Seminar: Making of Modernity (3/21/2012)

The Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity at the University of Birmingham is pleased to announce the first seminar in its new series, The Making of Modernity.  

The speakers are:

• Sue Currell (University of Sussex): Painting the Town Red:  New Masses Magazine and Communist Partying in the 1930s.
• Clare Pettitt and Mark Turner (King’s College, University of London): The Distance of Print: Global Networks in the Nineteenth Century

The seminar will be held on the Edgbaston Campus, 21 March 2012, 4-6pm, in Arts 103.

Full details are available on the Centre’s website here:
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/culturalmodernity 

You can download the poster here: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-artslaw/culturalmodernity/march-symposium.pdf

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

This year’s conference follows the theme, “Victorian Networks,” and will feature keynotes by Amanda Anderson, Adam Phillips, and a visual networks panel with Caroline Arscott, Tim Barringer, Julie Codell, and Mary Roberts.   Seminars will be run by Kate Flint, Jules Law, Tanya Agathocleous, Elizabeth Helsinger, Linda K. Hughes and Mark Turner, Jason Rudy, Kate Thomas, and Jill Galvan.  

You can find more information, including the CFP, here: http://english.wisc.edu/navsa/

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

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)

CFP: NAVSA 2012 Victorian Networks (3/1/2012; 9/27-30/2012)

The North American Victorian Studies Association Conference for 2012, in Madison, Wisconsin, September 27-30, invites papers on the theme of networks. NAVSA itself is a network, a hub of activity that fosters connections among scholars, among disciplines, and among institutions. We invite conferees to attend a networking lunch, where they can cross paths with others interested in shared themes, such as transatlanticism, visual culture, or serialization; and we aim to provide ample and rich opportunities for contact across specializations and new approaches including digital 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. More information to follow.

Proposals for individual papers or panels should be submitted electronically by March 1, 2012. Proposals for individual papers should be no more than 500 words; panel proposals should include 500-word abstracts for each paper and a 250-word panel description. Applicants should submit a one-page cv. All documents should be submitted in .pdf format through the online form linked to the conference website.

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 (transportation systems, postal or other communication systems like telephone, telegraph, cable)
• 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, series, periodicals, epistolary or other genres
• Psychic and supernatural networks: seances, spiritualism, mediums
• Digital networks: twenty-first century reading practices, or Victorian culture and Facebook, Twitterature, Wikipedia
• Networked periodization: romantic/victorian/modernist
• Networks of resistance: feminist, ecological, queer
• Networks of iteration and translation (between image, text, adaptation)

CFP: Neo-Victorian Networks: Epistemologies, Aesthetics and Ethics (2/1/2012; 6/13-15/2012)

Neo-Victorian Networks: Epistemologies, Aesthetics and Ethics
University of Amsterdam
June 13-15, 2012

This conference seeks to assess the state of contemporary neo-Victorian literature, film, television and other media, with papers offering new readings of neo-Victorian texts. The conference also seeks to interrogate the critical field surrounding the notion of the neo-Victorian by asking how we, as scholars, understand this genre and its allied politics. Does the current cultural interest in the “new Victorian” imply a resistance to post-modernism, post-structuralism or post-humanism? Or, can neo-Victorianism help us interrogate these terms? How does our post-Victorian landscape accommodate and manipulate the neo-Victorian urge?

We encourage papers that question the ethics, aims and cultural implications of neo-Victorian trends, and which attempt to understand this genre in light of our own political climate and our scholarly resistance to the liberal humanist subject. We also hope to receive papers that playfully link the Victorian and the contemporary, as in Joy De Lyria and Sean Michael Robinson’s reimaging of The Wire as a Victorian serial or Anna Maria Jones’ connections between the workings of the Victorian sensation novel and contemporary Victorian scholarship. Submissions from graduate students are welcomed.

Keynote Speakers:
Christine Ferguson (University of Glasgow)
Mark Llewellyn (University of Strathclyde)

Please send 250 word abstracts, together with a 100 word biographical note, to Joyce Goggin (J.Goggin@uva.nl) and Tara MacDonald (T.C.MacDonald@uva.nl) by February 1, 2012.

Organizing Committee: Joyce Goggin (University of Amsterdam), Tara MacDonald (University of Amsterdam), Monika Pietrzak-Franger (University of Siegen), Eckart Voigts-Virchow (University of Siegen), and Antonija Primorac (University of Split)