Of Victorian Interest

Call for Applications: PhD studentship on Hardy and Education (3/9/2012)

2012-02-17T20:45:00.000-05:00

Great Western Research and National Trust

fully-funded Doctoral Studentship
Thomas Hardy and Education Ref: 945

(application deadline 9th March 2012; studentship to begin October 2012)

The primary aim of this doctoral studentship is to ask how the study of Hardy can be taken beyond the academic research community. Focusing particularly on young audiences, but also on other learning groups, the project is interdisciplinary and in part practice-based, drawing on the research methods of English studies, history and education. It will involve some practical work in schools as well as with the National Trust and Dorset County Museum learning groups and the student will be required to develop and disseminate relevant, original research in the field. The student will also be expected to undertake up to six hours per week voluntary work from March to October each year at one of the Hardy properties in Dorset (birth place cottage or Max Gate) and will work with other parties in order to ensure the wider understanding both of Hardy and his work and of his importance to the cultural life of the South West region as well as more broadly.

The University of Exeter (Centre for South West Writing and Centre for Victorian Studies, College of Humanities, in consultation with Exeter Graduate School of Education), in conjunction with the National Trust and in collaboration with the University of St Andrews and the Hardy Country Steering Group (among which current partners include Dorset County Museum (DCM), Dorset County Council, Dorset Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) and the Thomas Hardy Society) has been awarded funding from Great Western Research (GWR) for this three-year doctoral research studentship on Thomas Hardy and Education.

For further details please see: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/studying/funding/award/?id=945

NCSA 2012: Spiritual Matters/Matters of the Spirit (3/22-24/2012)

2012-02-17T15:15:00.000-05:00

Please join us for the 33rd Annual Conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association: Spiritual Matters/Matters of the Spirit (March 22-24, 2012) in Asheville, North Carolina.

From Romanticism's spiritual resurgence to the interrogations of Darwinism and science, the nineteenth century was immersed in conversation about the place of spirituality and religion in society, politics, and the arts. This year's NCSA conference will feature papers addressing all aspects of belief, religion, and spirituality in the long nineteenth century, from 1789 to 1914.

Our keynote speaker this year is Alexandra Owen, Professor of History and Gender Studies at Northwestern University. The title of her presentation is “Spirit, Matter: Modern Ghosts and the Haunting Effect in the Shadow of the Long Nineteenth Century.” The program also features "An Evening with the Ghosts" (a reenactment of a Victorian séance conducted by Eric Hall) and an excursion to the Biltmore Estate. The complete conference program, as well as information about travel, accommodations, and registration can be found on the conference website: http://www.nineteenthcenturystudiesassociation.org/2012-conference.html.

We look forward to seeing you there!

CFP: MLA 2013 Special Session "Neo-Victorianism and Marginal Voices" (3/15/2012; 1/3-6/2013)

2012-02-17T11:44:00.000-05:00

This proposed special session panel seeks papers that explore the parameters of neo-Victorian literature from a variety of historical, formal, or theoretical approaches. Questions addressed might include (but are certainly not limited to) the following:

What is neo-Victorian literature? What are the genre’s boundaries? What are its defining characteristics? Are there exemplary texts?
What is “new” about neo-Victorian literature? Form? Subject positioning? Narrative technique? The alignment of readers’ sympathies? Something else?
How has it developed as a genre? From where does it come, and where might we expect it to go?
How does neo-Victorian literature provide a site for marginal voices to address issues of identity, subjectivity, politics, race, class, etc.? How does it work in establishing alternative histories?
What do these texts aim to do? Do they (or must they) have political agendas? In what way do they question ideologies or ideas of history or given knowledge in other epistemological categories like science or sexuality? Do they always represent an alternative to the dominant cultural narrative?
What relationships does this literature depict between the metropolitan center and the colonial margins? Must it be set in one or the other? As a genre, does it represent a particular subject position? Must it address the colonial experience?
Is neo-Victorian literature best understood as a subset of postcolonial literature, or is it a distinct genre?
What time period forms the boundaries of neo-Victorian literature? When can it be written, and when must it be set?
Where should neo-Victorian literature be taught? In courses on Victorian literature or the Victorian novel? Postcolonial courses? Twentieth-century Anglophone courses? Elsewhere? And what might be the point of teaching these texts?
What do neo-Victorian texts tell us about the Victorians? What do they tell us about ourselves in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?

Papers that contextualize neo-Victorian texts, the issues they raise, or their creators or consumers are welcome.

Please send 250-word abstracts to Cameron Bushnell (cbushne@clemson.edu) and Elizabeth McClure (emcclure@umd.edu) no later than March 15, 2012.

CFP: Special NACBS Jubilee Panel

2012-02-17T11:40:00.001-05:00

The North American Conference on British Studies program committee is interested in arranging a special session on the Jubilee for the 2012 Montreal meeting. This would be a great opportunity for comparisons to Victoria's Golden and Diamond Jubilees and the social/cultural history of jubilee years (for ex., 1977 or 1935), and a discussion about the celebrity culture of monarchy. Ifinterested, please contact Julie Taddeo at taddeo@mail.umd.edu to discuss a possible panel.

NACBS 2012: http://www.nacbs.org/conference.html

Registration Open: RSVP 2012 conference (9/14-15/2012)

2012-02-17T11:34:00.000-05:00

Registration is now open for the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals conference, “Sentiment and Sensation in Victorian Periodicals,” September 14-15, 2012, at the AT&T Conference Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Papers will address any aspect of Victorian periodicals, particularly those on the discourse of sentiment and sensation in the newspaper and periodical press that variously promoted or targeted readerships, established journalistic networks or brands, and shaped, responded to, and/or addressed cultural and ideological concerns. For information about local arrangements and registration is available at the RSVP 2012 website, www.rsvp2012.org or by contacting Kathryn Ledbetter, KLedbetter@txstate.edu

CFP: Project Narrative Summer Institute (3/1/2012; 6/11-22/2012)

2012-02-16T11:47:00.000-05:00

The Project Narrative Summer Institute (PNSI) is a two-week program on the Columbus campus of the Ohio State University for faculty members and advanced graduate students who want to explore the usefulness of narrative theory to their research and teaching. Led by two Project Narrative core faculty members, the seminar meets in the mornings to discuss narrative and narrative-theoretical readings, and participants work in the afternoons on projects they bring to the Institute. A project may be an article, book chapter, presentation, or syllabus. PNSI members form a vibrant and collegial community for sharing ideas about scholarship, writing, and pedagogy.

The 2012 PNSI will be led by Project Narrative core faculty members Frederick Aldama and Sean O'Sullivan. In addition to theoretical readings, texts will be drawn from many narrative genres with an emphasis on comics, film, and television.

Tuition for PNSI is $1200. Participants also cover the cost of their own travel and housing. We encourage participants to seek institutional funding for this professional development opportunity. We can offer information for participants who want to share housing, house-sit, or stay in local bed-and-breakfasts.

Applicants should send a current c.v. and a one-page description of the project they plan to undertake at PNSI to Robyn Warhol via email (warhol.1@osu.edu) no later than March 1, 2012.

For more information on PNSI, including rationale, list of texts, and a detailed schedule, please following this link.

Please distribute this email to all those potentially interested in attending.

Reminder: Neo-Victorian Studies special issue 2012 "The Other Dickens: Neo-Victorian Appropriation and Adaptation" (2/29/2012)

2012-02-16T11:20:00.000-05:00

As part of the bicentenary celebrations of Dickens's birth, the editors of a special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies on 'The Other Dickens: Neo-Victorian Appropriation and Adaptation' invite contributors to consider the 'other' Dickens - those aspects of Dickens's life and work that have been the subject of recent revision, reappraisal, and transformation in contemporary culture. The special issue will aim to critically assess our persisting fascination with this canonical Victorian figure and, more generally, the 'Dickensian' cultural legacy of the Victorian age in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We would especially welcome papers and creative pieces which address the continued influence of Dickens on neo-Victorian studies, in literature, in bio-fiction, as well as in film and television adaptations of his novels.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

Dickens and adaptation/re-writings
Dickens and the legacies of Empire
International/trans-cultural Dickens in the age of globalisation
Dickens and contemporary politics (social reforms, the 'Big Society', philanthropy)
Dickens and twenty-first-century material/commodity culture and consumerism
Dickens and revisions of gender in the private and public spheres
Dickens and neo-Victorian nostalgia
Gothicised Dickens/Dickens's ghosts
Dickens and Dickens's women in bio-fiction
Dickens and (self-)performance/performing the past

Please send a 500 word proposal for a 6,000-8,000 word chapter to the guest editors Elodie Rousselot (Elodie.Rousselot@port.ac.uk) and Charlotte Boyce (charlotte.boyce@port.ac.uk) by 29 February 2012, adding a short biographical note. Completed articles and/or creative pieces will be due by 15 July 2012 and should be sent as a Word.doc attachment via email to the guest editors, with a copy to neovictorianstudies@swansea.ac.uk. Please consult the NVS website http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/ for further submission guidelines.

CFP: Robert Browning and Victorian Poetry at 200 (6/30/2012; 11/1-3/2012)

2012-02-15T11:43:00.000-05:00

‘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.

CFP: Midwest Conference on British Studies (4/1/2012; 10/12-14/2012)

2012-02-13T17:32:00.000-05:00

The Midwest Conference on British Studies is proud to announce that its fifty-ninth annual meeting will be hosted by the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, October 12-14th, 2012.

The keynote speaker will be John Gillis, Professor Emeritus, Rutgers University. The plenary address will be given by Ian Gentles, Professor of History, Tynedale University College and Seminary.

The MWCBS seeks papers from scholars in all fields of British Studies, broadly defined to include those who study England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Britain's Empire and the Commonwealth. We welcome scholars from the broad spectrum of disciplines, including but not limited to history, literature, political science, gender studies and art history. Proposals for complete sessions are preferred, although proposals for individual papers will be considered. We welcome roundtables (of four participants plus chair) and panels (of three participants plus chair/commentator) that:

offer cross-disciplinary perspectives on topics in British Studies
situate the arts, letters, and sciences in a British cultural context
examine representations of British and imperial/Commonwealth national identities
consider Anglo-American relations, past and present
examine new trends in British Studies
assess a major work or body of work by a scholar
explore new developments in digital humanities and/or research methodologies

After a very positive response to last year’s first teaching roundtable, we would particularly like to receive proposals for teaching roundtables that discuss collaborative or innovative learning techniques in the British Studies classroom.

The MWCBS welcomes papers presented by advanced graduate students and will award the Walter L. Arnstein Prize for the best graduate student paper(s) given at the conference.

Proposals must:

Include a 200-word abstract for each paper and a brief, 1-page c.v. for each participant, including chairs and commentators.

For full panels, include a brief 200-word preview of the panel as a whole.

Please place the panel proposal, the accompanying paper proposals and vitas in one file and send it as a single attachment. Also identify within the email the contact person for the panel.

All proposals should be submitted online by April 1, 2012, to the Program Committee Chair, Lia Paradis at lia.paradis@sru.edu.

Program Committee: Phil Harling, University of Kentucky; Robin Hermann, University of Louisiana at Lafayette; Isaac Land, Indiana State University; Jennifer McNabb, Western Illinois University; Lia Paradis, Chair, Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania; Lisa Sigel, Depaul University.

Visit the MWCBS website at http://mwcbs.edublogs.org/

CFP: NAVSA 2012 panel "Between Science and Sensation: Psychic Networks in the Mid-Victorian Period" (2/27/2012; 9/27-30/2012)

2012-02-13T10:11:00.000-05:00

Between Science and Sensation:
Psychic Networks in the Mid-Victorian Period
NAVSA 2012 panel

We invite paper proposals on a variety of topics related to the theme of psychic connections between 1835-1875 for a special topic panel at NAVSA 2012 (at the University of Wisconsin). For this panel we are interpreting the term "psychic" broadly to include all forms of spiritual communications and connections—including mesmerism/hypnotism, prognostication, telepathy, etc. In particular, we welcome perspectives that examine the intersections between psychic networks and science. For example, potential papers could explore how scientific theories attempted to explain and contain psychic phenomena, or how the tension between science and the supernatural becomes sensationalized in popular narratives. The other proposed papers for the panel include a reading which examines Darwinian science and psychic inheritance in Wilkie Collins's Armadale and an examination of hypnotic poisoning in Charles Warren Adams's The Notting Hill Mystery.

Paper topics for this panel could address but are not limited to:

Scientific attempts to "prove" the existence of the supernatural (such as ghosts, fairies, etc.)
Mesmerism
Telepathy/telekenesis
Spirit photography
Natural Theology or other attempts to unite evolutionary theory with a spiritual belief system
Deja vu
Psychology
British interest in non-Western religions
Intersections between Christianity and science
Literary affect
Literature as science writing
Modes of belief
Studies of fear

Please send 500 word abstracts and a one-page CV in pdf format to szellars@indiana.edu by 27 February. Final acceptance contingent upon NAVSA approval.

INCS 2012 "Picturing the Nineteenth Century" (3/22-25/2012)

2012-02-10T19:11:00.000-05:00

You are invited to attend the 2012 conference of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies association, "Picturing the Nineteenth Century," to be held in Lexington KY, March 22-25. The conference features three keynote speakers:

Shawn Michelle Smith (Art Institute of Chicago), "Visions of the Nineteenth-Century Nation: Augustus Washington and the Civil Contract of Photography"
Julie Codell (Arizona State University), "Victorian Portraits: The Material Culture of Identity"
Nancy Armstrong (Duke University), "The Victorian Archive and Its Secrets"

In addition, it includes a lecture and exhibit by photographer/daguerrotypist Jerry Spagnoli and the inimitable Victorian Theatrical Society of the University of Virginia, which will perform H. J. Byron's 1858 play The Maid and the Magpie; or, The Fatal Spoon!

The complete conference program, the registration form, and travel and accommodation information can be found on the conference website: http://incs.as.uky.edu. Deadline for the advanced registration fee and the conference banquet is March 5; deadline for receiving a reduced rate at the conference hotel (Lexington Downtown Hilton) is March 1, though the hotel will honor the rate after the deadline if rooms are available.

CFP: Southern Conference On British Studies 2012 Meeting (3/1/2012; 11/2-3/2012)

2012-02-10T16:24:00.000-05:00

The Southern Conference on British Studies solicits proposals for its 2012 meeting to be held November 2-3, 2012 in Mobile, Alabama. The SCBS will meet in conjunction with the Southern Historical Association at the Renaissance Riverview Plaza Hotel.

The SCBS construes British Studies widely and invites participation by scholars in all areas of British history and culture, including 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.

Proposals Should Be Postmarked By March 1, 2012 And Mailed To:

Dr. William Anthony Hay, Department of History, P.O. Box H, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS 39762.

Inquiries are welcome at wilhay6248@aol.com, but please do not send proposals by email or fax.

Reminder: 2012 M/MLA: Permanent Section: English Literature 1800-1900 (3/9/2012; 11/8-11/2012)

2012-02-10T11:01:00.000-05:00

The English Literature 1800-1900 panel seeks papers for the 2012 Midwest Modern Language Association Convention. November 8-11, 2012. Cincinnati, Ohio.

In keeping with the informal theme of “debt” for the M/MLA 2012 convention, the English II: English Literature 1800-1900 panel seeks to present discussions of works and writers that deal in some fashion with that nineteenth-century juggernaut, debt. Possible themes include:

indebtedness and influence
borrowers and lenders
bonds and contracts
economics of lack
states of debt
oaths and promises
gift-giving, cultures of expenditure
occupy literature
trans-cultural capital
deferring,
symbolic economics
ecological materialism
rethinking civic missions/practices
forgiveness, gratitude
literature of demand
emotional obligation
debts of affect
student loans

Papers on any form or genre of British literature between 1800 and 1900 are welcome. Proposals of 200 to 400 words should be sent by March 9th to Nancee Reeves, Purdue University, nreeves@purdue.edu. Selected presenters will be informed by May 1st, 2012 and must register for the conference by July 1, 2012.

Reminder: Celebrating Mr. Dickens (2/18/2012)

2012-02-10T10:51:00.000-05:00

Celebrating Mr. Dickens

University of Delaware

February 18, 2012, 10:30am – 4:30pm

Join UD alumni and friends for a Saturday Symposium on February 18, 2012 in honor of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. The program will include faculty talks on Dickens and his world, a buﬀet lunch, a tour of two special exhibits on Dickens in the University Library and a performance of Dickens’s most celebrated public reading, “Sikes and Nancy” by Mic Matarrese from the Resident Ensemble Players.

The cost is $50 per person, Registration for the first 25 students/staff is free (lunch not included), space is limited!

Produced by the Department of English along with generous support given by the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library. Exhibits of Dickens in the library are curated by Mark Samuels Lasner and Jaime Margalotti.

CFP: UpStage summer 2012 issue (6/30/2012)

2012-02-09T11:38:00.000-05:00

UpStage, a peer-reviewed online publication dedicated to research in turn-of-the-century dramatic literature, theatre, and theatrical culture, is seeking submissions for its Summer 2012 issue. This is a development of the pages published under this name as part of THE OSCHOLARS, and is now an independently edited journal in the Oscholars group published by Rivendale Press at www.oscholars.com, as part of our expanding coverage of the different cultural manifestations of the fin de siècle.

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the work of Shaw, Schnitzler, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, von Hofmannsthal, and their contemporaries in Western and Eastern Europe and beyond.

UpStage welcomes a variety of theoretical and critical methodologies.

We are interested in receiving:

Scholarly articles of approximately 3000 words
Book reviews of approximately 500 words
Reports on work in progress (book manuscripts, Master’s theses, and doctoral dissertations) (approximately 500-1000 words)
Reviews of contemporary productions of turn-of-the-century plays (or plays about the turn of the nineteenth century) and announcements of future productions (approximately 500 words)

Please e-mail your submissions by June 30, 2012, as MS Word attachments only, to both

Dr. Helena Gurfinkel, Department of English Language and Literature, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Edwardsville, IL, USA at hgurfin@siue.edu

and

Dr. Michelle C. Paull, Drama Programme, St. Mary's University College, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, TW1, 4SX, England, at michelle.paull@smuc.ac.uk

Submissions should conform to the latest version of the MLA style. In order to undergo masked peer-review, scholarly articles must be submitted in the following way: the author’s contact information and brief bio should appear in the body of the e-mail, while the Word attachment should contain no identifying information.

CFP: Re-Thinking Humanities and Social Science "The Politics of Memory" (6/1/2012; 9/6-9/2012)

2012-02-09T11:24:00.000-05:00

The 3rd International Conference on Re-Thinking Humanities and Social Science is to be held at the University of Zadar, Croatia, from September 6 – 9, 2012.

The conference has taken place every year since 2010. The conference is an invaluable opportunity for meeting, exchanging and debating current topics in humanities and social sciences.

Two years ago the conference gathered approximately 100 international research scholars who discussed the topic of "Postmodernism and the Issue of the (Post)Other". The keynote speakers were Eric Santner (University of Chicago) and Stipe Grgas (University of Zagreb). Last year the topic was "The Zone and Zones: Radical Spatiality in Our Times" - keynote speakers: Edward Soja (UCLA) and Brandon Labelle (Bergen National Academy of the Arts).

In 2012 we would like to concentrate on the politics of memory.

Keynote speakers:

Laura Mulvey (Department of History of Art and Screen Media, University of London)
Lauren Berlant (Department of English Language and Literature, University of Chicago)

The Politics of Memory

How does remembrance shape our links to the past? What is the link between past and present? How are narratives of past constituted, maintained or dissipated? How is memory performed? How various discourses of the past inscribe social relations and subjectivities? How are our innermost emotions, desires and fantasies articulated with a discursive space of memory in the present? What is the link between communication technologies and the ways past is represented? How are we to understand various technologies of memory? Today, more than ever, questions such as these raise a more general concern about the politics of memory. Once, the past was seen as a stable and known, it was used as a tool to construct collective identities, nation states, to give us a feeling of belonging and common origin, to create what was seen as “our heritage”. But today the concept of the “ours”, with all of its categories, calls into question the notion of heritage. There has been growing awareness among scholars that the way the past is remembered is always articulated along specific social axes of differentiation such as class, gender, ethnic background etc. Each of these axes is invested with particular meanings, which can differ according to the different discursive formations that are used as an interpretative framework. All of these constitute the politics of memory that is performed in everyday cultural, political and economic

practices?

At this conference we problematise the politics of memory and the way it is embodied in films, photographs, performances, literature, public art, memorials …. We are especially interested in exploring the circulation of historical memories that offer the basis of identification in a given cultural, economic and political moment; (2) the possible responsive ways to, what Lauren Berlant calls “the urgencies of a moment (the historical moment, the sexual moment, the intimate moment, the singular subjective moment where survival time is another name for ordinary life)” and (3) the ways the new technology offers an opportunity to “aesthetics of the past to meet the aesthetics of the present” through “the aesthetic of delay” and confusion between living and dead (Laura Mulvey).

Possible topics include:

Film, photography and memory
Performing arts and memory
Literature and memory
Sound and memory
Rituals of memory
Memory, public sphere and citizenship
Cultural memory and trauma
Memory and forgetting
Commodity culture and cultural forgetting
Memory and body (memory of bodily movements, scars, pregnancy….)
Memory and autobiographical texts
Memory, gender roles and sexuality
Memory and communication technologies

Proposals are invited from scholars from different fields and disciplines of humanities and social sciences for individual papers (30 minutes including discussion time). Please send proposals (no more than 300 words in length) to rhss.conference@gmail.com by June 1st 2012. Selected conference papers will be published.

Abstracts should be in Word or RTF formats and include the following: a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) e-mail address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract. Please use plain text (Times New Roman 12, Single Spacing, Justify) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline).

We acknowledge receipt and reply to all proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us within a week from your submission, you should assume we did not receive your proposal; in that case we suggest trying an alternative electronic route or resending.

The conference language is English.

Registration: Conference fee is 80 Euros. Graduate students fee is 40 Euros. Late registration fee is 100 Euros i.e. 50 Euros for graduate students.

Dates: Proposal submission deadline is June 1st 2012. Registration deadline for all conference participants is July 1st 2012. Final conference announcement and the program will be published August 15th 2012 on the conference website: http://www.rhss-conference.com

Additional Information: The conference will take place at the University of Zadar (www.unizd.hr), Croatia. Additional information about travel arrangements, accommodation, and other practical details will be posted soon on the conference website: http://www.rhss-conference.com Or you can contact the organizers directly at rhss.conference@gmail.com

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

2012-02-08T09:27:00.000-05:00

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: Dickens’s World (3/7-8/2012)

2012-02-08T09:17:00.000-05:00

Coinciding with Dickens’ birth, we are pleased to announce the speakers for our online conference ‘Dickens’ World’ taking place next month. Register now at: http://dickensworld.wordpress.com/

Video lectures will be presented by:

David Paroissien: Looking Back and Looking Forward: Shifting Perspectives in Dickens's Fiction
John Bowen: Beginning the World
Anne Stiles: Topic to be confirmed

This unique online event, which is free for all, will celebrate the life and work of Charles Dickens.

Additional features include:

Free scholarly papers with discussion forum for each
Reading Room with free articles and book chapters from Wiley-Blackwell

Join an international group of scholars to discuss the work of one of the world's most important authors. The emphasis is on illustrating the many ways in which Dickens influenced, and was influenced by, his contact with other countries. More broadly, we hope the conference will encourage online discussion about the social, cultural and technological milieu in which (and of which) Dickens wrote. Log on to the discussion whenever it suits your schedule, everyone is welcome to participate!

We want to hear from you! If you're a Dickens enthusiast we would love to hear what Dickens means to you. Why not submit a short video address which may be featured in the conference? Find out more at http://dickensworld.wordpress.com/video-address-invitation/

We look forward to seeing you there!

CFP: Gramma special issue "The History and Future of the 19th-Century Book" (12/31/2012)

2012-02-06T22:02:00.000-05:00

Gramma Journal of Theory and Criticism

http://www.enl.auth.gr/gramma/

Special Issue "The History and Future of the 19th-Century Book" number 21 (2013)

In the period between 1740 to 1850, the systematization of the entire process of making and selling books through a network of printers, publishers, booksellers, writers, readers, and critics led to the evolution of the book trade into a profit-making machine. The resulting professionalization and commodification of literature created not only professional authors and critics, making authorship itself undergo significant change, but set up an entirely new way of conceiving of reading, writing, and selling literary materials. The changing nature of books, media, information and communication defined the literary culture of the period and was central to the establishment of national identity.

Today, the late twentieth-century emergence of digital media has led to a massive-scale migration of our paper-based inheritance to digital forms, forcing a return to textual scholarship and its various problematics, as well as placing literature within a complex interactive matrix of multiple collaborating agents, individual as well as institutional. Though digitization was not a concern in the nineteenth century, the drastically changing relationship of literature to its socio-historical milieu invites parallels with today’s re-inventing of the writing and dissemination of literature and of the digital transformation in the humanities. The debate becomes even more urgent as more and more eighteenth and nineteenth-century print literary materials are being modeled in digital environments. What does digital technology has to offer literary and cultural history? What are the stakes involved in the translation of print materials into digital forms?

For the 2013 volume of Gramma on the history and future of the book with a focus on British and American 19th-century literary materials, papers are invited on the following or related areas:

book production and publishing history
gender, class, and audiences as mediated by print/digital text
authorship and its redefinition
periodicals; serial publication; copyright and pirated editions
editing 19th-century British writers
interfaces, platforms, and technologies of 19th-century books
archiving, preserving, and collecting material and digital records
the impact of digitization on teaching and scholarship in 19th-century studies
bibliography, textual criticism, and digital technologies
the public domain and the creative commons for the 19th and 21st centuries

Papers should not exceed the length of 7,000 words (including footnotes and bibliography) and should be double spaced. They should adhere to the latest MLA style of documentation and should be submitted electronically in the form of a Word document to the editors of the issue, Maria Schoina and Andrew Stauffer, at the following email addresses: schoina@enl.auth.gr and amstauff@gmail.com

Deadline for submissions: 31 December 2012

Reminder: Charles Dickens: Births, Marriages, Deaths (5/15/2012; 10/19-20/2012)

2012-02-02T21:42:00.001-05:00

Charles Dickens: Births, Marriages, Deaths
October 19-20, 2012

Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece

Organized by The School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and The Department of English Language and Literature, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey.

Co-organizers: Valerie Kennedy (Bilkent) and Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou (Thessaloniki)

In Dickens’s bicentenary year we wish to invite proposals for papers on crucial thresholds, moments of transition, and life cycles as these are represented, questioned or complicated in Dickens’s writings. We invite contributions that explore these topics, including but not limited to papers which focus on the following:

Births (birth rituals; births of boys vs. birth of girls; legitimacy and illegitimacy; birth and class identity vs. innate identity);
Marriages (marriage and money; marriage and love; sadistic and masochistic marriages; marriage and theatrical performance);
Deaths (death by murder; death by drowning or 'accident'); funerals and theatrical performance; death and gender and social class).

Plenary speakers: Michael Hollington and Catherine Waters

Please send abstracts of 250 words to both Valerie Kennedy (kennedy@bilkent.edu.tr) and Katerina Kitsi (katkit@enl.auth.gr) by May 15, 2012.

http://www.enl.auth.gr/dickens/index.html

Extended Deadline: G. B. Shaw: Back in Town (2/24/2012; 5/29-6/1/2012)

2012-02-02T08:03:00.000-05:00

The deadline for sending an abstract to bernardshawindublin@gmail.com has been extended to February 24th, 2012. Please send the abstract along with a c.v. and a brief letter of introduction.

This conference is focused on Shaw’s return to Dublin, so to speak, to revisit his Irish identity, and papers discussing his Irish qualities, interrelationships with other Irish, and contributions to Ireland would be welcomed, along with testimony to his stature in and influence on world drama, and other topics as well.

Papers (maximum of twenty minutes per talk) may be written from any critical perspective. Abstracts of approximately 300 words should be submitted to bernardshawindublin@gmail.com for consideration, along with a c.v and brief letter of introduction.

If you'd like to apply for an ISS travel grant, see the instructions at http://www.shawsociety.org/ISS-Travel-Grants.htm and send your application to "Leonard Conolly" <lconolly@trentu.ca> and Richard Dietrich <dietrich@usf.edu> .

Conference details can be found at http://bernardshawindublin.yolasite.com
and http://www.shawsociety.org/UCD-Shaw-Conference-2012.htm .

CFP: BAVS 2012 conference: Victorian Value: Ethics, Economics, Aesthetics (3/31/2012; 8/30 - 9/1/2012)

2012-01-31T13:05:00.000-05:00

BAVS 2012

University of Sheffield

Thursday 30^th August – Saturday 1^st September

Victorian Value: Ethics, Economics, Aesthetics

I suppose the persons interested in establishing a school of Art for workmen may in the main be divided into two classes, namely, first those who chiefly desire to make the men happier, wiser and better; and secondly, those who desire them to produce better and more valuable work (John Ruskin)

The 2012 conference of the British Association for Victorian Studies will be held in Sheffield, the thriving heart of the Victorian Steel Industry. In 1875, on the outskirts of the city, John Ruskin established the Museum of St George, a collection of art objects and natural artefacts displayed for the aesthetic education of the city’s workers. Inspired by Ruskin, the theme of this year’s conference aims to explore the relationships between different kinds of value in the Victorian period, to return to the period’s central debates about how to measure, establish and uphold value in the emergent modernity of Victorian Britain, and to think about the representation and legacy of those values both in and beyond the field of Victorian Studies.

Papers may address, but are not limited to, to following topics:

The representation and circulation of different kinds of currency
Aesthetes in the marketplace
Critical/cultural evaluation, from Ruskin and Arnold to Leavis and beyond
The ethical turn in Victorian Studies
Political economy and the art of government
The transmission of value at home and abroad
Value rewritten, from Woolf to Waters
Domestic economy and the aesthetics of the home
Ethical dilemmas, aesthetic solutions
Value on display: collection and exhibition
New economies, from Cobden to Carpenter
Commodity culture and the value of ‘things’
Sincere characters: the ethics of self and text
Work ethics: Madox-Brown, Marx and Morris

Please send the title of your paper and an abstract of around 250 words to bavs2012@gmail.com by 31st March 2012.

For more information, please see our website (http://www.victorianvalue2012.blogspot.com).

Job Posting: Lecturer in 19th Century Studies, King's College London

2012-01-31T13:00:00.000-05:00

The Department of English at King's College London wishes to appoint an outstanding scholar in the area of 19th-century (post 1830) English Literature. We seek applications from strong candidates who work on any area of 19th-century (post -1830) literature, although candidates may have research expertise in any of the following: 19th-century poetry; the literature of the 1880s and 1890s; literature and its relationships to visual and material cultures; trans-national literatures of the 19th century; 19th-century media and print culture.

This is one of three new positions currently advertised, which form part of a strategy to ensure the Department's position as one of the top departments nationally. The current phase of hiring is the second in a planned expansion staged over 2011-2013. The Department is committed to research and teaching excellence in Anglo-phone literary and cultural studies, from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day, across a broad sweep of geographical locations and national traditions, genres, styles, and media (including theatre and performance and creative writing). Through strategic investment, it builds on its growing reputation for dynamic and innovative research and teaching (in RAE 2008, 70% of outputs were judged 'world leading' or 'internationally excellent'), and a distinctive programme of collaborations with
institutions in the cultural sector.

Further information about the English Department http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/index.aspx

For informal enquiries, contact Professor Josephine McDonagh, Head of the Department of English,josephine.mcdonagh@kcl.ac.uk

CFP: Race, Nation and Empire on the Victorian Popular Stage (3/23/2012; 7/2012)

2012-01-31T12:52:00.001-05:00

Race, Nation and Empire on the Victorian Popular Stage

https://sites.google.com/site/victorianpantomime/home/2012-conference

This conference will be the third in a series of three organised as part of our AHRC-funded project on the 'Cultural History of English Pantomime, 1837-1902'.

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

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

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

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

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

The deadline for proposals for 20 minute papers, up to but not exceeding 300 words, should be sent to Peter Yeandle (p.yeandle(at)Lancaster.ac.uk) by no later than 23 March 2012.

Keynote Speaker: John MacKenzie

Other confirmed speakers:

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

Conference: Politics, Performance and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain (4/19-20/2012)

2012-01-31T12:40:00.000-05:00

Politics, Performance and Popular Culture

in Nineteenth-Century Britain
University of Birmingham, 19-20 April 2012

You are invited to join us for a two-day symposium in Birmingham, at which we will explore the relationship between politics, performance and popular culture in nineteenth-century Britain. Our speakers have been confirmed, but we welcome participants for roundtable discussions and other contributions.

In what ways might popular culture have defined politics? How might 'performance' be addressed as a concept by which better to understand crowd behaviour, whether for example at hustings or in protest? How did politicians and others conceptualise their audience? If, as Patrick Joyce argues, the late-Victorian audience in a context of political reform were 'rightful heirs to the democracy of pleasure' (Visions of the People, 1994, p. 309), how can we define the relationship between audience, politics and pleasure? Can we identify a discursive relationship between political and performance culture?

Speakers:

Mike Sanders (Manchester): on Platforms, Correspondences and Theatrical Metaphor.
Jim Davis (Warwick): Victorian pantomime and the Politics of Gender Variance
Jane Pritchard (Victoria and Albert Museum): on Ballet, class and identity
Jill Sullivan (Independent): on The Irish question in regional pantomime
Marcus Morris (Lancaster): on Labour leaders, political rhetoric and performativity
Richard Gaunt (Nottingham): on Peel as actor-dramatist (parliament itself as theatrical institution)
Caroline Radcliffe (Birmingham): on Theatrical hierarchy and Cultural capital: East and West London
Anselm Heinrich (Glasgow): on Gladstone, national theatre and contested didactics of theatre.
Janice Norwood (Hertfordshire): on East End Socialism, performance techniques in protest/marches
Peter Yeandle (Lancaster): on Christian Socialism and performing arts: politics, theology and theatricality

Costs: £35 (£20 postgraduate). Further information about local accommodation upon request. For further information, please contact Peter Yeandle at p.yeandle(at)lancaster.ac.uk

CFP: Robert Browning’s legacy(ies) and transition(s) (4/30/2012; 12/6-7/2012)

2012-01-26T20:01:00.000-05:00

Proposals for papers are invited for an international conference to be held at Lyon 2 University (France) on December 6th and 7th 2012, as part of the commemoration of the bicentennial of the birth of Robert Browning.

Too often relegated to the Victorian shelves of neglected literature, too often identified exclusively as the inventor of the dramatic monologue — also known as the Victorian monologue —, too often considered to be a difficult, if not obscure, poet, the victim of the readers of his century, who discovered him late, Robert Browning was blamed by the Victorians precisely for what the Modernists treasured in his poetry. By turns Romantic, post-Romantic, Victorian, and post-Victorian, Robert Browning’s works spanned almost the entire Victorian era, looking backwards to rediscover the Romantic period, and forward to herald the arrival of the Modern period, through innumerable complex poems, which he himself questioned and reworked. The main question about such a legacy is the reason why his contemporaries rejected it whereas the poets and readers to come would be proud of it. What are the traces he left in Victorian poetry that would survive their author unexpectedly and in spite of him? How and why is it possible to say that Browning’s poetry is one of legacy(ies) and transition(s)?

Proposals (300 words max.) for 30-minute papers in English or French should be sent by April 30th 2012 at the latest, accompanied by a short cv, to the following e-mail address: Jean-Charles.Perquin@univ-lyon2.fr.

Job vacancy at Florence Nightingale Museum (2/6/2012)

2012-01-26T19:58:00.000-05:00

Job vacancy at Florence Nightingale Museum

www.florence-nightingale.co.uk

Job Title: Gallery Assistant
Line Manager: Front of House Manager
Salary: £7.50 per hr (paid monthly through FNM BACS in arrears)
Hours: 8 hours with a 30 minute unpaid lunch break
Hours of work: 9:00-5:00/9:30-5:30
Contract: Permanent

Background information
The Florence Nightingale Museum Trust was established as an independent charity in 1983 and opened to the public in 1989. The museum is located in the grounds of St Thomas' Hospital at the heart of the cultural regeneration taking place on the South Bank.

Successful applicants will have the opportunity to join a new team in a modernized and redesigned museum, dedicated to promoting the Life and work of Florence Nightingale.

Florence Nightingale became a living legend as the 'Lady with the Lamp'. When she died in 1910, aged 90, she was famous around the world. But who was the real Florence Nightingale? The Florence Nightingale Museum follows her story and uncovers a woman of many talents, as well as flaws. The new museum opened in May 2010 after a £1.4million refurbishment. Visitors travel through three pavilions which take them on a journey through the life and times of Florence Nightingale, from her Victorian childhood to the Crimean War and on to her years as an ardent campaigner.

The Front of House is a small, enthusiastic and hardworking team. Applicants are required to work a minimum of three days across a seven day week, with no fixed Rota, so flexibility is essential. Demonstrate excellent interpersonal communication skills and experience in customer services, as well as an interest in the arts and cultural heritage.

For an application form and further details please email catherine@florence-nightingale.co.uk. Please telephone or email to request a hard copy application.

Catherine McGregor (Front of House Manager)
Florence Nightingale Museum
Gassiot House
2 Lambeth Palace Road
SE1 7EW
020 7620 0374

The closing date for applications is 9am on 6th February 2012. Interviews will be held at the Florence Nightingale Museum on 8th February 2012

Registration Reminder: W.T. Stead: Centenary Conference for a Newspaper Revolutionary (1/31/2012; 4/16-17/2012)

2012-01-26T19:51:00.000-05:00

W.T. Stead:
Centenary Conference for a Newspaper Revolutionary
British Library
16-17 April 2012

Plenary Speakers include: Laurel Brake; John Durham Peters; Tristram Hunt MP; Geoffrey Robertson QC; Roy Greenslade

Early registration closes on the 31 January 2012. Up until the 31 January registration is £70 (£60 concessions) for both days, including lunch and a wine reception. From the 1 February registration will be £85 (£75 concessions). Registration closes on the 31 March 2012

Registration is via the British Library Box Office. Unfortunately, the BL can only take bookings by telephone (+44 (0)1937 546546) or in person at the Box Office at St Pancras.

For more details about registration see the conference website: http://sites.google.com/site/stead2012/registration

The conference program is here: http://sites.google.com/site/stead2012/program

CFP: MLA 2013 Victorian Division panels on Victorian Attention and Victorian Distraction (3/1/2012; 1/3-6/2013)

2012-01-25T13:50:00.000-05:00

The Victorian Division seeks abstracts for a panel on Victorian Attention. Did Victorians attend to their world in particular ways? Were their concepts of attention themselves distinct from those of other periods? What does it mean to “pay” attention in the nineteenth century? Were there Victoria attention disorders: according too much attention to something or someone, or too little; the wish for inordinate attention, or the inability to bear attention.

Topics might include:

Attending to children, books, celebrities, clothing, etc.
Absorption—in activities, thought, the self.
Noticing, considering, focusing.
Publicity, celebrity, scandal.
Learning, memorization, retaining knowledge.
Caring for and comforting others; forms of courtesy.
Disorders of attention: Victorian attention spans, attention deficits, attention seeking, shyness, etc.

The Victorian Division also seeks abstracts for a panel on Victorian Distraction. What are the peculiarly Victorian modes by which attention goes astray? Why has the nineteenth-century continuum of distraction—from mild absent-mindedness to full-on madness—become so foreshortened? Who or what drives literary characters to distraction and why? What is the precise quality of a beneficial distraction? When does attention become distraction, or vice versa? What does Victorian psychology have to say about any of these topics?

Topics might include:

Diversion: hobbies, leisure activities.
Getting lost, wandering, going astray, traveling, fugue states.
Madness, temporary or permanent.
Absent-mindedness, mild confusion, poor attention.
Narrative and/or theoretical implications of distraction.

500 word abstracts and CV to Elaine Freedgood (ef38@nyu.edu) by Mar 1 please.

Charles Dickens and the Mid-Victorian Press, 1850–70 (3/28-31/2012)

2012-01-24T22:09:00.000-05:00

Charles Dickens and the Mid-Victorian Press, 1850–70
Wednesday 28th March–Saturday 31st March 2012
Department of English, University of Buckingham,

Buckingham MK18 1EG

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

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

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

If you have any queries then please contact John Drew, Ben Winyard or Hazel Mackenzie atdjo@buckingham.ac.uk.

CFP: Wounded Bodies, Tortured Souls: Narratives of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Trauma (3/16/2012; 6/14/2012)

2012-01-24T22:04:00.001-05:00

Wounded Bodies, Tortured Souls:
Narratives of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Trauma

Postgraduate Conference, University of Portsmouth, 14th June 2012

Keynote Speaker: Dr Marie-Luise Kohlke, University of Swansea

In recent years the study of trauma has become central to contemporary conceptualisations of personal and collective narratives of pain and loss. Often identified as a ‘modern’ phenomenon, a product of industrialisation and modernisation, trauma emerged as a distinct pathology alongside the rise of a middle-class readership, and accounts of physical and psychological wounds abound in Victorian fiction. In turn, Victorian tropes of trauma have been appropriated by the neo-Victorian novel, often in ways which offer a self-conscious or critical engagement with past representations.

This conference seeks to examine the intersection between the physical and psychical representation of trauma in both Victorian and Neo-Victorian literature. It aims to explore the importance of the relationship between the mind and the body, as well as the relationship between Victorian literary representations and neo-Victorian appropriations. We welcome papers examining representations of trauma in Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction, as well as contributions from the fields of literary theory, cultural studies, and the visual arts.

Possible areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

Victorian trauma narratives
Pain in Victorian art, literature and culture
Neo-Victorian traumatic appropriations
‘Wound Culture’
Traumatic performances (race/gender/sexuality, etc.)
Imperial trauma

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words for papers lasting 20 minutes, and a brief biographical note (100 words), to Emily Hunt (emily.hunt@port.ac.uk) or Alex Messem (alexandra.messem@port.ac.uk) by 16 March 2012.

CFP: Print and Beyond: Publishing Rossetti, Morris and the Aesthetes (3/15/2012; 1/3-6/2013)

2012-01-24T21:59:00.000-05:00

SHARP and William Morris Society at MLA 2013

As in 2012, SHARP and the William Morris Society in the United States are proposing a joint panel for the Modern Language Association's 2013 conference to be held January 2013 in Boston.

"Print and Beyond: Publishing Rossetti, Morris and the Aesthetes"

This proposed joint session with the William Morris Society will consider material presentations of Pre-Raphaelite works in a variety of media.

Abstracts to Greg Barnhisel (barnhiselg@duq.edu) by March 15.

Event: News of the World: A Study Day (2/24/2012)

2012-01-24T21:52:00.000-05:00

News of the World: A Study Day
King’s College London
24 February 2012
All Welcome - Free

Founded in 1843, the News of the World was one of the UK’s longest-running Sunday newspapers when it came to its inauspicious end in the summer of 2011. Gone, but not forgotten, the paper continues to be of interest as the full ‘story’ of the hacking scandal is revealed in the wake of parliamentary and other investigations.

Initially a broadsheet transformed into a tabloid by News International only in 1984, the News of the World has always been one of the most read newspapers in Britain. During the Victorian period, it had one of the largest circulations, catering, in particular, for the working classes, and at the time of its closing, it was the highest selling newspaper of any kind in the UK. Its history has always been lively and controversial, with sensational and investigative journalism a mainstay of its news. As one media historian has claimed, the paper always had something of the ‘saucy seaside postcard’ about it, and as such, it may have had a unique place within British news culture.

News of the World: A Study Day seeks to stimulate discussion of the paper by taking an historical view that understands the title within the framework of media history. This day of lectures, roundtable discussion and seminar considers a range of issues related specifically to the title, since its launch in the nineteenth century.

10.15-11.15 – Welcome and LectureMartin Conboy (Univ. of Sheffield) 'Residual Radicalism and the Novelty of the Nation: Circumstance Beyond our Control'

11.15-11.30 – Coffee

11.30-1.00 – Roundtable: Victorian BeginningsClare Horrocks (Liverpool John Moores Univ)
Andrew King (Canterbury Christ Church)
Jim Mussell (Univ of Birmingham)
Melissa Score (Birkbeck, University of London)

1.00-2.00 – Lunch

2.00-3.00 – Seminar: ‘Sex on Trial: Wilde and Montagu’ led by Prof. John Stokes (King’s College London)

3.00-3.15 – Tea

3.15-4.15 – PanelAlison Oram, (Leeds Metropolitan Univ), ‘“Another Man-Woman…”: Sexuality and Modernity in the News of the World 1914-1960’
James Rodgers (London Metropolitan Univ), ‘The decline of the English newspaper: the double-edged sword of technology, and the downfall of the News of the World’

The Study Day, organized by Laurel Brake (Birkbeck) and Mark Turner (KCL), is open to all and admission is free, though places are limited. Please email Mark Turner (mark.2.turner@kcl.ac.uk), by 15th February, to reserve your place. Venue: The Council Room, King’s College London, Strand Campus. The Study Day is made possible through support from the journal Media History and the Department of English, King’s College London.

Edward Lear: The Bicentennial Conference (9/21-22/2012)

2012-01-23T20:40:00.000-05:00

Edward Lear: The Bicentennial Conference

Jesus College, Oxford, 21-22 September 2012

http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/news-events/upcoming-events/201209/edward-lear-bicentennial-conference

Edward Lear (1812-1888): zoological illustrator, landscape painter, cartoonist, travel writer, drawing master to Queen Victoria, depressive, diarist, friend of the Tennysons, epileptic, exile, and nonsense poet of genius. Praised by Ruskin and Eliot, elegized by Auden, analysed by Orwell and Huxley, Lear has never ceased to fascinate and delight. His life and works intersect major artistic currents of the nineteenth century, and his influence can be felt in successors as diverse as Stevie Smith and John Ashbery, James Joyce and James Thurber.

This two-day conference will be the first ever gathering of scholars to celebrate and discuss Lear’s work in his various creative fields. Interdisciplinary in scope, it will set the agenda for future study, resituating Lear as a major figure in his own time, and showing how he continues to speak to our own.

Speakers: Anna Barton * Gillian Beer * Matthew Bevis * Aingeal Clare * Richard Cronin * Christopher Decker * Hugh Haughton * Daniel Karlin * Robert M. Peck * Adam Phillips * Seamus Perry * Peter Robinson * Anne Stillman * Peter Swaab * James Williams

Registration Opens 15 April. The option to pre-register will be available within the next week on the Oxford English Faculty website. Please follow this link: http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/news-events/upcoming-events/201209/edward-lear-bicentennial-conference

For further information, please contact james.williams@jesus.ox.ac.uk

Symposium: Celebrating Mr. Dickens (2/18/2012)

2012-01-23T20:33:00.000-05:00

"Celebrating Mr. Dickens"
Saturday symposium, February 18, 2012
University of Delaware, Newark, DE

The University of Delaware will hold a special Saturday Symposium on Feb. 18 in honor of the 200th anniversary of the birth of novelist Charles Dickens.

The "Celebrating Mr. Dickens" program includes talks on Dickens and his world by faculty members, a tour of two exhibitions in the University of Delaware Library, and a performance of the author's most celebrated public reading, "Sikes and Nancy."

The Symposium will begin at 10:30a a.m. in Gore Hall, room 103, on the UD campus. Following coffee, participants will first hear Margaret D. Stetz, the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of Humanities, speak on "He wanted a wife and a family: Charles Dickens and Women."

The second speaker will be Thomas Leitch, Professor of English and Director of the Film Studies Program, who will speak on "Dickens, Dickens, and Adaptation."

Following the two morning sessions, a buffet lunch will be served.

Participants will then visit the University of Delaware Library to tour two exhibitions of rare books and Dickensiana: "Dickens at 200: 1812-2012," in the Special Collections Gallery, 2nd floor, Morris Library, on view January 24, 2012-June 8, 2012 and "Dickens and the Late Victorians," an exhibition in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, Morris Library 115A, on view January 24, 2012-March 1, 2012

The third talk of the day will be by Heidi Kaufman, Associate Professor of English and Jewish Studies, who will speak on "The Fagin Myth."

Following Professor Kaufman's talk and a break for coffee and tea, Iain Crawford, Acting Chair of English, will discuss Dickens's public readings and introduce a performance of "Sikes and Nancy" by Mic Matarrese, who is a member of UD's professional acting company, the Resident Ensemble Players (REP).

The cost is $50 per person, including lunch. Registration for the first 25 University of Delaware students or staff is free, with lunch not included. Space is limited.

To buy tickets, see the UD Connection Saturday Symposium website: http://www.udconnection.com/saturdaysymposium

The symposium has been made possible through the support of the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library.

Dickens at the University of Massachusetts Lowell: exhibition and conference

2012-01-23T20:23:00.000-05:00

On January 22, in 1842, Charles Dickens and his wife, Catherine, arrived in America for their tour of the young republic. The battered steamship Britannia had weathered a terrifying Atlantic hurricane and put into port in Boston, MA (dubbed "Boz town") with shattered lifeboats dangling from its sides.

In this, the bicentenary year of Dickens's birth, the University of Massachusetts Lowell is celebrating this author's connection to the United States with several months of programming and a major exhibit: "Dickens and Massachusetts: A Tale of Power and Transformation" (Mar. 30 - Oct. 20, 2012). We are also hosting a Dickens Society Symposium 13 - 15 July 2012 here in Lowell and invite scholars at all stages of their career to submit proposals for paper presentations.

The University of Massachusetts Lowell would like to announce the launch of its new website: http://www.uml.edu/dickens. Please check out our CFP for the symposium, the description of our major exhibition, and a schedule of some of our 75+ planned programs. Dickens in Lowell is the culmination of three years of work and collaboration among many scholars, including Joel Brattin, Lillian Nayder, Natalie McKnight, and others.

Please check us out and consider a trip to Lowell to see artifacts such as the 1842 Francis Alexander portrait of Dickens (not shown in public for over 30 years), the Maclise drawing of the Dickens children (a portrait brought by the Dickenses to American when they had to leave their family at home), first editions and original letters, a rare Boston Line Type raised letter edition of The Old Curiosity Shop commissioned by Dickens as a gift to the American blind in 1968, and other rare artefacts and interesting interactive elements such as our phrenology display. If you teach in the area, please consider bringing your students. We'd be happy to arrange docent tours if desired.

Last Call: Victorian Thresholds: Between Literature and Anthropology (1/28/2012; 4/28/2012)

2012-01-22T22:10:00.000-05:00

VSAO 45th Annual Conference, 28 April 2012, York University

"Victorian Thresholds: Between Literature and Anthropology"

Plenary adresses by Kathy Psomiades and Audrey Jaffe.

The Victorian Studies Association of Ontario executive invites abstracts of 20-minute papers papers to be presented at this year's conference. The theme will be "Victorian Thresholds: Between Literature and Anthropology" and the conference date is April 28 2012. Please send electronic copies of proposals (300-500 words) and a brief biographical statement to Matthew Rowlinson (mrowlins@uwo.ca) by 28 January 2012. Alternatively, hard copies can be sent by mail to Matthew Rowlinson, Department of English , University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada N6A 3K7.

For more information on the conference, visit the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario.

Event: Celebrating Dickens in Southwark (2/7/2012)

2012-01-21T10:49:00.000-05:00

Celebrating Dickens in Southwark

Southwark Cathedral are proud to announce that award-winning biographer Claire Tomalin, author of Charles Dickens: A Life will be speaking at the Cathedral as part of their celebrations to mark the 200th anniversary of Dickens' birth on Tuesday 7 February.

Exhibition and other events -- full details here: http://cathedral.southwark.anglican.org/news/Dickens

Event: Shared Visions: Art, Theatre and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (2/11/2012)

2012-01-21T10:41:00.000-05:00

Shared Visions:
Art, Theatre and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Saturday 11th February 2012, 9.30am to 6.00pm (Registration from 9.00 am)

School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies, Millburn House, Warwick University

This one-day conference, held in conjunction with Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, will explore the connections between art, theatre, and visual culture in the nineteenth century. During this period, the ‘art of seeing’ challenged the traditional dominance of the written word. Vision, previously denigrated as deceptive, became considered as a universal language, accessible to all, and more authentic than text. Popular theatre, especially melodrama, led the way in exploring the possibilities of the new visuality. This conference will explore the visual culture of theatre and exchanges between theatre and the visual arts.

Conference fee: £20 (£10 for postgraduate students)
Tea and coffee, sandwich lunch, and an evening wine reception (6.00pm–7.30 pm) are all included.

Registration is now open: www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/theatre_s/staff/jim_davis/sharedvisions.

Although the registration fee may be paid on the day of the conference, we would be grateful if delegates would register in advance, preferably by the 8th February, so that we have a sense of the numbers intended for catering purposes.

For further information on the conference, please visit http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/theatre_s/staff/jim_davis/sharedvisions/, or contact Jim Davis: Jim.Davis@Warwick.ac.uk, or Patricia Smyth:patricia.smyth@nottingham.ac.uk.

Directions: The department is located in Milburn House located in the University Science Park. It is about 10 minutes walk from the main campus by footpath, but there is no direct road access from the campus itself. The closest railway station is Coventry. If you are arriving by train, either take a cab to Milburn House directly or take a bus to main campus and walk. If you are driving, you will need to access Milburn House via Lynchgate Rd and the Science Park, as shown on the campus map. There are parking spaces for visitors at the front of the building. The main entrance to the building is at the side, facing right. Campus maps may accessed via http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/about/visiting/maps.

Accommodation: For any delegate who requires accommodation on campus on Friday 10th or Saturday 11th, accommodation is currently available starting from £60 per night at Scarman House and Radcliffe House, which may be contacted throughreservations@warwick.ac.uk. Early booking is advisable.

Plenary Speaker: Shearer West, University of Oxford, ‘Benjamin Robert Haydon’s “Punch or May Day”’

Confirmed papers:

History and Narrative:

Peter Cooke, University of Manchester, ‘Gustave Moreau: The Theatre, Theatricality, and Anti-Theatricality’
Cathy Haill, Victoria & Albert Museum, ‘“Hold it! What a Picture!” - Art, Living Pictures and Poses Plastiques on the Nineteenth-Century Stage’
Annabel Rutherford, York University, Toronto, ‘Drama in Art in Drama: The Interweaving of Visual Art and Theatre’

Stage Adaptation:

Barbara Bell, Edinburgh Napier University, '“...taken from the original”: Word, Image and the Drive for Authenticity in Early Stagings of the Works of Sir Walter Scott’
Karen Laird, University of Manchester, ‘Reconstructing J. Ware's “The Woman in White: A Drama in Three Acts” (1860)’
Melissa Dickson, Kings College, London, ‘Visions of the Orient: Manufacturing the Arabian Nights on Early Nineteenth-Century London Stages’

The Art of Theatre: Lights, Costume, Scenery

Veronica Isaac, Victoria & Albert Museum, ‘The “Art” of Costume in the Late Nineteenth Century: Highlights from the Wardrobe of “The Painter's Actress”’
Janice Norwood, University of Hertfordshire, ‘Posing Questions: The Iconography of Two Female Theatrical Impresarios’
Jane Pritchard, Victoria & Albert Museum, ‘The Iconography of the Ballet at the Alhambra, 1884 – 1912’

Religious Spectacle:

Peter Yeandle, University of Lancaster, ‘Spectacles of Sin or Performances of Divine Grace? Seeing the Ballet Through Anglican Eyes, c. 1880 – 1900’
Anjna Chouhan, University of Leicester, ‘Performing Religion in Shakespeare on the Late Victorian Stage'
Leanne Groenveld, University of Regina, '“I felt as never before, under any sermon that I ever heard preached”: English and American Responses to, and Representations of, the Oberammergau Passion Play, 1840 – 1900’

Dramatizing the Environment:

Viv Gardner, University of Manchester, ‘The Image of a Well-ordered city: Manchester Theatre Architecture, 1880 – 1910’
Trish Reid, Kingston University, ‘Ah, my own village home before a palace”: Nostalgia and the Rural Idyll in Melodrama of the 1830s and 40s’
Mary Jane Boland, University of Nottingham, ‘Through the Eyes of Others: Reassessing Audience Engagement with Joseph Peacock's Pattern Day at Glendalough’

Stage Spectacle:

Hayley Bradley, University of Manchester, Delighting the Eye Rather than the Ear: The Triumvirate's Autumn Dramas at Drury Lane
Jane Jordan, Kingston University, ‘From Popular Novel to “Sensational Equestrian Drama”: Late Nineteenth-Century Theatrical Adaptation for “an amusement loving public”’
David Mayer, University of Manchester and Cassie Mayer, Independent Scholar, ‘Exit with Dead Horse’

Seminar Series: Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies (Spring 2012)

2012-01-19T19:41:00.000-05:00

Birkbeck's Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies is pleased to announce the launch of a new lecture and seminar series, the Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies, to which all are welcome.

The Forum will be inaugurated at 6.00 pm on Thursday 26 January with a lecture on '"A Case of Metaphysics": Counterfactuals, Realism, Great Expectations' by Professor Andrew H. Miller, director of the Victorian Studies programme at Indiana University, and co-editor of Victorian Studies.

The lecture, which will be held in the Keynes Library (Room 114, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD), will be followed by a party to celebrate the launch of the Forum and an exciting new programme of events in interdisciplinary nineteenth-century studies.

This term's visiting speakers include, in February, Tom Mole (2 February), Mary A. Favret (9 February), Susan Matthews (16 February), Thomas Dixon (23 February), and in March, Sophie Levie (15 March), and Matt ffytche (19 March).

Look out for announcements about forthcoming Forum events, and meanwhile email birkbeckforum@gmail.com to join our mailing list.

CFP: anthology chapter on A Christmas Carol, It's A Wonderful Life, or Groundhog Day (2/22/2012)

2012-01-19T19:34:00.000-05:00

Dr. Marc DiPaolo is looking for an essay that examines the contemporary relevance of It's a Wonderful Life - and the text that inspired it, A Christmas Carol - in light of recent religious, economic, and political events, including the "war on Christmas" and the continuing commercialization of Christmas, Occupy Wall Street, and Banxodus, and that consider the characters of Scrooge and Mr. Potter as examples of modern American capitalist amorality. This contemporary, ahistorical analysis should, naturally, include a serious study of the works in their original socio-political context, as well as consider issues of authorial intent.

The essay would be due in mid-February but would be included in a contracted book that will be published by McFarland at the end of 2012 or the start of 2013. The writing style should be intellectually rigorous enough to be considered solid scholarship, but written in an accessible style for undergraduate readers and a possibly broader-than-academic readership. References to another "religious" reform story, Groundhog Day, are welcome, but not necessary.

Length of Contribution: 6,000 – 8,500 words (including notes)

Citation Style: Modern Language Association

Please contact Dr. Marc DiPaolo at captainblackadder@hotmail.com.

CFP: Carlyle Conference (2/1/2012; 7/10-12/2012)

2012-01-18T08:24:00.000-05:00

Carlyle Conference

University of Edinburgh

10-12 July, 2012

http://www.lifelong.ed.ac.uk/carlyle/

The 2012 conference will celebrate the publication of 40 volumes of the Duke-Edinburgh edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2012 (volume 40 forthcoming November).

Call for Papers

Papers are invited on Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle and related subjects. They can reflect current research interests in either Carlyle. We would also welcome papers relating the Carlyles to other authors and fields.

How to Submit a Paper

Email your abstract to Carlyle@ed.ac.uk before 1 February 2012.

Abstracts will be reviewed and a decision sent by 1 March 2012.

Reminder: NAVSA 2012 Conference "Victorian Networks" (3/1/2012; 9/27-30/2012)

2012-01-17T09:00:00.000-05:00

The North American Victorian Studies Association Conference for 2012, in Madison, Wisconsin, September 27-30, invites papers on the theme of networks. Keynotes include Amanda Anderson, Adam Phillips, and a visual networks panel with Caroline Arscott, Tim Barringer, Julie Codell, and Mary Roberts. Participants will also be able to sign up for networks seminars of 15 presenters of precirculated 5-page position papers on the topic.

March 1, 2012 is the deadline for electronic submissions of proposed papers and panels. We welcome proposals of no more than 500 words for individual papers; for panel proposals, please submit abstracts of 500 words per paper and a panel description of 250 words. Please include a one-page cv and submit all files in .pdf format to english.wisc.edu/navsa. Conference threads might include:

Networks of artists, critics, consumers, scholars
Networks of print (books, chapbooks, newspapers, magazines, letters, pamphlets), including relations among publishers, printers, editors, writers, readers
Commodity culture networks and the circulation of things and bodies
Networks of discourse (such as science, religion, nature, politics)
The science of networks, then and now
Textual networks (characters, plot, language, intertextuality)
Networks of influence, production, reception
Networks of display or exhibition
Fashioning networks among otherwise unconnected authors and historical figures
Transnational and other migrations: geographic, cultural, ideological, rhetorical
Borders and "borders" – theorizing cultural connection, separation, entanglement
Diasporic networks: cosmopolitanism, wandering, exile
Clandestine networks such as spies, secret agents, and detection
Networking technologies
Network arts
Social networks including leisure clubs and professional societies
Family and kinship networks
Victorian cities: streets, arcades, parks, or other networks of urban space
Imperial networks
Network forms: gossip, blackmail, suspense, serials,, periodicals, or other genres
Psychic and supernatural networks: seances, spiritualism, mediums
Digital networks and twenty-first century reading practices
Networked periodization: romantic/victorian/modernist
Networks of resistance: feminist, ecological, queer
Networks of iteration and translation (between image, text, adaptation)

SHARP Call for Reviewers: Digital Projects

2012-01-17T08:55:00.000-05:00

The SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing) newsletter has been running a regular feature review of digital projects (subscription & open access). At this point, we're looking for reviewers and projects to be reviewed. We've amassed a queue of projects below. Also below are the deadlines.

Potential Projects to be Reviewed:

The Vault at Pfaff's
Salani Project
19th-Century American Children's Book Trade Directory
America's Historical Imprints
America's Historical NewsPapers
ARTFl
London Lives: 1690-1800
Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture
Waterloo Directory of Periodicals

Deadlines:
Winter (Nov 1 deadline)
Spring (Feb 1 deadline)
Summer (May 1 deadline)

If interested, please choose a project from above or suggest one outside the list and contact Dr. Katherine D. Harris at katherine.harris@sjsu.edu. The only caveat is that it can't be a project that you've worked on yourself. Please also choose a deadline. Dr. Harris will send further information (style sheets, etc).

SHARP: http://www.sharpweb.org/

CFP: Emblems of Nationhood: Britishness 1707-1901 (3/1/2012; 8/10-12/2012)

2012-01-16T09:15:00.000-05:00

Emblems of Nationhood: Britishness 1707-1901

10-12th August 2012

University of St Andrews

National identity is a central point of enquiry that is repeatedly called upon in contemporary social and political rhetoric. Our conference, ‘Emblems of Nationhood, 1707–1901’, will address the roots of this theme by discussing depictions of Britain and Britishness in literature, philosophy, and art between the Act of Union in 1707 and the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. Over the course of this multidisciplinary conference, we aim to explore how expressions of nationalism have moulded both critical perspectives on national identity and their creative products.

Discussing emblems of nationhood in 2012 is a fitting way to mark the twentieth anniversary of Linda Colley’s seminal account of Britishness, Britons: Forging the Nation, and coincides with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Several broad questions could potentially be explored in the course of the conference: What did Britishness mean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and how was it represented and perceived? To what extent is nationalism tied with military events and empire building? How “British” was Britain before the launch of the Empire? How did concepts of nationalism enter the public consciousness, both within the British Isles and abroad? What is the impact of artistic and cultural depictions of Britain and Britishness in domestic and international contexts? How can these historical ideas of Britishness enhance our contemporary understanding of the concepts of nationalism and national identity?

Alongside panel sessions and a roundtable discussion on national identity in the period, public expressions of nationhood will also be represented: we are planning an exhibition of pictorial representations of Britishness in the form of cartoons, banknotes, war-landscapes, et cetera, as well as an evening of patriotic entertainment from the period.

Suggested topics for papers might include, but are not limited to:

Britannia and definitions of Britishness
Liberty and Empire
Four nations, archipelago and Britishness
The Auld Alliance
British history and histories of Britain
Foreign and British taste
Mother-nation and Commonwealth
The Gothic revival, Gothic novels, and the ancient Gothic constitution
Foreign perceptions of Britain and Britishness
National anthems
Expressions of Britishness in applied arts, satirical prints and cartoons
The Great Exhibition of 1851
The iconography of British institutions
Positive and negative forms of national identity

We seek 250-word proposals for 20-minute papers from postgraduates and established scholars from across the Arts and Humanities. The deadline for submission is 1st March 2012. Please email submissions to EmblemsOfNationhood@gmail.com. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact the conference organisers, Dr Kristin Lindfield-Ott (mko4@st-andrews.ac.uk) and Jennifer Whitty (jw836@st-andrews.ac.uk).

http://www-ah.st-andrews.ac.uk/Emblems_of_Nationhood/Home.html

CFP: 2012 M/MLA: Permanent Section: English Literature 1800-1900 (3/9/2012; 11/8-11/2012)

2012-01-16T09:09:00.000-05:00

The English Literature 1800-1900 panel seeks papers for the 2012 Midwest Modern Language Association Convention to be held on November 8-11, 2012 in Cincinnati, Ohio.

In keeping with the informal theme of “debt” for the M/MLA 2012 convention, the English II: English Literature 1800-1900 panel seeks to present discussions of works and writers that deal in some fashion with that nineteenth-century juggernaut, debt. Possible themes include indebtedness and influence, borrowers and lenders, bonds and contracts, economics of lack, states of debt, oaths and promises, gift-giving, cultures of expenditure, occupy literature, trans-cultural capital, deferring, symbolic economics, ecological materialism, rethinking civic missions/practices, forgiveness, gratitude, literature of demand, emotional obligation, debts of affect, and student loans. Papers on any form or genre of British literature between 1800 and 1900 are welcome. Proposals of 200 to 400 words should be sent by March 9th to Nancee Reeves, Purdue University, nreeves@purdue.edu. Selected presenters will be informed by May 1st, 2012 and must register for the conference by July 1, 2012.

Call for Contributors: Journal of Victorian Culture online

2012-01-16T09:03:00.000-05:00

The Journal of Victorian Culture online is looking for contributors for their blog. Now that Christmas is over, we would love to hear your musings for our blog 'Victorians beyond the Academy'. Have you watched a Victorian period drama on TV, rediscovered a Victorian classic or stumbled upon the Victorians in an usual place? Why not tell us about it? Contributions can be of any length and any topic.

If you have any questions you can email Lucinda Matthews-Jones at l.matthews-jones@swansea.ac.uk; Lisa Hager at lisa.hager@uwc.edu or Ryan Fong at rdfong@ucdavis.edu.

To see past posts take a look at our website http://myblogs.informa.com/jvc/. You can also like us on Facebook at the Journal of Victorian Culture or twitter @JofVictCulture for regular updates.

CFP: Spatial Perspectives: Literature and Architecture, 1850 – Present (3/2/2012; 6/22/2012)

2012-01-14T11:49:00.000-05:00

Spatial Perspectives: Literature and Architecture, 1850 – Present
Friday 22nd June 2012
University of Oxford, Faculty of English Language and Literature
Website: http://spatialperspectives.wordpress.com/

Keynote: Professor Douglas Tallack will deliver a keynote on “Tall Stories: New York Skyscrapers in Art and Literature” and will discuss Hardy's reaction to “giants of the mere market” in The American Scene.

“I’ve felt that a book is like a building, and a building is like a book” -Steven Holl.

“Architecture will no longer be the social, the collective, the dominant art. The great poem, the great building, the great work of mankind will no longer be built, it will be printed” -Victor Hugo

“Perhaps because literature and architecture are the two most "visible" arts, since they organize both the everyday practices of reading and the everyday necessities of shelter, the crises and tensions that affect them seem strikingly parallel” -Philippe Hamon

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to foster a dialogue between literature and architecture by bringing together papers that encompass the diversity of thinking about these two disciplines and the ways in which they engage and interact. This will be the first conference to examine the intersections of architecture and literature globally over a broad timeframe.

We warmly encourage contributions from practising architects, architectural historians, creative writers, and scholars of literature. An edited collection of conference proceedings is planned. Papers are invited that address, but are not limited to, the following broad themes:

Textual spaces / spatial texts The language of built space / narrative and architecture
Mapping the city Icons and meaning
Interart analogues Visual cultures
Literature and architectural discourse Form, representation, and poetry
Writing the architect Writers that build
Interiors and design Architecture and Utopias / dystopias

Please send abstracts of 300 words for 20 minute papers to literature.architecture@gmail.comby Friday 2nd March 2012. We look forward to receiving your proposal.

The conference is organised by Nicole Sierra (University of Oxford) and Terri Mullholland (University of Oxford).

Event: Art versus Industry? (3/23-24/2012)

2012-01-14T11:35:00.000-05:00

This two-day international and transdisciplinary conference aims to re-evaluate the intersections between the visual arts and industry in Britain during the long nineteenth century, with speakers including Dr Lara Kriegel (Indiana University), Dr Tom Gretton (University College London), Dr Colin Trodd (University of Manchester) and Dr Steve Edwards (Open University). Booking is open until Friday 9 March 2012. Please visit http://artvindustry.blogspot.com/ for further information and to download the booking form.

Both days: £20.00 (£15 for students)

Single day: £10.00 flat fee

Presentations:

Friday 23 March 2012
Lara Kriegel (Indiana University): Filaments of History: Ladies, Lace, Labour and Nation at the Fin de Siecle

Panel one: De-centering the narrative

Lara Eggleton (University of Leeds): Surface Deceits: Owen Jones and John Ruskin on the Ornament of the Alhambra
Sally Tuckett (University of Edinburgh): Colouring the Nation: Scottish Turkey-Red Design and Manufacture
Natasha Eaton (University College London): Subaltern Colour? Art, Industry and Colonialism in Britain and India
Renate Dohmen (University of Louisiana at Lafayette): The Calcutta International Exhibition of 1883-4: A Differenced Vision of the Great Exhibition?

Panel two: Labour, class and invention

Jasmine Allen (University of York): The Status of Stained Glass at the International Exhibitions
Anne-Marie Millim (University of Luxembourg): "A substitute for moonlight": The Cultural Value of Mining in The Graphic (1870s)
Frances Robertson (Glasgow School of Art): Crank-Pin Tracks and Corinthian Columns: Engineers and Draughtsmen as Visual Technicians
Ben Russell (Science Museum): James Watt's Workshop: A Nexus Between Art and Industry

Tom Gretton (University College London): Industrialised Graphic Technologies Feature the World of Art: The Illustrated London News and The Graphic c. 1870 - 1890

Saturday 24 March 2012
Colin Trodd (University of Manchester): Affinity and Alienation: Civility, Barbarism and Discourses of Design Culture, 1862-1894

Panel three: Making and mechanical perception

Ann Compton (University of Glasgow): Building a Better Class of Craftsman? Re-examining Issues of Education, Craftsmanship and Professional Practice in Sculpture and Related Trades, c. 1880-1925
Gabriel Williams (University of York): 'Mechanical Dexterity' and Sculpture Machines at the Great Exhibition
Nicole Bush (Northumbria University): Mechanical Patterns: The Role of Brewster's Kaleidoscope in the Age of Morris and the Machine
Patrizia Di Bello (Birkbeck): 'Camera-Medusa': Stereoscopic Photographs of Statuettes

Panel four: Electrotypes and the aesthetics of electricity

Alistair Grant (University of Sussex, Victoria and Albert Museum): Galvanic Engraving in Relief: The Origins of the Art of Electro-Metallurgy
Angus Patterson (Victoria and Albert Museum): For the Promotion of Art: The Formation and Influence of the Victoria and Albert Museum's Electrotype Collection
Graeme Gooday and Abigail Harrison Moore (University of Leeds): Decorative Electricity: The Gendered Aesthetics and Ethics of Domestic Electric Lighting

Steve Edwards (Open University): Picture Capitalism

The full program is available here.

Last Call: INCS 2011 Essay Prize Nominations (1/15/2012)

2012-01-13T09:39:00.000-05:00

Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies invites nominations and submissions for its annual essay prize. The $500 prize recognizes excellence in interdisciplinary scholarship on any nineteenth-century topic or world region. We encourage members of INCS to nominate an essay written by a current (2011) member of INCS or to submit their own work. Articles published in a book or journal dated 2011 are eligible. The winner will be announced at the 2012 conference (to be held at the University of Kentucky, March 22-25) and invited to put together a panel for the 2013 INCS Conference. Please send three paper copies of the nominated essay to Professor Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, Department of English, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803 no later than January 15, 2012. For more details about the essay competition, the conference, or the organization, we invite you to visit the INCS website at http://www.nd.edu/~incshp/ .

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

2012-01-13T09:35:00.000-05:00

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

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

The conference program will include keynote talks and concurrent sessions as well as a conference dinner and an optional museum excursion on the final day of the conference.

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

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

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

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

CFP: Transforming Objects (3/4/2012; 5/28-29/2012)

2012-01-13T09:23:00.000-05:00

Transforming Objects

28-29 May 2012, Northumbria University

Keynote Speakers: Dr Sarah Haggarty (Newcastle) and Dr John Holmes (Reading)

This two-day conference invites papers that consider the transformation of objects and the transformations effected by objects from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Approaches to this theme are welcomed from established scholars and especially from postgraduate research students.

Object theory and discourses of materiality largely engage with objects as stable items of a permanent nature; this conference seeks to address those moments which slip through the gaps of such readings. We wish to explore the method and process of transformation, the between-ness or not fully realised state of an object or discipline, and to consider its effect upon the culture.

We are keen for papers to address particular historical, cultural, or social environments in which transformations take place or are enabled by. The conference aims to provoke discussion about such moments of change and the important role of objects in transformations between period, discipline, location, and sensation, as well as engaging with more broader considerations of bodily transformation and states of metamorphosis.

We hope the action of ‘transforming’ and the term ‘object’ will be engaged with in their widest sense, and therefore welcome proposals which interpret the conference theme in innovative and expansive ways. Topics of particular interest though include:

Psychological transformations, altered states, derangement, and hallucinatory experiences
Industrial transformation: travel and communication (from railways to cars, the mail coach to the telegraph)
Visuality: transformations in perceptual modes and methods.
Intertextuality and the transformation of texts within texts
Histories of the book, transformations in printing, the effect of technology upon the page
The growth of digital humanities and transformed ways of encountering the text
Disciplinarity, categorisation, and periodicity: creating and dismantling boundaries
Spatial transformations and the experience of movement
Serial publishing and transforming temporalities of reading
Remediation and the lifecycle of objects
Text transformed by objects: experimentalism and additions to the textual page
The professionalisation of the sciences and medical practices
Adaptation across genre: text into film, theatre, music, or the visual arts
It-narratives and the voice of the object
Experiencing transformation through the body and the senses
Merchandise: from text to cultural commodity item

Please send abstracts (250 words) for 20-minute papers, along with a brief biographical note, to the conference organisers, Nicole Bush and Anna Hope: transformingobjects@gmail.com. The deadline for abstracts is 4 March 2012.

For further details and updates please see the website: www.transformingobjects.blogspot.com

Supported by the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS).

M/MLA 2012: proposed session on Bernard Shaw (3/1/2012; 11/8-11/2012)

2012-01-13T09:10:00.000-05:00

"Bernard Shaw and Debt Sealings"
proposed session of the 2012 Midwest Modern Language Association Convention

November 8-11, 2012

Cincinnati, Ohio

The proposed session seeks papers on Shaw's writings that dovetail with the conference theme of "Debt." Possible topics could include:

representations of borrowers and lenders, borrowing and lending, in Shaw's plays
debts Shaw and/or his plays owe to other thinkers, writers, and/or political figures
Shavian debts accrued by contemporary plays, playwrights, and/or theorists

Please send 300-500 word abstracts via electronic attachment to Christopher Wixson at cmwixson@eiu.edu by March 1st, 2012.

Selected presenters will be informed by May 1st, 2012 and must register for the conference by July 1, 2012. More information on the proposed session can be found at http://www.shawsociety.org/Shaw-at-MMLA-2012.htm. More information on the MMLA and the 2012 conference can be found at www.luc.edu/mmla.

CFP: Victorians Institute 2012 Conference: Victorian Mixed Media (5/1/2012; 10/19-21/2012)

2012-01-11T21:11:00.000-05:00

Victorian Mixed Media
The 41st Meeting of the Victorians Institute
19-21 October 2012
Virginia Commonwealth University

Please send 300-500 word proposals for papers and a 1-page c.v. via email to dlatane@vcu.edu by 1 May 2012. Papers are invited on any aspect of the rubric, including arts & crafts – the media of the empire – theatre – ekphrasis – the exhibition as medium – illustration and text (extra-illustrated volumes – giftbooks) – hybridity and language – map and mapping – media and genre – medium specificity in the 19th-century – new (digital) media and the Victorians – photography and its relationship to traditional media – poetry of the daily press – the print trade – show and tell (dioramas, panoramas, history, literature) – Victorian new media (typewriting – film) – sound and music – information systems – periodicals, pamphlets, broadsides – representation of media in fiction and poetry, etc.

Because 2012 marks the bicentennial of Robert Browning’s birth, papers which consider his work are especially welcome, whether or not they conform closely to the topic, as a portion of the program will commemorate the occasion.

Keynote address by W. J. T. Mitchell, Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, is editor of Critical Inquiry and his books include What Do Pictures Want?, Art and the Public Sphere, Iconology, and Blake’s Composite Art.

Plenary talk to commemorate the bicentennial of the birth of Robert Browning by Herbert Tucker, John C. Coleman Professor of English at the University of Virginia; his books include Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790-1910, Tennyson and the Doom of Romantcism, and Browning’s Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure.

Selected papers from the conference will be refereed for the Victorians Institute Journal annex at NINES.

Limited travel subventions will be available from the Victorians Institute for graduate students whose institutions provide limited or no support.

Please visit www.vcu.edu/vij for information about the conference, the Victorians Institute, and Victorians Institute Journal.

“Victorian Mixed Media” is sponsored at Virginia Commonwealth University by the College of Humanities and Sciences, Department of English, and the PhD program in Media, Art and Text (MATX).

David Latané, conference organizer. Advisory committee: Nicholas Frankel, Catherine Ingrassia, John Picker (English); Eric Garberson, Catherine Roach (Art History); Nicholas Wolf (History).

Job Posting: Lectureship at Southampton University, UK (1/25/2012)

2012-01-11T10:09:00.000-05:00

Lecturer in English
The University of Southampton seeks to appoint a full-time, two year fixed term Lecturer in English, specialising in the period 1880-1920.

Location: Avenue Campus
Salary: £27,428 to £33,734
Full Time Fixed Term
Closing Date: Wednesday 25 January 2012
Interview Date: To be confirmed
Reference: 080411F4

English at Southampton comprises a varied and lively team of people whose teaching and research interests range from the early medieval period to the contemporary, and include film, creative writing, Jewish studies, and book history. The work of individual members of staff crosses period, geographical, disciplinary, and faculty boundaries (including collaborations with law, and the sciences), and we welcome applications from people whose work will expand our ideas of what 'English' does in both teaching and research.

You will have a PhD in a relevant topic, and a proven track record of publication. You will have a strong intellectual grasp of the principal issues affecting late nineteenth-century, empire, and/or the global roots of modernism, and a willingness to make links between English and other disciplines. You will be able to communicate your views enthusiastically to a broad undergraduate and postgraduate student body, engage productively with staff across the discipline, the Faculty and beyond, and help to build Victorian and early twentieth-century studies at Southampton.

The appointment will be made within the Lecturer salary range, depending on qualifications and experience, to begin on 1 May 2012. For specific informal enquiries relating to this post, please contact: Professor Ros King, Head of English via email at R.King@soton.ac.uk

The closing date for this post is 25 January 2012. Please apply through www.jobs.soton.ac.uk or please telephone 023 8059 2750 for an application form. Please quote vacancy reference number 080411F4 on all correspondence.

Please also visit the 'Job Opportunities' page of http://www.soton.ac.uk/

VanArsdel Essay Prize (5/1/2012)

2012-01-10T08:36:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

Event: Orality and Literacy (London C19 Studies Seminar) (Spring 2012)

2012-01-09T21:28:00.000-05:00

London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar
Spring Term 2012: Orality and Literacy
Saturdays, Room G37, Senate House (South Block), University of London

The series marks the thirtieth anniversary of the appearance of Walter Ong’s influential Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Over three days in January, February, and March, speakers will explore a range of issues relating to the interactions between voice and text in the Anglo-American long nineteenth century: philology and acoustic nostalgia, melody and poetic form, laughter, and more. All sessions take place in Room G37 (Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet St., London WC1E 7HU, map). All welcome, but please note: these seminars are very popular and the meeting rooms are often very full. Please RSVP to jon.millington@sas.ac.uk if you would like to attend.

Abstracts for the talks will be made available as the term proceeds at http://oralityandliteracy.org/.

Saturday 14 January, 11:00–13:00

Herbert Tucker (Virginia): ‘Unsettled Score: Structure and Play in Browning’s “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”’
William Abberley (Exeter): ‘Voices of Nature: The Oral Past in Victorian Historical Fiction’

Saturday 25 February, 11:00–13:00

Matthew Bevis (Oxford): ‘Poetry for Laughs’
Louise Lee (KCL): ‘Shattered Articulations: Darwin’s Evolutionary Jokes and the Deferral of Cognition’

Saturday 17 March, 11:00–17:00 — extended final day
Session 1

Jason Camlot (Concordia) on early literary recordings and digital analysis
James Mussell (Birmingham) on nineteenth- and twenty-first-century media and digital literacy

Session 2

Claire Potter (U Paris Diderot): ‘The Weight of the Voice/The Slant of the Word: Circulations of Melancholia in Hardy’
Roisin Quinn-Lautrefin (U Paris Diderot): ‘Giving Utterance: Mary Barton and the Language of the Working Class’
Mary L. Shannon (KCL): ‘Spoken Word and Printed Page: G. W. M. Reynolds and the London Riots, 1848’

Final Session

Sandra M. Gustafson (Notre Dame) on public speech and nonviolence in the nineteenth-century United States

Strand Organisers, Spring Term 2012: James Emmott (Birkbeck) and Tom F. Wright (UEA)
For more information about the London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar, contact Ana Vadillo (Birkbeck) (a.parejovadillo@bbk.ac.uk).

http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/seminars/19C/

Last Call: RSVP Annual Conference: Sentiment and Sensation in Victorian Periodicals (2/1/2012; 9/14-15/2012)

2012-01-09T11:42:00.000-05:00

3rd Call for Papers
Sentiment and Sensation in Victorian Periodicals
Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Annual Conference
September 14-15, 2012

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) will hold its annual conference at the University of Texas at Austin, September 14-15, 2012. While papers addressing any aspect of Victorian periodicals will be considered, RSVP particularly welcomes proposals for papers on the discourse of sentiment and sensation in the newspaper and periodical press that variously promoted or targeted readerships, established journalistic networks or brands, and shaped, responded to, and/or addressed cultural and ideological concerns.

Suggested themes include but are not limited to:

The serialization of sensation fiction
Sentimental or sensational illustration
Major scandals, legal cases, crimes, or controversies
Affect, cognition, and readerly sensations
Sentimental poetry or fiction in periodicals
The rhetoric of sentiment/sentimentality
Sport or theatrical sensations
Gender and periodical genres
Entrepreneurialism and fame
Sensational formatting and headlines
The feeling of print or the materiality of periodicals
Physiology and psychology in the press

Please e-mail two-page (maximum) proposals for individual presentations or panels of three to rs4vp.2012@gmail.com. Please include a one-page C.V. with relevant publications, teaching, and/or coursework. The deadline for submission of proposals is Feb. 1, 2012. Final papers should take 15 minutes (20 minutes maximum) to present. The program will also include a plenary speech by Margaret Beetham, the 2012 Michael Wolff lecturer, a presentation by the winner of the 2012 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize, and workshops devoted to digital resources and to methods of teaching periodicals.

Call for Guest Editors: Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies summer 2012 issue (1/27/2012)

2012-01-07T10:38:00.000-05:00

We are currently looking for guest editors for the summer 2012 issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (www.ncgsjournal.com). This past summer Lizzie Harris McCormick and Cecile Kandl put together an issue on "Women Write the Natural World." Previous summer issues include "Nineteenth-Century Feminisms: Press & Platform," edited by Susan Hamilton and Janice Schroeder, and "Gender, the Professions, and the Press," edited by Andrew King and Marysa Demoor. All past issues of the journal can be found on our website.

If interested, please submit a brief proposal (no more than a couple of pages) to both melissa.purdue@mnsu.edu andsefloyd@stritch.edu by January 27th.

Reminder: VISAWUS 2012 Victorian Transnationalism: The Atlantic Legacy in the Long 19th Century (3/5/2012; 10/11-13/2012)

2012-01-07T10:31:00.000-05:00

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

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

The focus of this year's conference is Victorian Transnationalism, with particular emphasis on the Atlantic legacy in the long 19th century. As the site of a decisive American victory in the War of 1812, Plattsburgh is a testament to the fraught history of the “special relationships” between Britain and her neighbors across the pond. The town is home to an annual re-enactment of the Battle of Plattsburgh as well as historical sites relevant for scholars of the nineteenth century. We encourage papers across all disciplines exploring various aspects of the relations among and between the UK, Canada, the US, and other nations and regions across the Americas. Possible topics include, but are not limited to the following:

Intertextuality across national boundaries
Transnational influences in art
Concert tours and musical influences
Theatrical trends and tours
Transnational friendships, famous and infamous
Periodical press and public relations
Sports and amusements, competitions and crazes
Fashion and fads
Celebrity authors and book tours
Literary and other piracies
Transnational science—synergies and squabbles
Expeditions and exploration
Migration of religious and spiritual movements
The Imperial project in Britain and the Americas
Legacies of war (Revolutionary, Napoleonic, War of 1812)
Transnational relations during the American Civil War
Race, racism, and slavery
Transatlantic social reform movements and actors
International affiliations and antipathies
Transportation, tourism, and travel
Expatriots: immigration and emigration
Communication technologies (telegraph, e.g.)
Transatlantic commerce and commodities
Nautical technologies, marine life, aquaria
Fishing and whaling
Indigenous peoples, real and imagined
Wilderness and civilization
National symbols, stereotypes, and slurs
National identities and ideals
Clashing national manners and customs
Transnational gender-role differences
Ways of speaking: accents in English
National tastes in food and drink
Cosmopolitanism and provincialism
Definitions of class difference and labor issues
Contagion and containment, infectious diseases and epidemiology
Contact zones, ethnographies, and autoethnographies

By March 5, 2012, email 300-word abstracts and a 1-page CV (name on BOTH) to Genie Babb at gbabb001@plattsburgh.edu. For further information on the conference, please contact Genie Babb. We are currently having problems with our website, but I hope in a week or so those will be resolved at which time, please visit VISAWUS.org.

Conference Hotel: Best Western Inn at Smithfield. To make reservations please call the hotel directly at 518-561-7750, dial extension 2 to reach the front desk and ask for the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association to receive the group rate. There is a cut-off date of 09/10/2012; rooms will need to be booked on or by this date to receive the group rate. (Group rates available 10/10 through 10/13/2012.)

VISAWUS: http://visawus.org/

Last Call: 2012 BWWC special session "Landmarks in Nineteenth-Century Natural History: Texts and Landscapes" (1/15/2012; 6/7-10/2012)

2012-01-04T11:29:00.000-05:00

2012 British Women Writers Conference, Boulder, Colorado

Special Session: "Landmarks in Nineteenth-Century Natural History: Texts and Landscapes"

Over the course of the nineteenth century, a number of landmark works of natural history—which constitute what we might now call biological and geological sciences—dramatically altered how British society viewed the natural world. Natural “monuments” (as Georges Cuvier put it), such as geological strata or fossils, were increasingly interpreted as signifying marks on the face of the landscape that needed to be interpreted and understood. How did women writers engage with these frequently changing natural and textual landmarks? What implications do such landmarks hold for individuals’ and societies’ notions of self and of history, relationships to each other and to nature, and production of artistic and of scientific works? Charles Darwin’s writings have often been considered by literary scholars interested in how women writers reflected, negotiated, and participated in nineteenth-century scientific discourse, and papers exploring Darwin in light of the theme of this panel are welcome, but those focusing on other landmark Romantic or Victorian natural histories are particularly encouraged.

Please submit 500-word abstracts to both laurenkl@email.unc.edu AND bwwc2012@colorado.edu, stating your application to this special session.

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

2012-01-04T11:24:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

Talia Schaffer, Queens College and Graduate Center, CUNY

talia.schaffer@qc.cuny.edu

Reminder: Special Issue of Women's Writing: Re-evaluating Dinah Mulock Craik (2/1/2012)

2012-01-04T11:18:00.000-05:00

Special Issue of Women's Writing: Re-evaluating Dinah Mulock Craik
Guest Editor: Karen Bourrier, Consulting Editor: Sally Mitchell

Throughout her lifetime and since her death, Dinah Mulock Craik (1826-1887) has been considered either ahead of her time or a touchstone for all things Victorian. Henry James, for example, assessed her work as “kindly, somewhat dull, pious, and very sentimental.” At the other end of the spectrum, Elaine Showalter found that she excelled at a “peculiar combination of didacticism and subversive feminism.”1

This special issue of Women's Writing seeks to re-evaluate Dinah Mulock Craik's life and work, moving beyond assessments of her work as either too sentimental or subversive. Recent scholarship on Craik has contributed new contexts to the appreciation of her work. The rise of disability studies has spurred scholars to re-consider the role of invalids in Craik's work, and her complicated relationships with Ireland and Scotland have led to a re-evaluation of the role of the nation in her novels. Her personal involvement in and fictional treatment of controversial topics such as adoption and the Deceased Wife's Sister's Act, along with her widely-cited series of essays, “A Woman's Thoughts on Women,” continue to act as a touchstone for scholars considering women's roles in Victorian family life. This issue aims to interrogate what was idiosyncratic in her views and writings and what was more representative of Victorian thought, in order to gain a fuller understanding of her work and multi-faceted career.

Topics might include but are by no means limited to:

Craik and disability
Craik and nationality
Craik and marriage / adoption
re-evaluating the woman writer's career
Craik's posthumous reputation
Craik and children's literature
the twentieth-century reception of Craik's work
Craik's relationships with other women writers; women's systems of mentorship
Craik's relationships with male publishers and artists
transatlantic publishing strategies and Craik's American audience
Craik and the periodical publishing system
Craik as poet
Craik and class

Please submit articles of 4,000 to 7,000 words for consideration to the Guest Editor, Dr. Karen Bourrier, University of Western Ontario, karen.bourrier@gmail.com, by 1 February 2012.

Contributors should follow the journal’s house style, details of which are available on the Women’s Writing web site http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/womenswriting.

1See Henry James, “A Noble Life” in Notes and Reviews, Cambridge: Dunster House: 1921, page 172. Elaine Showalter. “Dinah Mulock Craik and the Tactics of Sentiment: A Case Study in Victorian Female Authorship” in Feminist Studies, 2:2/3 (1975), page 6.

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

2012-01-03T12:53:00.000-05:00

20th International Thomas Hardy Conference and Festival

Dorchester, UK, 18-26 August 2012

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

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

Proposals should be addressed to:

‘Call for Papers’ – ( The Thomas Hardy Society) Dr. Jane Thomas,

Department of English University of Hull,

East Yorkshire HU6 7RX

Email: j.e.thomas@hull.ac.uk

All submissions will be read and adjudicated by an academic panel. The closing date is 31st March 2012.

The best of the papers given at the Conference will be eligible for publication in the peer-reviewed Thomas Hardy Journal appearing in Autumn 2012.

Conference delegates contributing to the panels will be required to register for the Conference and Festival (‘Day Rates’ can be negotiated) and will be responsible for finding their own accommodation, which they are advised to do as soon as possible as accommodation is likely to be scarce in August in view of the Sailing Olympics.

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

Additional Information: http://www.hardysociety.org/index.php/society-conference

CFP: BWWC 2012: Special Session Panel on George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1/15/2012; 6/7-10/2012)

2012-01-01T13:04:00.000-05:00

CFP: 2012 British Women Writers Conference

Special Session Panel on George Eliot’s Middlemarch

In response to the conference topic on “Landmarks,” I issue a call for papers for a special session panel at the 2012 British Women Writers Conference on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Not only is Eliot a landmark woman writer who wrote an important landmark in the history of the novel, her novel itself engages issue of landmarks in a wide variety of ways. The novel engages the high culture, Classical landmarks of Greece and Rome through the comparisons of Dorothea to a new Antigone, as well as through her honeymoon trip to Rome. But these well-known figures and sites of human history and achievement are implicitly contrasted to achievements, people and epochs that are not likely to be memorialized. Perhaps no image from the novel better captures this than the ripples or the figure of concentric circles implied by the “incalculably diffusive” good that characterizes Dorothea’s achievements. Her most famous novel and Eliot’s work more generally have also anchored or occasioned landmark critical essays, methods or observations. As such, I aim to construct a panel that is oriented around the single text, but that dramatizes and is alive to the multitude of ways that Middlemarch and writers about that novel engage with or embody issues of landmarks.

Please send abstracts stating application to the special session both to Katherine Voyles at kvoyles@uw.edu and bwwc2012@colorado.edu by January 15 .

Funded Doctoral Fellowship: History of the Interior, University of Bern (1/15/2012)

2011-12-29T14:56:00.000-05:00

The University of Bern has announced generous funding for a doctoral student as part of a project on the History of the Interior. They have extended the deadline for applications until 15th January to allow more candidates to apply. The fellowship supports a student working with Professor Gramaccini on ideas of the Feminine Interior in the long 19th century. Applications from Europe, North America, or further afield are encouraged. For further details, please contact Prof. Norberto Gramaccinin at norberto.gramaccini@ikg.unibe.ch.

University of Bern: http://www.unibe.ch/eng/

Deadline Extended: Charles Dickens and the Mid-Victorian Press (1/5-6/2012; 3/28-31/2012)

2011-12-28T11:21:00.000-05:00

Deadline for this late March conference held open until Twelfth Night (5/6 January 2012) to encourage a few last submissions. Conference Proceedings due for publication in early Autumn! All details of call at www.buckingham.ac.uk/djo

Submissions are invited, in three main areas relating to the conference theme:

Original close readings of one or more articles from Household Words and All the Year Round, or the work of an individual contributor. Many articles in the journals―whether by Dickens, a known contributor, or anonymous―repay close scrutiny, whether approached in stylistic, rhetorical, ideological, or historical terms. Yet the published literature in the field is small, and something that the conference seeks to redress.
Appraisals of the contribution made by either or both journals, more generally, to key areas of debate in the mid-Victorian press. Public health, social policy, science and technology, education, gender roles, the urban experience, imperial expansion, emigration and the law, are just some of these. Aesthetic and cultural analysis of the journals, as miscellanies, in terms of the dynamics of genre they present, or in terms of broad thematic or bibliographic concerns that the paper sets out to explore, will also be welcome.
Contrastive readings of other contemporary periodical publications―whether weekly, monthly or quarterly―in relation to Household Words and All the Year Round, that will assist us in positioning the latter in relation to the crowded mid-century marketplace. Such publications might include Chambers’s Journal, The Examiner, Punch, Bentley’s Miscellany, the Illustrated London News, The Cornhill Magazine, as well as political and literary reviews, and ‘penny bloods.’

Submissions from graduate students and as yet unpublished scholars will be particularly welcome. 500-word proposals for 20-minute papers to reach DJO@buckingham.ac.uk by Friday 30 December 2011.

An edited selection of the Conference Proceedings, embracing the three main areas above, will be published by the University of Buckingham Press in 2012. A complimentary copy will be included with every conference booking.

Event: Dickens's World: A Free Online Conference (3/7-8/2012)

2011-12-22T15:07:00.000-05:00

On the 7th and 8th of March 2012, Wiley-Blackwell will be hosting a free online conference to celebrate the bicentenary of Charles Dickens.

Features include:

Video addresses by prominent Dickens scholars
Free scholarly papers with discussion forum for each
Reading Room with free articles and book chapters from Wiley-Blackwell

Lisa Evans
Senior Marketing Controller
Social Sciences and Humanities Journals
Wiley-Blackwell
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK

Job Posting: Charles Dickens Museum: Education and Outreach Officer (12/30/2011)

2011-12-22T15:02:00.000-05:00

Education and Outreach officer

£23,000 PA (Fixed Term Contract Until 31 December 2013)

The Charles Dickens Museum is recruiting an Education and Outreach officer to deliver a programme for 2012 and beyond. As part of a large-scale redevelopment of the museum, the role will involve developing a Museum strategy for audience development as well as delivering outreach and education activities.

The successful candidate will have experience of outreach and interpretation and a working knowledge of the heritage sector. Excellent communication skills and enthusiasm are also requisite.

Dowload Job Description here: JD Learning&Outreach Officer

Closing date for applications is 10am on 30 December 2011.

Reminder: Browning, Before, Beyond (1/31/2012; 6/28-30/2012)

2011-12-22T12:52:00.000-05:00

Reassessing the Dramatic Monologue in the 19th and 20th centuries:

Browning, Before, Beyond
Royal Holloway, University of London, 28-30 June 2012

Organised by the Browning Society in collaboration with Royal Holloway, University of London, the University of Westminster and the University of the West of England. Supported by the British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS).

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Isobel Armstrong
Daniel Karlin
Tricia Lootens
Cornelia Pearsall

Over the past two centuries, Robert Browning has been hailed initially as the co-inventor of the dramatic monologue, and more recently, as earlier origins of the genre have been proposed, as its most prominent practitioner. To celebrate the Bicentenary of Browning’s birth, the Browning Society is hosting an international conference to reassess not only Browning’s work in what is arguably the defining genre of his oeuvre, but also the broader practice and theory of the dramatic monologue before, after and during his lifetime.

The conference remit of Browning, Before and Beyond proposes, in the first instance, to discuss the dramatic monologue in relation to Browning and other Victorian practitioners of the genre. The conference seeks to explore the reasons behind the rise of the genre during the Victorian era and the extent to which its formal and generic concerns with issues of performativity and spectacle, identity and subjectivity, text and truth – Browning introduced his Dramatic Lyrics of 1842 as 'so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine’ – are illustrative of key concerns of the Victorian age.

Further, the conference hopes to extend critical discussion of the growth, profile, and generic nature of the dramatic monologue. The organisers welcome papers on pre-and post-Victorian poets and poems as a means of exploring the historical limits and reaches of the genre. Similarly, papers that explore the generic and disciplinary reaches of the form – its associations with drama, or connections to the Romantic lyric mode, for example – are warmly encouraged.

20-minute papers are invited on any topic relating to the dramatic monologue. Submissions may include, but are not restricted to:

new approaches to defining the dramatic monologue and its significance
reassessments of established approaches to the genre
the origins/ predecessors of the genre
Victorian variants of the genre
issues of subjectivity and selfhood
Post-Romanticism and the dramatic monologue
the dramatic monologue and gender
the genre’s relation to history
hybrid versions of the genre
twentieth-century and twenty-first century uses of the genre
the dramatic monologue and performance poetry

Conference organizers: Dr Simon Avery, Dr Vicky Greenaway, Dr Britta Martens. Please submit 300-word abstracts to s.avery@westminster.ac.uk by 31 January 2012.

Registration: W.T. Stead: Centenary Conference for a Newspaper Revolutionary (3/31/2012; 4/16-17/2012)

2011-12-20T13:37:00.000-05:00

W.T. Stead: Centenary Conference for a Newspaper Revolutionary

British Library, London

16-17 April 2012

Due to some problems with the British Library Box Office system, we have extended the early registration period for W.T. Stead: Centenary Conference for a Newspaper Revolutionary until 31 January 2012. Registration closes on 31 March 2012 and the conference itself is 16-17 April 2012.

Registration is via the British Library Box Office. Unfortunately, they are only able to take bookings by telephone or in person at the British Library at St Pancras. We appreciate that this can cause inconvenience for those booking from overseas and we are continuing to investigate alternatives. However, for now these are the only methods to register.

Full details about the conference are availabe on the conference site: https://sites.google.com/site/stead2012/
The conference program is available here: https://sites.google.com/site/stead2012/program
You can follow the conference on Twitter @stead2012, hashtag #stead12
Any enquiries, please contact the conference organizers at stead2012@googlemail.com

Job Opening: 19th-century British and Anglophone literatures/digital humanities (1/30/2012)

2011-12-20T13:23:00.000-05:00

Washington State University
Opening for Assistant Professor of English
Applications due January 30, 2012

Assistant Professor of English with specialty in 19th-century British and Anglophone literatures with additional specialization in digital humanities, tenure track, beginning August 2012. Duties and responsibilities include teaching courses in literary studies and in the Digital Technology and Culture undergraduate degree program, as well as graduate courses in nineteenth-century Anglophone literatures and digital humanities (2-2 teaching load). Successful candidate will maintain an active research agenda and participate in professional and university service. Ph.D. in English or related field required by July 1, 2012. Evidence of teaching effectiveness at the college level strongly preferred. Promise of scholarly potential in nineteenth-century British or Anglophone literatures, Victorian studies, digital humanities, archival theory and practice, or the electronic/digital remediation of printed texts strongly preferred. Other preferred areas of scholarship include comparative media studies, visual culture studies, or the study of literature and information technologies. Demonstrated ability to work in diverse communities highly desirable. Apply at http://www.wsujobs.com. Be prepared to upload a letter of application, curriculum vitae, contact information for three references, and a writing sample. Review of applications will begin on January 16, 2012. For full consideration applications must be received by January 30, 2012. WSU is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. Members of ethnic minorities, women, Vietnam-era or disabled veterans, persons of disability and/or persons age 40 or over are encouraged to apply.

Symposium: The Collection in Context: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at Museo de Arte de Ponce (2/4/2012)

2011-12-16T16:08:00.000-05:00

Museo de Arte de Ponce is pleased to announce its Pre-Raphaelite symposium, to be held on Saturday, February 4 from 10 am to 5:00 pm at the Salón Fundación Plaza del Caribe. This symposium, titled "The Collection in Context: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at Museo de Arte de Ponce" will be one of the Museum’s main academic events in 2012. It will convene distinguished scholars and researchers in the field of Victorian culture, who will present papers on the creative practices of the young group of artists that founded in 1848 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, recurring themes in this movement, the artistic and literary exchanges it yield, and the curatorial frameworks employed in exhibiting the Pre-Raphaelites since the 1980s.

The list of speakers includes Tim Barringer (Yale University), Sally Huxtable (Northumbria Unversity), Franny Moyle (autor and producer, BBC), Jason Rosenfeld (Marymount Manhattan College), Alison Smith (Tate Britain), and Madeleine Vala (University of Puerto Rico).

The British Collection of Museo de Arte de Ponce constitutes one of the main strengths of its permanent collection. Its core of Victorian works is considered one of the best outside of London. This symposium will be a landmark in the history of the Museum, as it will provide, for the first time, a context to understand these wonderful artworks outside their native context of Victorian England. By way of this international symposium, the Museum is happy to present this important group of works to a wider audience in the Americas and to continue highlighting its permanent collection as a subject for research and international dialogue.

The symposium will serve as a preamble to a bilingual catalogue edited by Cheryl Hartup (Chief Curator, Museo de Arte de Ponce) and Alison Smith on the museum’s British Collection, to be published later in 2012. This collection, which has traveled to Tate Britain, Museo Nacional del Prado, and the Belvedere Museum includes masterworks such as The Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon (1881-1898), by Sir Edward Burne Jones and Flaming June (c. 1895), by Frederic Lord Leighton. The catalogue of the British Collection will be the first of a multi-volume work on specific areas that make Museo de Arte de Ponce a museum with a world-class permanent collection.

The symposium will be held in English with simultaneous translation to Spanish. This academic program will be made possible thanks to the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. A number of travel grants of up to $600 for U.S. travelers and $900.00 for European travelers are available for graduate students specializing in Victorian art or literature.

To apply, please send a resumé and a cover letter explaining your interest in attending the symposium and how this program or the Museum’s British collection relates to your topic of research. Your cover letter should state your institutional affiliation and the year of acceptance into your M.A./Ph.D. program. Applications should be sent to kjelias@museoarteponce.org with the subject heading TRAVEL GRANT APPLICATION. Applications must be received by Dec. 24, 2011.

For more information, please visit www.museoarteponce.org

Contact: Taína Caragol tcaragol@gmail.com

CFP: Project Narrative Summer Institute (3/1/2012; 6/11-22/2012)

2011-12-16T12:48:00.000-05:00

Project Narrative Summer Institute

June 11–June 22, 2012
Application deadline: March 1, 2012

Tuition for PNSI is $1200. Participants also cover the cost of their own travel and housing. We encourage participants to seek institutional funding for this professional development opportunity. We can offer information for participants who want to share housing, house-sit, or stay in local bed-and-breakfasts.

The 2012 PNSI will be led by Project Narrative core faculty members Frederick Aldama and Sean O'Sullivan. In addition to theoretical readings, texts will be drawn from many narrative genres with an emphasis on comics, film, and television.

Rationale
Storytelling, around since at least the Paleolithic, exists in many modes and is one of the most popular forms of entertainment all over the world. This omnipresence offers the opportunity to study it both in its universality and its particularity. That is, nowadays it is possible to study storytelling with the most rigorous research methods and means. These include a scientific aesthetics, socioneurobiology, and narratology.

To the extent that it is possible to accomplish this in two weeks, our aim is to examine central concepts pertaining to the study of narrative fiction as realized in its three primary modes: short stories, comics, and films (t.v. inclusive). These narrative fiction texts will offer various formal challenges and include varying degrees of multicultural content. The choice of primary texts and theory will allow us to focus on concepts and categories that can be empirically verified and logically argued, and therefore also teachable.

Such concepts and categories are meant to show how storytellers create blueprints that direct understanding and guide interpretation by readers and audiences. We shall see that authors, author/artists and filmmakers follow generic structures or recreate them anew as their stories unfold for their audiences to be both in familiar and unfamiliar territory. This will lead us to examine aesthetic categories of genre (tragedy, comedy, the grotesque) and distance (including habituation and enstrangement) as well as their concomitant emotions. And of course, this discussion will allow us to look more closely at the notion of the aesthetic itself, as a specific domain of human activity marked as a particular relational activity.

Questions we will ask ourselves include: What do we mean by the aesthetic relation, or what is the aesthetic relation? What is the aesthetic object as an organic whole? Why do the aesthetic genres, their combinations, and their concomitant emotions (the comic, the tragic, the grotesque) play a role in the creation of the artistic blueprint and also in its interpretation and understanding?

This will lead us to explore the concept of the blueprint as the specific form storytelling assumes: a set of minimal road signs that the skilled storyteller establishes for the skilled readers/audiences to follow in their understanding and interpretation of the work, be it a short story, a comic book, or a film. We will come to understand better how as the story unfolds and we interpret it in its parts and as a whole, following the signposts inscribed by the author in the making (writing, filming) of her/his blueprint (short story, comic book, film). Our secondary readings in the field of narratology along with the application of findings in socioneurobiology will enrich our understanding of the creative mind as it concerns authors and readers, filmmakers and audiences. Such general and specific knowledge will take some of the enigma out of how these complex processes take place.

Stories possess an internal and external meaning. They are “about” something (the plot, the story) and they are a shape, a form, a particular way of having been told (what narratologists call “discourse”). Stories are understood in these two dimensions as they unfold, and both are equally the pillars of all storytelling. But “discourse” has the more dynamic role, for it acts as the prime shape-giving and generative operator. Thanks to “discourse” storytelling is potentially an ever creative activity, always new, always renewed.

If, as Jorge Luis Borges once suggested about metaphors, stories too are limited in number, their telling is limitless; it can always be fresh and new because humans possess a unique capacity to generate an infinite number of shapes or forms and are able to apply to stories that same infinite creativity. So a question arises: what is narrative in general? And this question poses several other ones: What is narrative fiction in particular? Why nonfiction narrative is governed by the rules of truth and empirical discovery? And why narrative fiction is governed exclusively by the rules of sovereign creativity and is the product not of discovery but of constructed, imagined, created ingredients.

We want to know in the clearest terms possible, what elements are comprised within the category of story and within the category of discourse. In the first case, we will explore and come to understand what plot and theme are and what character and events are. In the second case, we will study carefully and come to understand concepts of form and shape-giving, such as ordering, sequentiality, flashback and flashforward, rhythm, frequency, space, focalization, visual and auditive narrators, intradiagetic and extradiegetic music, mise-en-scène, panel, framing, and so on.

In our allotted two week period we will examine concepts that are not only useful, but indispensible to the scientific understanding of the specific domain of aesthetic activity we call the creation and reception of what have becometoday the dominant three storytelling media. We will learn and explore as many well defined and clear cut concepts or tools that are necessary for the analysis of works (multicultural and otherwise) at hand in the domain of short story, comic books, and films.

With an eye toward texts (multicultural and otherwise) we might teach in the classroom, the Project Narrative Summer Institute 2012 will explore these themes in conjunction with a group of diverse multiple media fiction narratives—short story, comic books, and film (t.v inclusive)—to provide insight into essential elements of narrative fiction and narrative theory.

PNSI 2012 has an explicit pedagogical aim. We will work step by step toward the final goal of the course: to develop courses that use the tools of narratology and advances in the brain sciences to analyze comic books, films (t.v.), and/or short stories. This is an opportunity to develop courses that are attuned and responsive to the ever more present needs and interests of students today in audiovisual storytelling media. We will end the two weeks with each of you developing your ideal course with the tools and knowledge acquired.

For the list of primary and secondary texts, visit https://projectnarrative.osu.edu/programs/summer-institute#Rationale

For the schedule, visit: https://projectnarrative.osu.edu/programs/summer-institute#Schedule

CFP: The Stockholm 2012 Metaphor Festival (3/31/2012; 9/6-8/2012)

2011-12-16T12:40:00.000-05:00

The Stockholm 2012 Metaphor Festival (SMF)

Thursday 6 to Saturday 8 September
Keynotes: Patrick Hanks and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan
Deadline for abstract submission: 31 March 2012

The Stockholm Metaphor Festival is an annual conference on the use of figurative language and other modes of figurative expression, arranged by the Department of English at Stockholm University. It brings together researchers from a broad range of academic disciplines, working within different theoretical and methodological paradigms in a creative, internationally oriented, and friendly atmosphere. The importance of figurative language and figurative semiotics is now generally recognised, and the Festival offers an opportunity to present and learn about research findings concerning figurative uses in different types of human communication, and their cognitive, cultural, narrative, poetic, rhetorical, social, or textual functions.

Contributions to the Festival can address the linguistic and literary character and use of tropes – metaphor, metonymy, simile, oxymoron, hyperbole, litotes, punning, and irony – or the character and use of rhyme schemes and various types of parallelism, as well as the nature of figurative signs and devices in non-verbal communication.

At the 2012 Festival we are also planning two workshops on Saturday 8 September, one on Linguistic and Conceptual Metaphors and their Relations, led by Gerard Steen, VU University Amsterdam, and another one on Dickens and Figurative Language, led by Leona Toker, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

Each talk is allotted 30 minutes at the Festival, roughly 20 minutes for the presentation and 10 minutes for discussion. There is also a separate poster session that can be visited by all participants at the Festival.

Abstract guidelines: Abstracts should be written in English, and they are expected to be about 300 to 400 words long. The abstract should have a title, but the author’s name, academic affiliation, and email address should be indicated on a separate sheet, where it should also be specified whether the abstract is intended as a basis for a general session talk, a poster presentation, or a workshop presentation. Abstracts for the general sessions should be emailed to Metaphorfestival@English.su.se, while abstracts for the workshop on Linguistic and Conceptual Metaphors and their Relations should be emailed to g.j.steen@vu.nl. The abstracts for the workshop on Dickens and Figurative Language should be emailed both to toker@mscc.huji.ac.il and toMetaphorfestival@English.su.se. Information about acceptances will be emailed by 15 May to all scholars submitting an abstract.

Conference fee: €80 for early registration, by 31 July; €100 from 1 August.

For further information about The Metaphor Festival, see our home page: www.english.su.se/research/metaphorfestival.

Event: Grand Orgue, The Nineteenth Century Explored (1/28/2012)

2011-12-15T11:58:00.000-05:00

Grand Orgue, The Nineteenth Century Explored

http://www.organistsonline.org/grand.orgue/

Saturday 28 January 2012, from 2.00pm

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
235 Shaftesbury Ave, London WC2 8EP

Introduction

Following the success of the Organists Online Open House on 29 January 2011, Music in Bloomsbury (Philip Luke) and Organists Online (Philip Norman) invite all organists and other musicians to an afternoon and early evening of recitals, displays, and presentations.

The theme of the event, Grand Orgue, The Nineteenth Century Explored, gives a panoramic view of the symphonic organ and its music. Apart from the recitals, each taking a closer look at the music of England, France, and Germany, and the presentations filling in the background to the period, there will be ongoing refreshments, displays of relevant material and sales of CDs and books, and a substantial buffet.

The two Philips look forward to seeing you, and sharing an afternoon of fine performances, interesting viewpoints, and tasty food.

Programme
1.30     Light refreshments
2.00     Recital 1 - Mo Wah Chan
French music
2.30     Presentation 1 - Will Fraser
Capturing Cavaillé on DVD
3.00     INTERVAL
3.15     Recital 2 - Jonathan Hope
English music
3.45     Presentation 2 - The Rhinegold Singers
Choral Music of the Period
4.15     INTERVAL
4.30     Recital 3 -Tim Wakerell
German Music
5.00     Presentation 3 - Gerard Brooks
The background to his recital
5.30     BUFFET
6.00     Celebrity Recital - Gerard Brooks
7.00     End

CFP: Desire, Literature, Culture (12/16/2011; 3/29-30/2012)

2011-12-12T13:41:00.000-05:00

Desire, Literature, Culture

University of Malta Postgraduate Symposium

29-30 March, 2012

The present pleasure,

By revolution low’ring, thus become

The opposite of itself

- Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

If, in the near future, all data, movies, etc., were to become instantly available, if the delay were to become minimal so that the very notion of "searching for" (a book, a film …) were to lose meaning, would this instant availability not suffocate desire?

- Žižek

[d]o not give way on your desire

- Lacan

Might desire be in decline? At first glance the suggestion seems almost preposterous: we live in an age in which near-instant gratification has, on many levels, never been so widely available, keenly desired or insistently promised. The past century has seen the development of a highly theorised understanding of desire as well as the emergence and astonishingly rapid growth of the various culture industries that sustain the ever increasingly complex economy of wish-fulfilment that structures our daily lives, reinforcing what seems to be the contemporary injunction par excellence, namely to ‘enjoy’ or ‘consume’. One might even be inclined to look back upon modernism as marking the emergence of the literary text, and the artwork more generally, as a self-absorbed exploration and cultivation of memory and desire, which is then taken to its self-reflexive, playfully autotelic and freely libidinal extreme by postmodernism. And yet there seems to be a pervading sense that desire is not what it used to be.

Could it be that we are quite literally spoilt for choice? That desire is either coming to be sated or is now in some sense vitiated or impoverished, and that, in any case, there is – and perhaps has always been – something unsatisfying about the satisfaction of desire? Moreover, if – and we ought not to take this for granted – the last century traces the undulating rise and fall of desire, how has this been reflected in literature, theory and culture? From the current crisis in global capitalism, to the academy’s critical default of post[–]ist discourse, to a cursory glance at recent, notable publications – Living in the End Times, What Ever Happened to Modernism?, Theory after ‘Theory’, The Poetics of Disappointment, On Late Style, The Philosophy of Boredom – it is impossible to escape the pervading sense of an ending (to echo deliberately both the title of Julian Barnes’ 2011 Man Booker winner, and Frank Kermode’s influential study of literature and apocalypse).

Or might it be the case that desire is alive and well but simply elsewhere, constituting alternative sites of cultural and political expression? Might this, for instance, account for the popularity of grassroots politics – from Occupy Wall Street to the so-called Arab Spring – at a time when political apathy has supposedly never been greater? What, then, are the sites of desire today and how are they figured in literature and culture? How, in particular, are literature and culture negotiating the redirected flows of desire of the digital age?

If, however, our contemporary cultural reality is indeed marked by ‘vanishing desire’ (Lacan) or ‘the disappearance of desire’ (Žižek), then, at least on one reading, we live in the tension between fantasy and anxiety. How, in such a context, might both literature and culture be seen to be responding to Lacan’s imperative not to give way on one’s desire? This conference invites papers that respond to these issues and to the topic of desire, literature and culture more generally.

Papers may discuss, but need not be limited to, the following topics:

Waning/saturated desire in literature and culture
Desire in literature and literature in desire
Other desires – marginal, multiple, forbidden and deviant desires
Desire and modernism/postmodernism
Figures of desire in literature
Desire and power
Erotic desire
The poetics of desire
Desire and death
Desire and freedom
Desire and ideology
Cultural desires
Desire and cinema
Feminism and desire
Desire and censorship
Kristeva: desire in language
Desire in and for realism
Desire and the sense of an ending
Capitalism, individualism and desire
Theories of desire and the representation of the self in literature
Desire, promise and l’avenir
Recalculating proximities: psychoanalysis and desire
The aesthetics of desire and contemporary culture
Towards a stylistic understanding of desire
The economics of desire

Abstracts of no more than 300 words, accompanied by a brief biographical note, should be sent to dlc2012@um.edu.mt by 16^th December.

Registration open: Shared Visions (2/11/2012)

2011-12-11T11:24:00.000-05:00

Plenary Speaker: Professor Shearer West, Head of Humanities Division, University of Oxford

Saturday 11th February 2012
9.30am to 6pm

www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/theatre_s/staff/jim_davis/sharedvisions

For further information on the conference, please contact Patricia Smyth: patricia.smyth@nottingham.ac.uk

Job Vacancy at the Florence Nightingale Museum (2/10/2012)

2011-12-11T11:20:00.000-05:00

Collections Assistant
£20,000 pro rata, 3 days per week
Closing date: 10th February 2012
Interview date: 20th February 2012 at the Florence Nightingale Museum

Background:
The Florence Nightingale Museum celebrates the life and work of the best known figure in nursing history. Located within St Thomas' Hospital, the museum was opened in 1989 and now forms a key part of London's medical heritage. The collection consists of personal material associated with Florence Nightingale, items relating to the Crimean War and nursing artefacts. The museum archives include approximately 800 letters from Florence Nightingale and an important rare book collection of 284 titles. The museum is located in the grounds of St Thomas' Hospital, at the heart of the cultural re-generation taking place on the South Bank, and has 40,000 visitors a year.

The Collections Assistant must be a highly organised individual with past experience in working with collections, good documentation skills and an eye for detail. This post will involve basic curatorial duties as well as working with a wide range of people, including academic researchers and family historians

For application forms and further details please email natasham@florence-nightingale.co.uk Please telephone or email to request a hard copy application. The closing date for applications is 9am on 10th February 2012.

To apply:
Complete an application form and email or post to:
Natasha McEnroe (Director)
Email: natasham@florence-nightingale.co.uk

Postal address:
Florence Nightingale Museum
Gassiot House
2 Lambeth Palace Road
London
SE1 7EW

Natasha McEnroe, Director
The Florence Nightingale Museum
Gassiot House
2 Lambeth Palace Road
London
SE1 7EW
T:0207 620 0374
F:02079281760
www.florence-nightingale.co.uk

CFP: BWWC 2012 special session: "Landmarks in Nineteenth-Century Natural History: Texts and Landscapes" (1/15/2012; 6/7-10/2012)

2011-12-07T12:55:00.000-05:00

Please find below a CFP for a special session at the 2012 British Women Writers Conference in Boulder, CO.

"Landmarks in Nineteenth-Century Natural History: Texts and Landscapes"

Over the course of the nineteenth century, a number of landmark works of natural history—which constitute what we might now call biological and geological sciences—dramatically altered how British society viewed the natural world. Natural “monuments” (as Georges Cuvier put it), such as geological strata or fossils, were increasingly interpreted as signifying marks on the face of the landscape that needed to be interpreted and understood. How did women writers engage with these frequently changing natural and textual landmarks? What implications do such landmarks hold for individuals’ and societies’ notions of self and of history, relationships to each other and to nature, and production of artistic and of scientific works? Charles Darwin’s writings have often been considered by literary scholars interested in how women writers reflected, negotiated, and participated in nineteenth-century scientific discourse, and papers exploring Darwin in light of the theme of this panel are welcome, but those focusing on other landmark Romantic or Victorian natural histories are particularly encouraged.

Please submit 500-word abstracts to both laurenkl@email.unc.edu AND bwwc2012@colorado.edu by January 15, stating your application to this special session.

For more information on the 2012 British Women Writers Conference, visit http://www.bwwc2012.com/.

CFP: ELN Special Issue: “Scriptural Margins: On the Boundaries of Sacred Texts” (3/15/2012)

2011-12-05T21:32:00.000-05:00

ELN 50.2 (Fall/Winter 2012): “Scriptural Margins: On the Boundaries of Sacred Texts.”

English Language Notes

Contact email: eln2@colorado.edu

Deadline: March 15, 2012

This special issue invites nontraditional examinations of sacred texts from major religious traditions, including those of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. We seek readings of scriptures that carve out an interpretive space between religious and secular modes of response. Such readings may be informed by recent critical movements – queer theory, affect theory, ontotheology, biopolitics, etc.. They may investigate the usually complex and uncertain process by which a text moves from sacred to secular status (or from sacred back to secular). They may engage the question of how traditional interpretations bend, mutate, or sustain themselves in the wake of cultural changes or political exigencies. They may examine the dynamic and mutually transformative exchanges between religious hermeneutics and secular modes of interpretation (e.g. legal, literary, psychoanalytic). Papers submitted for this issue may theorize on the relationship between commentaries, treatises and sacred texts - - on the ways, for example, that commentaries enter into the historical lives of scriptures, inscribing them with meanings that become naturalized. Or they may explore the paths by which scripture flows into non-scriptural writings -- poetry, fiction, or song – and how such paths reconfigure or coexist with the division between a sacred and a non-sacred text. Or they may track the fate of a sacred text as it moves across cultural and geographical boundaries, finding new communities of believers and generating new readings, whether as recognitions or misrecognitions of the readings adopted by preceding schools of believers. In all cases, contributors will be motivated by a desire to operate outside the engrained opposition between religious and secular discourses and by the desire for a mode of reading that isn’t reducible to spiritual or anti-spiritual programs, to immediately recognizable acts of heterodoxy or piety. Consideration will be given to critical essays, creative writings, and to writings that are combinations of the two. We also welcome round-table discussions on particular sub-topics and reviews or review articles of recent books relevant to the issue’s theme.

Please send double-spaced, 12-point font contributions adhering to the Chicago-style endnote citation format in hard copy and on CD-ROM to the address below:

Special Issue Editor, “Scriptural Margins”
English Language Notes
University of Colorado at Boulder
226 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0226

Specific inquiries may be addressed to the issue editor, Sue Zemka, zemka@colorado.edu. The deadline for submissions for the first issue is March 15, 2012.

Request from the New York Times

2011-12-05T12:46:00.000-05:00

Dear Victorianists,

I'd like to speak with Victorianists who have written biographies about 19th century subjects—and who happen to have read Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs. I am preparing a piece for the New York Times on the difficulties of writing deeply about the lives of contemporary figures—Steve Jobs, in particular.

I would guess that much, much richer biographies have been written about relatively unknown figures in Victorian England who lived, say, in the 1870s, than will ever be written about Jobs, even though he is the dominant business figure in our Information Age—a misnomer when it comes to biography.

What is missing today, in the post-epistolary time in which Jobs grew up and built his career, are contemporaneous records of his thoughts, and those of his family members, friends, and colleagues. Without those, we cannot know much about Steve Jobs's interior life or of those around him.

I seek the help of Victorianists who have written biographies and can show that inner lives were well-preserved in the Victorian period. I'd like also to look at Isaacson's biography from a Victorianist's perspective.

I write the Digital Domain column for the Sunday edition of the Times and have a day job as a professor of business at San Jose State University. In a former professional life, I was trained as a historian. This project is for an upcoming Times column.

If this piques your interest and you'd be willing to help, kindly send me an email. Thanks very much.

Cheers,

Randall Stross

Digital Domain columnist

New York Times

stross@nytimes.com