CFP: The "Exotic" Body in 19th-century British Drama (5/25/2014; 9/25-26/2014)

The ‘Exotic’ Body in 19th-century British Drama

University of Oxford

Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford

Funded under the 2011 Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowships scheme, European Commission

September 25-26, 2014

Deadline: May 25, 2014

Convenor: Dr Tiziana Morosetti (Oxford)

Confirmed speakers:

Professor Ross Forman (Warwick), Dr Peter Yeandle (Manchester),

Dr Hazel Waters (Institute of Race Relations, London)

Increasing attention has been paid in recent years to the representation of the Other on the 19^th-century British stage, with key studies such as Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790-1930 (Bratton et al. 1991), The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Ziter 2003), Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Brooks 2006), Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representation of Slavery and the Black Character (Waters 2007), Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter (Gould 2011), China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Forman 2013). Building on these, the conference aims at exploring the concept, politics, and aesthetic features of the ‘exotic’ body on stage, be it the actual body of the actor/actress as s/he performs in genres such as the ‘Oriental’ extravaganza, or the fictional, ‘picturesque’ bodies they bring on stage. A term that in itself needs interrogation, the ‘exotic’ will therefore be discussed addressing the visual features that characterize the construction and representation of the Other in 19^th-century British drama, as well as the material conditions, and techniques that accompany the ‘exotic’ on stage on the cultural and political background of imperial Britain.

One of the dissemination activities for the two-year project ‘The Representation of the “Exotic” Body in 19th-century English Drama’ (REBED), funded under the 2011 Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowships scheme, the conference also hopes to function as a site for discussing the state of the art on the ‘exotic’ in the theatrical cultures of both Romantic and Victorian Britain; contributions on ongoing research and/or recently completed projects are therefore particularly encouraged.

Although attention will be paid mostly to the non-European Other, papers addressing a European ‘exotic’ are also welcome. Topics include the following: 

Definitions of ‘exotic’:

• Is the non-European Other on stage really ‘exotic’?
• Are any genres more ‘exotic’ (or more liable to convey ‘exotic’ stereotypes) than others?
• Do different dramatis personæ and/or settings convey different degrees of ‘otherness’?
• Can the British on stage be ‘exotic’, and, if so, to what extent?
• Is the spectacular on stage itself ‘exotic’?

Staging the ‘exotic’ body:

• How are costumes, make-up, scenery, movements employed to construct the ‘exotic’?
• Are any visual features more recurrent than others?
• To what extent is the visual representation of the ‘exotic’ body historically accurate?
• How does music contribute to the staging of the Other?
• Who embodies the ‘exotic’? Is the acting career informed by bringing the Other on stage?
• Who were the audiences? Did their composition have an impact on the performance of the ‘exotic’?
• Are any experiences abroad relevant to how managers staged the Other in Britain?
• In what ways were representations of the ‘exotic’ body informed by venues?
• The Other on the London stage and the provinces

Cultural and political backgrounds:

• To what extent did audiences’ expectations affect theatrical representations of the Other?
• In what ways do class, gender, race inform the acting and managing of ‘exotic’ pieces?
• To what extent did scientific and anthropological accounts inform theatrical portraits of the Other?
• Were illustrations of (European and/or) non-European countries informed by theatre?
• In what ways have political narratives influenced (or been influenced by) the ‘exotic’ on stage?
• Has the legal frame for the theatre influenced the staging of the Other?
• Visual points of contact between popular entertainment and theatrical representations of the Other

The travelling ‘exotic’:

• How do texts such as Arabian Nights, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Mazeppa ‘travel’ between dramatic and non-dramatic genres?
• Survival of a Romantic ‘exotic’ in the Victorian staging of the Other;
• Is Othello on the Romantic and Victorian stage ‘exotic’?
• How do translations/adaptations from other languages contribute to the construction of the Other on the British stage? Can we define a British specificity when it comes to the ‘exotic’?
• Has the theatrical representation of the ‘exotic’ in Britain had an impact on non-British stages?

The legacy of 19^th-century ‘exotic’ body:

• Contemporary plays/performances addressing the Other on the 19^th-century British stage (e.g. Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet)
• The ‘exotic’ body on the British stage in a diachronic perspective
• The non-European Other in the 20^th- and 21^st-century Christmas pantomime

Abstracts of no more than 300 words and a short bio should be sent to rebedconference@gmail.com by May 25, 2014. Speakers whose abstracts have been accepted will be notified by June 15.

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

Applications Open for Postdoctoral Research Positions (3 posts)

Literature and Science at Oxford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CFP: Romanticism at the Fin de Siècle (1/15/2013; 6/14-15/2013)

Romanticism at the Fin de Siècle

an international conference on collecting, editing, performing,

producing, reading, and reviving Romanticism at the Fin de Siècle

Trinity College Oxford, 14-15 June 2013

Keynote Speaker: Professor Joseph Bristow (UCLA)

Call For Papers:

This conference places Romanticism at the core of the British Fin de Siècle. As an anti-Victorian movement, the British Fin de Siècle is often read forwards and absorbed into a ‘long twentieth century’, in which it takes the shape of a prehistory or an embryonic form of modernism. By contrast, Fin-de-Siècle authors and critics looked back to the past in order to invent their present and imagine their future. Just at the time when the concept of ‘Victorian’ crystallized a distinct set of literary and cultural practices, the radical break with the immediate past found in Romanticism an alternative poetics and politics of the present.

The Fin de Siècle played a distinctive and crucial role in the reception of Romanticism. Romanticism emerged as a category, a dialogue of forms, a movement, a style, and a body of cultural practices. The Fin de Siècle established the texts of major authors such as Blake and Shelley, invented a Romantic canon in a wider European and comparative context, but also engaged in subversive reading practices and other forms of underground reception.

The aim of this conference is to foster a dialogue between experts of the two periods. We welcome proposals for papers on all aspects of Fin-de-Siècle Romanticism, especially with a cross-disciplinary or comparative focus. Topics might include:

• bibliophilia and bibliomania
• collecting
• cults
• editing
• objects
• performance
• poetics
• politics
• print culture
• sociability
• continuities and discontinuities
• Romanticism and Decadence
• Romantic Classicism
• European Romanticism and the English Fin de Siècle

Deadline for abstracts: 15 January 2013

Please email 300-word abstracts to romanticfin@bbk.ac.uk

Conference organisers: Luisa Calè (Birkbeck) and Stefano Evangelista (Oxford)

This conference is co-organised by the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and the English Faculty of Oxford University with the support of the MHRA.

CFP: Navigating Networks: Women, Travel, and Female Communities (4/1/2013; 10/4/2013)

In the field of travel studies, the past two decades have witnessed an ever-growing interest in women’s travel writing. One aim of scholars has been to counter stereotypical assumptions about travel and travel writing being a principally masculine enterprise, emphasising instead that the perception of the gendering of travel is to a large extent a misconception, an ideological construct that assumes the notion of gendered separate spheres. This day-­long conference seeks to move beyond the already established fact that women travelled far more than the patriarchal ideology of separate spheres would suggest. It aims to delve further into the rich topic of women’s travel and travel writing practices by examining the ways in which women navigated female networks and created communities with one another, both through their travels and travel writing. In doing so, it will draw upon the notion of travel as a means of building networks and fostering connections with others. Through an examination of various female travel networks, this conference seeks to explore further the significance of women’s travel throughout the ages, including the opportunities for communication it fostered and the unique privileges that it cultivated.

We invite papers that address the topic of women’s travel networks in any historical period. We welcome discussion on any of the following: nonfictional or literary accounts; diaries; letters; articles; films; documentaries; photographs; and paintings.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

The Act of Travel

• women travelling in groups, independently of men (‘unprotected’ female travellers, spinsters abroad)
• access to exclusively female spaces abroad (harems, baths, spas, circles of gossip)
• development of alliances between the female traveller and the female local
• issues of ‘othering’ – do women have an imperial agenda or do they sympathise with foreign women?
• bonds of sisterhood, friendship, and partnerships
• communities of female expats; salons and social scenes abroad
• feminine self-­fashioning: creation of female travel identities abroad
• negative associations with female travel networks: women’s aversion to being lumped together with other female travellers; their desire to break free from collective identities and stereotypes

Recording Travels

• female literary communities developed through the practice of travel and writing
• female travel writers’ engagement with one another’s texts
• female reception to travel texts
• modern travel blogs
• travelogues, advice books, or periodical pieces aimed at female readers/ travellers
• similar stylistic characteristics of women’s travel writing
• shared attitudes, interests, and goals in women’s travel writing

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words (for papers of 20 minutes) to Hannah Sikstrom and Kimberly Marsh at <travelculturesseminar@gmail.com> by 1 April 2013.

Travel Cultures is an interdisciplinary seminar series at the University of Oxford for anyone with an interest in inter-­cultural communication, exploration, and travel writing.

Steampunk Exhibit

Lisa Hager forwards a link to the site devoted to an upcoming Steampunk exhibit at Oxford's The Museum of the History of Science.

You'll need to scroll a bit, but there are some fascinating images here.


(Steampunk aficionados might be interested in this interview I did with Ann and Jeff VanderMeer about their recent anthology.)