CFP: McGill Graduate Conference - Luxuries of the Literary Mind: Readings of Commodity & Privilege (1/14/11; 3/4-6/2011)

17th Annual McGill International Graduate Conference on Language and Literature

McGill University, Montreal

March 4 to 6, 2011

Focus: luxury, privilege, commodity, and consumption in literature, and other texts and cultural artifacts

We invite presentations from all periods and fields of literary study, as well as theatre, film, and cultural studies. Interdisciplinary approaches (e.g., with reference to history, philosophy, science, medicine, economics, art history, religious studies, and other fields) are welcome and encouraged. Potential topics include, but are not limited to the following:

• Class and social standing.
• Wealth and poverty, images of excess and need.
• Human rights (sexual freedoms, disability rights, etc.) versus social privilege
• The racialization of wealth and status.
• The politics of pleasure.
• Iconography, brands and branding, labels, commodity fetishism.
• Consumer behavior and identity.
• Binaries of public/private, high/low, male/female, and consumer/producer central to markets and marketing.
• Literary depictions of shopping, markets, fairs.
• Imperialism, colonialism, trade, and their effects (e.g., environmental degradation, exploitative labor).
• Gift-giving, treasure, hoarding.
• Gender, the body, cosmetic technologies and practices.
• Camp, ostentation, glamor, performance and performativity.
• Fashion and sartorial luxuries.
• Spectacle in film and theater.
• Cultural and aesthetic decadence.
• Literature as a luxury (e.g., book-making expenses & practices, middle- & upper-class education as privilege).
• How has literature shaped or complicated our sense of luxury and commodity?
• How has literature responded to economic or financial fluctuations?
• Gastronomy, epicureanism, connoisseurship, and urbanity.
• Luxury goods and taxes.
• Lifestyle porn (e.g., luxury travel, culture, or celebrity narratives).

We would be delighted to see Victorianists amply represented in our programme. To facilitate the blind-vetting process, please submit the following to mcgillconference2011@gmail.com in .doc, .docx, or .pdf form by Friday, January 14, 2011:

• an anonymous 250-word abstract detailing your proposed paper.
• a separate cover letter including a brief biographical paragraph.

Keynote Speaker Dr. George Toles has published extensively on art and ethics in 19th to 20th-century fiction, drama, and film. His book of film essays is titled A House Made of Light (Wayne State UP, 2001), and his screenwriting collaborations with Guy Maddin include My Winnipeg (2007), Brand Upon the Brain (2006), The Saddest Music in the World (2003), and the upcoming Keyhole, currently in production with Isabella Rossellini and Udo Kier. Dr. Toles' presentation will complement what we hope will be a series of engaging and provocative conference panels.

Conference Organizer: Marc Ducusin

CFP: VISAWUS 2011: "The Vulgar and the Proper: Victorian Manners & Mores" (3/15, 10/13-15/2011)

16th ANNUAL CONFERENCE of the VICTORIAN INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES ASSOCIATION OF THE WESTERN UNITED STATES (VISAWUS)

"The Vulgar and the Proper: Victorian Manners and Mores"

October 13-15, 2011

Houston, TX

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Helena Michie, English, Rice University, author, The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies; Sororophobia: Differences among Women in Literature and Culture; Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal; co-author, Confinements: Fertility and Infertility in Contemporary Culture, and co- editor, 19th-Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century. PLENARY SPEAKER: Lynn Voskuil, English, University of Houston, author, Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity, and essays in Victorian Studies, Feminist Studies, and ELH. Her current project is entitled "Horticulture and Imperialism: The Garden Spaces of the British Empire."

The 16th annual conference focuses on Victorian obsessions with vulgarity and propriety. We invite proposals on manners and mores in politics, culture, society, religion, art, science, economics, rural life, and other Victorian matters of decorum and propriety and what Victorians deemed vulgar, crude or crass. We encourage papers across all disciplines, including (but not restricted to) art history, literature, gender, history of science, history, material culture, political science, performance, life writings, journalism, photography, popular culture, and economics.

By March 15, 2011 email 300-word abstract and 1-page CV (name on BOTH) to: Laurel.Williamson@sjcd.edu.

Download the full CFP here, and click here for more information on VISAWUS.

CFP: Victorian Epidemics (9/15/2010; 4/29-30/2011)

Victorian Epidemics
Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada
Banff, Alberta April 29-30, 2011

Keynote speaker: Pamela Gilbert, Albert Brick Professor of English, University of Florida

Dr. Gilbert has published widely in the areas of Victorian literature, cultural studies and the history of medicine. Her first book, Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1997, followed by Mapping the Victorian Social Body (SUNY Press, 2004) and The Citizen’s Body (Ohio State University Press, 2007), and Cholera and Nation (SUNY Press, 2008).

This international conference will bring together specialists in Victorian art history, history, gender studies, science, and literature to contemplate the theme of disease in Victorian England and its colonies. Papers will address medical and social histories of disease, literary and artistic representations of disease, and disease as metaphor in Victorian culture.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Victorian plagues: cholera, TB, venereal disease, influenza, smallpox
• histories and narratives of disease
• identity and pathology
• disease and the body
• disease as metaphor, languages of disease, contagion, illness
• disease and colonization, disease and globalization
• art as disease, mass culture as disease
• the spread of commercialism
• visual and literary representations of disease and illness
• sewers, filth, miasma
• slums, prostitution
• health and hygiene
• representations of illness
• mental illness
• imperial anxiety and disease
  

Please submit a 500 word abstract and short (50-75 word bio) by September 15 to Kristen Guest, Program Chair, kguest@unbc.ca

The conference will take place in Banff, Alberta in the heart of the Canadian Rockies. The town of Banff is surrounded by the spectacular scenery of Banff National Park, which offers excellent opportunities for both hiking and downhill skiing in late April. Banff is approximately one hour from Calgary and is easily accessible by car or air (regular and reasonably priced shuttles are available from Calgary International Airport).

Photo by Flickr user currybet / Creative Commons licensed