kontou of Oxford Brookes University and Professor William Hughes of Bath Spa University.

Please submit proposals of 300 words, along with a short biographical note, by Monday December 16, 2013 to sightsandfrights@gmail.com or use the form on our website sightsandfrights.com. If you have any questions about the Conference, or about a potential proposal, please do not hesitate to contact us by email at the above address.

Reminder - CFP: Special Issue Supernatural Studies Journal "Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century" (11/30/2013; 3/31/2014)

Reminder - CFP: Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century

Special Issue of Supernatural Studies Journal

Abstracts: November 30, 2013

Articles: March 31, 2014

The Supernatural Studies Journal is now accepting proposals (article and book reviews) for a themed issue on the supernatural in the nineteenth century (due Winter 2014), guest edited by Janine Hatter and Sara Williams.

Articles may examine any aspect of the representation of the supernatural within the context of worldwide literature, arts and material culture in the nineteenth century. The editorial board welcomes any approach, but request that authors minimize jargon associated with any single-discipline studies.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
folklore & mythology, monstrosity, hybridity, vampires, shapeshifters, goblins, fairies and fairy tales, ghosts and hauntings, demons and angels, possession and/or mind control, death and dying, burial rites, occult, mysticism, spiritualism and séances, spirit photography, religion, superstition, voodoo, culture, philosophy, desire, politics, gender, race, sexuality and class.

For articles: please send a 300-500 word abstract (or complete article, if available) and C.V. by November 30, 2013. All submissions will be acknowledged. Notification of acceptance will be e-mailed by December 15, 2013. If your abstract is accepted, the full article (3,000 - 6,000 words, including references using MLA style) will be March 31, 2014.

Additionally, the editorial board is seeking reviews of books that engage with elements of the nineteenth century supernatural (800-1,000 words in length).

For reviews: please send a C.V. and description of the book you would like to review, or alternatively, see the journal’s website for available books.

Further information, including Submission Guidelines, are available at the journal site: supernaturalstudies.org.

Please e-mail submissions to both j.hatter@hull.ac.uk ands.williams2@hull.ac.uk. If emailing the journal directly atsupernaturalstudies@gmail.com please quote ‘nineteenth century’ in the subject box.

Postdoc Positions: Applications Open for 3 Posts at Oxford as Part of “Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives” (12/6/2013)

Applications Open for Postdoctoral Research Positions (3 posts)

Literature and Science at Oxford

Faculty of English Language and Literature, Oxford, in association with St Anne’s College

Grade 7: £29,541 – £36,298 p.a.
Deadline: Noon on December 6, 2013 

Following the award of a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Grant to Professor Sally Shuttleworth (“Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives”), the Faculty of English Language and Literature seeks three postdoctoral research assistants to work on aspects of the project. This project will explore the phenomena of stress and overload, and other disorders associated in the nineteenth century with the problems of modernity, as expressed in the literature, science and medicine of the period, tracking the circulation of ideas across these diverse areas.

The posts are fixed term for 59 months, and will start on March 1, 2014. Applicants must have a PhD or DPhil in a relevant area, possess strong communication skills and be willing to participate in the running of the project. The appointees will be based at St Anne’s College, Oxford.

The deadline for all of these posts is 12:00 noon on December 6, 2013.

Further details are available at: https://www.recruit.ox.ac.uk/pls/hrisliverecruit/erq_jobspec_version_4.jobspec?p_id=110328

and http://litsciox.wordpress.com/2013/11/12/applications-open-for-postdoctoral-research-positions-in-literature-and-science-at-oxford/

Special Event: Monsters and Detectives: Re-Writing the Victorians for Television and Radio (11/23/2013)

Monsters and Detectives: Re-Writing the Victorians for Television & Radio
Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD
Saturday November 23, 2013, 2:00-5:00pm

Adaptations of nineteenth-century narratives are a staple of prime-time drama, but the costume classics have now been joined by a new kind of Neo-Victorian tale. Popular shows like Ripper Street and Sherlock reinvent the past as a fictive playground of ideas, where contemporary fears and fantasies can be played out. But why do writers return to the past in order to scrutinise modernity? And what happens in the intersection between history, literature and mass media?

Speakers:
Dr Marie-Luise Kohlke (Swansea): 'Reciprocal Haunting in Ripper Street: Spectres of Twenty-First-Century Sexual Abuse in Neo-Victorian Media'
Michael Eaton (television and radio writer): 'Victorians such as Us'
Dr Benjamin Poore (York): “The Strange Casebooks of Dr Jekyll and Mr Holmes: Adaptations and the limits of Neo-Victorianism”

Admission is free, but registration is essential: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/events-calendar/monsters-and-detectives-re-writing-the-victorians-for-television-and-radio

CFP: NAVSA 2014! "Victorian Classes and Classifications" (11/13-15/2014)

Victorian Classes and Classifications

North American Victorian Studies Association Conference 2014
London, Ontario, Canada
November 13-15, 2014

Victorian Britain belonged to the classifying age. Imperial expansion and new techniques of observation and production confronted Britons with an expanding universe of natural and man-made phenomena.  In response, scientists, writers, artists, and educators sought to articulate some underlying sense of order through ever more complex systems of organization, arrangement, and tabulation. Natural philosophers vastly extended and revised the taxonomies of Linnaeus. Medical professionals developed new diagnostic tools and coined a broad range of new pathologies and diseases. Criminologists gathered biometric data that allowed them to constitute and apprehend criminal types. Literary critics debated the rise of new classes of literature, from the penny dreadful and sensation fiction to the naturalist novel. Librarians set out the protocols for indexing the classes and sub-classes of literature that resulted from the vast outpouring of printed matter. Teachers began to organize their classrooms into distinct groupings of students by age and ability. But with these efforts came, too, a new concern and fascination for that which exceeded classification, the anomalous, the mutation, the hybrid, the monstrous, and class struggle emerged as a theory of history and as a basis for political organization.

The organizers of the North American Victorian Studies Association’s 2014 conference welcome papers studying any aspect of the Victorians’ self-organization, organization of culture, and organization of the natural world. Proposals for individual papers or panels should be submitted electronically by March 1, 2014. Proposals for individual papers should be no more than 500 words; panel proposals should include 500-word abstracts for each paper and a 250-word panel description. Applicants should submit a one-page CV.

Conference threads might include:

• Varieties, species, genera, and types of living organism and inanimate object
• Literary genres, parts, classifications, and forms of publication
• Social class and its material embodiment in modes of travel, commodity culture, fashion, and the built environment
• Pedagogy and the classroom
• The sciences and pseudo-sciences of human classification: racial science, criminology, and sexology.
• Character types and body types
• Breeding, rank, and class
• Museums, exhibitions, shops, libraries, schools, and other sorting institutions
• Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and the organization of knowledge
• Cultural forms that exceed classification: the gothic, the grotesque, the monstrous, the absurd, the nonsensical.

Details on how to submit a proposal are forthcoming.
Check back here soon!

CFS: Consider Submitting to Papers on Language and Literature

Call for Submissions

PLL is a generalist journal of literary criticism and scholarship published quarterly at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. PLL publishes essays on all national literatures and historical periods, as well as book reviews, notes, and original materials such as notebooks, letters, and journals. For more information on submissions and the journal in general visit the webpage: 

(http://www.siue.edu/PLL/pllindex.html)

We do not publish exclusively in the nineteenth century but are open to submissions from scholars working in Victorian Studies and Romanticism. We have a new FB page: http://www.facebook.com/PapersonLanguageandLiterature

Reminder: NASSR 2014 "Romantic Connections" (11/30/2013; 6/13-15/2014)

“Romantic Connections”

NASSR 2014

University of Tokyo,
June 13–15, 2014

Deadline: November 30, 2013

The NASSR committee invites proposals for a major international Romanticism conference, to be held at the University of Tokyo on June 13–15, 2014.

This unique event will bring together four scholarly societies from three continents: it is a supernumerary conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR), also supported by the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS), the German Society for English Romanticism (GER), and the Japan Association of English Romanticism (JAER).

Over the last two decades, there has been sustained scholarly interest in the connections between European Romanticism and the peoples, cultures, and literatures of the rest of the world. In addition to discussing representations of the “East” by Romantic authors, there has been a growing trend towards viewing Romanticism itself in a global context, as a movement shaped by wider eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century forces of trade, migration, material circulation, intellectual exchange, slavery, and colonialism. 

While the conference's approach will be informed by the legacy of Saidian “Orientalism,” the committee is particularly interested in models of intercultural connection which refine or challenge totalising models of domination and subordination. Papers are welcome that shed light upon the question of “connection” from the broadest range of perspectives: imaginative, linguistic, material, social, sexual, scientific, economic, and political.

Drawing on the conference's location in Tokyo, this conference will consider the broader task of forging connections between Eastern and Western literature and scholarship. In a Japanese context, the idea of interpersonal “connection” (kizuna) takes on a different resonance, because of its close connection to the project of recovery (saisei) following the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami. This conference wishes to explore how such acts of cross-cultural translation offer the possibility of reciprocal transformations of meaning.

The conference welcomes explorations of the reception of European Romanticism in Asia and other regions of the world, as well as discussions of the future status of Romanticism studies in a geographically diverse and technologically connected scholarly world.

Topics for papers may include:

• Romantic and Romantic-period representations of Asia, Africa, or South America
• material, scholarly, scientific, and literary exchanges between European and non-European cultures
• trade and travel accounts
• connections with past civilizations or imaginary worlds
• sympathetic, imaginative, and psychological models of interpersonal or intercultural “connection”
• sociability, civility, ritual, and diplomacy
• intimacy, romance, sexuality, and gender
• bodily encounters, disease, and medicine
• race, colonialism, and slavery
• refugees, renegades, migrants, and exiles
• transatlantic, expatriate, or transcultural identities
• trade routes, technology, infrastructure, and modes of transport
• language, translation, interpretation, and linguistic barriers
• cosmopolitanism and the creation of a “global consciousness”
• pessimism, skepticism, and resistance to metropolitan or colonial narratives
• culture shock and challenges to national or personal identity
• comparative models of connection (such as Japanese ideas of kizuna, or bonds)
• Romantic reception and afterlives in different regions of the world
• the future of Romanticism studies in a global university context
• advances in technology, critical theory, and pedagogy

Send proposals for papers (200–300 words) to submissions@romanticconnections2014.org. The deadline is November 30, 2013. The committee will contact all participants by mid-December. 

For more details about the conference and our location in Tokyo, see our website: www.romanticconnections2014.org.

A limited number of travel bursaries may be available for graduate students. If you wish to apply for one, please include a CV and a brief statement of your current research (around 300 words) with your proposal.