CFP: VPFA "Victorian Treasures & Trash" (4/4/2014; 7/8-10/2014)

The Victorian Popular Fiction Association

Generously Supported by BAVS

Institute of English Studies, Senate House, London

July 8-10, 2014

Deadline: April 4, 2014

Speakers and Special Presentations

• Keynote Speaker: Dr Jonathon Shears (Keele), "'[...] battered [...] soiled [...] broken [...] empty [...] half-smoked [...] stale': The Hangover in Victorian Popular Fiction’"
• Guest Speaker: Judith Flanders, "Painting Reality: Home vs. Home-ness"
• Senate Library Special Collections Talk and "hands-on" mini-exhibition: Dr Karen Attar, "Trash, Treasure or Trashy Treasure at the Institutional Library"

CFP: “Victorian Treasures and Trash” 

The Victorian Popular Fiction Association conference is recognized as an important event on the annual conference circuit and offers a friendly and invigorating opportunity for established academics and post graduate students to share their current research. The organizers remain committed to the revival of interest in understudied popular writers, which is pivotal to the reputation this conference has established.  

The organizers invite a broad, imaginative and interdisciplinary interpretation of the topic and its relation to any aspect of Victorian popular literature and culture which might address literal or metaphorical representations of the theme.

The organizers welcome proposals for 20 minute papers, or for panels of three papers, on topics which can include, but are not limited to:

• Treasures and Trash in: the home, the street, the store, the library, the gutter, the island, the workhouse, the factory, etc.
• Print culture and the literary marketplace: ‘trash’ fiction, high/low culture, taste, fashion, rarity, cheap editions, fine editions, ‘specials’, royalties, contracts, collectors, etc.
• Treasure: buried, hoarded, displayed, collected, traded, neglected, etc.
• Waste: scrap/s, refuse, recycling, reclamation, that which is/those who are discarded/unwanted, the abandoned, etc.
• Dirt: gossip, scandal, degeneracy, decay, cleanliness, healthfulness, godliness, etc.
• Trashed: defaced, vandalised, wasted, defamed, scandalised, denounced, drunk, drugged, etc.
• Industry: the ethics of production, craftsmanship, the cheap, the mass-produced, etc.
• Money: markets, debts/debtors, savings, shares, inheritances, ransoms, fortunes, etc.
• Papers and artefacts: archives, special collections, the museum, the preserved, the priceless, the lost, digitised treasures, etc.
• The Beloved: persons, possessions, memories, moments, etc.
• Values: validity, value/worth, cost, price, morals, family values, etc.
• Things: junk, clutter, paraphernalia, bric-a-brac, curiosities, trinkets, tokens/keepsakes, troves, etc.
• People: fortune-hunters, gold-diggers, prospectors, speculators, pirates, con-artists, thieves, beggars, prostitutes, consumers, etc.

Special author panels: This year the committee will schedule special panels to be hosted by guest experts on each of six key popular authors; therefore, the organizers especially welcome papers about the following authors:

• Mary Elizabeth Braddon (hosted by Anne-Marie Beller)
• Wilkie Collins (hosted by Mariaconcetta Constantini)
• Marie Corelli (hosted by Nickianne Moody)
• Florence Marryat (hosted by Greta Depledge)
• Ouida (hosted by Jane Jordan and Andrew King)
• Robert Louis Stevenson (hosted by Sara Clayson)

Other suggested authors/papers in previous years have also discussed authors such as:

J. M. Barrie, Mrs Beeton, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Rhoda Broughton, Lewis Carroll, Mary Cholmondeley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Jerome K. Jerome, Rudyard Kipling, Eliza Lynn Linton, Edith Nesbit, Margaret Oliphant, Olive Schreiner, Bram Stoker, William Makepeace Thackeray, Dinah Craik, Anthony Trollope, Mary Augusta Ward, H.G. Wells, Ellen Wood, & Charlotte Yonge

Postgraduate students can apply now for funding to cover conference fees – see the website for details: http://victorianpopularfiction.org/ . Please send proposals of no more than 300 words to Drs. Kirsty Bunting, Janine Hatter and Helena Ifill at: vpfamembership@gmail.com. Deadline for proposals: Friday April 4, 2014.

CFP: BAVS 2014 "Victorian Sustainability" (3/31/2014; 9/4-6/2014)

BAVS 2014

New Centre for Victorian Literature and Culture

University of Kent, Canterbury

September 4-6, 2014

Deadline: March 31, 2014

“Victorian Sustainability”

From emerging ideas about the perils of environmental degradation to the establishment of the National Trust, the concept of sustainability began to take on a new importance in the Victorian period that remains relevant in 21st-century modernity. We welcome proposals which address any aspect of Victorian sustainability and especially encourage interdisciplinary approaches.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Victorian nature writing and/or discourses of nature and science
• Heritage and preservation (of built environments, natural landscapes, species, material cultures)
• Climate change and the Victorians
• Sustenance and sustainability
• Victorian discourses of emotional/psychological sustainability or wellbeing
• Eco-criticism and environmental aesthetics in Victorian literature
• Sustaining the Victorians (literary and/or cultural legacies)
• ‘Green imperialism’ and/or colonial sustainability
• The emergence of self-sufficiency and sustainable ways of life in the Victorian period
• Waste/pollution vs. recycling/renewal in urban and industrial contexts
• Narratives of catastrophe, risk, decay or crisis in the Victorian period
• Representations of growth, flourishing and/or transformation in Victorian literature and culture
• Social ecology and the relation between human and non-human in the Victorian period
• Victorian pastoral and/or the legacy of Romanticism
• The sustainability of Victorian Studies

Proposals (300 words max.) are due by March 31, 2014, and should be sent tokentbavs2014@gmail.com. Panel proposals (comprised of 3 paper proposals, plus an additional 300 words explaining how the papers are linked in addressing the theme) are also welcome.

Any inquiries about the Centre or the conference may be sent to the Centre Director, Professor Wendy Parkins at W.J.Parkins@kent.ac.uk

For more information visit the website: http://bavsuk.org/events/annual-conference/

CFP: BAVS 2014 "Victorian Sustainability" (3/31/2014; 9/4-6/2014)

British Association of Victorian Studies conference

University of Kent, Canterbury

September 4-6, 2014

Deadline: March 31, 2014

“Victorian Sustainability”

From emerging ideas about the perils of environmental degradation to the establishment of the National Trust, the concept of sustainability began to take on a new importance in the Victorian period that remains relevant in 21-st century modernity. We welcome proposals which address any aspect of Victorian sustainability and especially encourage interdisciplinary approaches.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Victorian nature writing and/or discourses of nature and science
• Heritage and preservation (of built environments, natural landscapes, species, material cultures)
• Climate change and the Victorians
• Sustenance and sustainability
• Victorian discourses of emotional/psychological sustainability or wellbeing
• Eco-criticism and environmental aesthetics in Victorian literature
• Sustaining the Victorians (literary and/or cultural legacies)
• ‘Green imperialism’ and/or colonial sustainability
• The emergence of self-sufficiency and sustainable ways of life in the Victorian period
• Waste/pollution vs. recycling/renewal in urban and industrial contexts
• Narratives of catastrophe, risk, decay or crisis in the Victorian period
• Representations of growth, flourishing and/or transformation in Victorian literature and culture
• Social ecology and the relation between human and non-human in the Victorian period
• Victorian pastoral and/or the legacy of Romanticism
• The sustainability of Victorian Studies

Proposals (300 words max.) are due by March 31, 2014, and should be sent to kentbavs2014@gmail.com. Panel proposals (comprised of 3 paper proposals, plus an additional 300 words explaining how the papers are linked in addressing the theme) are also welcome.

The 2014 BAVS conference will be hosted by the new Centre for Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Any inquiries about the Centre or the conference may be sent to the Centre Director, Professor Wendy Parkins at W.J.Parkins@kent.ac.uk

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

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

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

Registration goes up by 50 euros starting April 15.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog: victorianbodyparts.wordpress.com                          

Twitter: @victbodyparts

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

Nineteenth-Century Numbers

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

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

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

Call for Papers

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

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

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

Last Call: NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA Supernumerary Conference “The Global and the Local” (10/4/2012; 6/3-6/2013)

The conference is a supernumerary conference for NAVSA, BAVS, and AVSA.  The dates will be June 3-6, 2013 and the deadline for proposals is October 4, just a few days after the NAVSA '12 Wisconsin conference.  NAVSA's regular conference will occur in 2013 at the Huntington, the Getty, and Pasadena from October 23-27.  You can find more information about the Venice conference at the following web site: http://glocalvictorians.wordpress.com/

The deadline, once again, is October 4.  

The conference will occur on the beautiful island of San Servolo, just a 10-minute vaporetto ride from Piazza San Marco, the tourist heart of Venice.  There will be the option to stay on the island of San Servolo, in dorm room housing (with bathroom in room) for the fee of €53.33 (US$69) per night per person (an unbeatable rate for Venice!).  The rooms are spare but clean and a number of the rooms will be doubles, triples, and quadruples, so you would likely be sharing a room in this scenario.  

Lynda Nead (Birkbeck, UK) and Lydia Wevers (Victorian U, Wellington, New Zeland) have been confirmed as plenary speakers.  An opening State of the Field panel will have position papers by Regenia Gagnier (U Exeter, UK), Jock Macleod (Griffith U, Australia), and Kate Flint (USC, USA).  The conference will include a special night time tour of Basilica San Marco and a series of material culture seminars spread around the city. 

NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA Supernumerary Conference (10/4/2012; 6/3-6/2013)

The conference is a supernumerary conference for NAVSA, BAVS, and AVSA.  The dates will be June 3-6, 2013 and the deadline for proposals is October 4, just a few days after the NAVSA '12 Wisconsin conference.  NAVSA's regular conference will occur in 2013 at the Huntington, the Getty, and Pasadena from October 23-27.  You can find more information about the Venice conference at the following web site: http://glocalvictorians.wordpress.com/

The deadline, once again, is October 4.  

The Venice Professionalization Workshop

This workshop is intended for graduate students and recently minted PhDs and will address such issues as grant-writing; postdoctoral fellowships; the writing of proposals; job letters and the market; the interview process and job talks; teaching portfolios; how to turn a seminar paper into a published article; the digital humanities, pros and cons; the differences among Canadian, American, British, and also Australian markets; and negotiating contracts. The workshop will occur on San Servolo every morning, May 27-31, June 3, and June 7.  A number of scholars have expressed their willingness to participate, provided they can arrange their schedule and funding, including Andrew Miller, Carolyn Williams, Alison Byerley, Barbara Leckie, Pamela Gilbert, and Kate Flint.  There will not be a firm list of visitors until the new year.

The workshop will cost US$800.  That will include the program fee, rental of the classroom, and lodging for the period May 25 to June 2, plus an additional night on June 7, so 10 extra nights in Venice.  This means that participants would have 10 extra nights in Venice for less than they could arrange any other way, thanks to the help of Venice Int'l U, so the workshop is a bonus of sorts (two and a half hours every morning, leaving the afternoons to visit Venice each day).  The only cheaper lodging option is the Venice hostel but it only allows you to stay for a maximum of 3 nights.  The next cheapest is Domus Ciliota at €70/night (the price, however, goes up in June). It's already sold out for those dates (if it were available, it would be over $1000 for 10 nights, with the June rate increase). The housing will be in in dorm rooms on San Servolo from May 25 to June 7, not counting the nights of the conference itself; the conference runs from June 3-6.  You can find information about the island here:

http://www.sanservolo.provincia.venezia.it

In most cases, there will be three students together in one room, with a bathroom in the unit.  San Servolo is just a 10-minute vaporetto ride away from Piazza San Marco, the tourist heart of Venice.  

Note that the conference will run the first-come-first-served seminar format NAVSA ran successfully at Vanderbilt last year and will be running again in Wisconsin:

http://english.wisc.edu/navsa/?page_id=137

This means that, even if an individual does not get accepted in response to the general call, s/he will have the ability to join the conference and have his/her paper listed in the conference program.  Hopefully, that will be enough to secure funding from home institutions.

If you are interested in this workshop, please contact Dino Franco Felluga at:  felluga@purdue.edu

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

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).

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

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).

Registration Deadline Extended for the BAVS 2011 Conference (8/24/2011)

BAVS 2011 Conference: Composition and Decomposition

1-3 September 2011, University of Birmingham

To account for holiday times and Bank Holidays, registration for the BAVS 2011 Conference has been extended to Wednesday 24th August. The Conference website is here:
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edacs/departments/drama/events/bavs.aspx

There you'll find the Conference programme and Delegate Information (downloadable) with details of arrival arrangements, accommodation, travel, WiFi. We expect to be able to post Conference abstracts of all papers within the next few days. All this information will also be in your Conference packs.

For those delegates arriving on Wednesday, we are arranging an informal meeting on Wednesday evening – drinks and a meal (pay as you go) – at the Selly Soak, 556 Bristol Road, in Selly Oak, at 7pm on Wednesday 31st August.

A Google map of Conference locations (including the Selly Soak) is here:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=212294809852835789335.0004aa36166af9aef5daf&msa=0&ll=52.450308,-1.929646&spn=0.013234,0.036306

You can register via our online shop here:
https://www.bhamonlineshop.co.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&prodid=333&deptid=17&catid=3

Categories of registration:
Standard registration (at full or PG rate) with accommodation includes all meals from morning tea/coffee on Thursday to afternoon tea/coffee onSaturday, including the Friday night reception in the Muirhead Tower, plus accommodation (en suite, with breakfast) on Thursday and Friday nights. This registration includes the Conference dinner on Friday night.

Standard registration (at full or PG rate) without accommodation includes all meals from morning tea/coffee on Thursday to afternoon tea/coffee onSaturday, including the Friday night reception in the Muirhead Tower, but not campus accommodation. This registration includes the Conference dinner on Friday night.

Day registration at full or PG rate include morning & afternoon tea/coffee and lunch on the day/s of registration, including the Friday night reception in the Muirhead Tower, but NOT accommodation or evening meals. This registration does NOT include the Conference dinner on Friday night.

For delegates opting for the Day rate for Thursday and/or Friday, evening meals can be purchased separately by the registration deadline:
Dinner: Thursday night £15
Conference dinner: Friday night £35

All delegates must be financial members of BAVS. Registration for the 2011 BAVS Conference does not include membership of BAVS. To arrange membership subscription, please click on this link: http://www.bavsuk.org/membership.htm

We look forward to greeting delegates on Thursday, 1st September. The first event is a welcome for postgraduate students at 11:00, followed by Professor Tucker's opening keynote at 12 noon.

Update: BAVS 2011 Conference schedule and registration (9/1-3/2011)

The program and schedule for the BAVS 2011 Conference, hosted by the University of Birmingham, are now available for viewing and downloading from our Google Docs site.

We are very excited about this wide an interdisciplinary programme, in which we are hosting around 120 papers over three days at the University of Birmingham Business School, on our Edgbaston campus. We have also schedule special sessions at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts: http://www.barber.org.uk/ and the Cadbury Research Library, home of our Special Collections: http://www.special-coll.bham.ac.uk/index.shtml
 
Keynote speakers are:

• Professor Tracy Davis (Northwestern), “Amelia Chesson Enters the Fourth Estate: ‘She must, therefore, be considered a pioneer in lady journalism’”  http://www.communications.northwestern.edu/faculty/?PID=TracyDavis
• Professor Herbert Tucker, (Virginia), on  “Compost Happens: A Synthetic Analysis” http://www.engl.virginia.edu/faculty/tucker_herbert.shtml
• Dr Colin Cruise (Aberystwyth), on”'Arranging Meanings: Pre-Raphaelite Compositions and Narratives” http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/art/staff/coc/
• Professor Shearer West, and panel, “The Value of Victorian Studies” http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2011/110902.html

 
Overall Schedule: https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkfTzomljON2dDV6ajNmMFIyMmdiSjFMd0czaEZCSkE&hl=en_US

 
Panel schedule:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nB6XgldKTLTCvLSwfSzbJEbMh5mSc_RLSP2Q0wG85og/edit?hl=en_US

You can register for the Conference via our online shop at: http://bit.ly/oxnKHv

Registration Open: 2011 BAVS Conference, Composition and Decomposition (9/1-3/2011)

British Association for Victorian Studies

Annual Conference

Composition and Decomposition

University of Birmingham, 1-3 Sept. 2011

BAVS is pleased to announce registration for the 2011 BAVS conference, Composition and Decomposition, is now open.  Please follow this link for further information:
https://www.bhamonlineshop.co.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&prodid=333&deptid=17&catid=3

General Conference information can be found at: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edacs/departments/drama/events/bavs.aspx

If you have requests for specific types of accommodation or extending your stay, please contact Kate Newey directly at: k.newey@bham.ac.uk

2011 BAVS Conference: Postgraduate and Post-doctoral Bursaries (6/16/2011)

BAVS is pleased to announce the details for BAVS Postgraduate and Post-doctoral Conference Bursaries for the 2011 Conference:


BAVS offers up to 12 bursaries worth £150 each to help post-graduate students or post-doctoral scholars who are either UK-based or members of BAVS to meet the costs of attending the annual conference at the University of Birmingham in 2011. There are usually 2 bursaries for observers who will report on the conference for the BAVS newsletter, and around 10 bursaries for postgraduate or post-doctoral paper presenters whose papers have been accepted for the Conference.

Post-doctoral bursaries are available to those who have recently submitted doctoral theses, but do not hold an academic post. Observer’s bursaries are open to all postgraduate or post-doctoral students including those who are not giving a paper.

Application is via letter, brief CV of no more than 2 pages, and (for paper presenters) the title of your conference paper abstract. Applications are assessed by a panel that includes member(s) of the BAVS Executive Committee and member(s) of the conference organising committee.

If you want to be an observer, your letter of application should say what interests you about the conference and what makes you a suitable observer. If you want to apply as a paper presenter, your letter of application should explain how your paper relates to your research and to the conference theme, and why attendance at the conference will be of benefit to you. The criteria for selection are the relevance of your proposal to the conference theme, the originality of your ideas, the presentation of your argument, and the benefits likely from your attendance at the conference.

Bursary-holders will be expected to pay all registration and other fees for the conference in advance, and will receive their bursary cheques at the conference.

Applicants should send their applications electronically to the 2011 Conference organising committee at:  bavs2011@gmail.com

The deadline for applications is 16th June 2011.

Preference will be given to those who have not previously held a BAVS conference bursary. Applicants will be informed of the outcome of the competition by the end of June 2011.



BAVS: http://www.bavsuk.org/index.htm

Reminder: BAVS 2011 CFP "Composition and Decomposition" (3/31/2011; 9/1-3/2011)

Call for Papers: BAVS 2011, University of Birmingham

 Composition and Decomposition

The University of Birmingham will be hosting the 2011 BAVS Conference, 1–3 September  2011, on the Edgbaston campus.  We invite papers that deal with the conference theme of ‘Composition and Decomposition’ in all its various connotations.

This theme reflects Birmingham’s own nineteenth-century history as the ‘workshop the world.’  Birmingham is a city intimately connected with industry and manufacture.  However, one of its main exports in the nineteenth century was pens.  Our conference thus draws on the double of meaning of composition as both artistic practice and broader industrial process.  At a time when the country as a whole, and this city in particular, is reflecting upon the legacy of industrial decline, this conference also invites speakers to think about its inverse, decomposition.

We invite participants to engage with the theme widely and imaginatively.  Papers might be on the following:

●      Decadence, decay and degeneration

●      Formal composition or simply of what things are made

●      Putting things together, taking things apart

●      Waste and recycling; the return of discarded things.

●      Ingredients, inventories and other types of list

●      The role of composition in the practice of fine art, music, literature and drama.

●      Architecture and town planning

●      Scientific analysis and processes

●      The material culture of composition, whether draft manuscripts, laboratory equipment, or processes of manufacture

●      Industrialization, industrial processes, and industrial cultures

●      The importance of form and formal methodologies

●      Composition and the press; printing and print culture

●      The politics of deconstruction, whether as methodology or historical event (clearances, demolition etc.).

Please send proposals (500 words max) to bavs2011@googlemail.com no later than 31 March 2011.  Please direct any queries about the conference to the organizers at the above address.

Please note that the increasing popularity of BAVS as a conference where scholars of Victorian Studies share their research means that, unfortunately, not all offers of papers can be accepted.

The 2011 Conference hosts will select offers of papers according to the criteria of quality, engagement with the Conference theme, and with due regard to accepting papers from a spread of disciplinary areas, to support postgraduate research, and to fulfil BAVS’ commitment to interdisciplinarity.

Click here for more information: http://www.drama.bham.ac.uk/conferences/bavs/

CFP: BAVS conference on "Victorian Forms and Formations"

CFP: British Association for Victorian Studies 2010 Conference : ‘Victorian Forms and Formations,’ Sept. 2-4, 2010, U of Glasgow

The 2010 BAVS conference seeks to address the question of ‘form’, in all its varied meanings, in Victorian culture. We invite papers that address the topic of literary form, and that engage with current debates in the field over the return to form in literary criticism, but also wish to broaden the topic to encompass forms and formations in other disciplines, including but not limited to art history, science, architecture, politics, religion and history of the book. Papers might consider the role of different social and political groupings and institutions in the Victorian period, or the formation of a particular idea or discipline. They might deal with wide-ranging debates over varied attempts at reform in the nineteenth century, or could focus on the formation or reformation of the individual. Papers considering material forms, including the fashioning of the body in medical and other discourse, are welcome, as are papers on the physical features of the Victorian landscape: urban and rural spaces, natural forms and the built environment. We also invite papers that are concerned with the reworking of Victorian forms in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and culture.

Plenary speakers:

• James Eli Adams
• Matthew Campbell
• Margaret Macdonald
• Catherine Robson

A number of postgraduate bursaries will be available for postgraduate students presenting a paper at the conference or acting as a conference reporter. Please check this site in spring 2010 for details of how to apply.

Deadline for submission of abstract: 15 March 2010. Please send a 200-word abstract to bavs@arts.gla.ac.uk

Suggested topics for consideration:

Poetic form* Narrative form* Generic formation* Neoformalism* Political formations* Social reform* Educational reform* Scientific formations* Geological forms* Religious formations* Imperial formations* Urban forms* Architectural form* Sculptural form* Domestic design* Intellectual formations* Forms of publication* Bodily formations* Gendered forms* Forms of conduct* Forming identities* Moral forms*Neovictorian forms*

The full CFP is online here.