NAVSA 2013 Panel Proposal: "'With fog all around them': Obscurity of Form and Suffering in Victorian London" (2/26/2013; 10/23-27/2013)

Panel Proposal:

“With fog all around them”: 

Obscurity of Form and Suffering in Victorian London

NAVSA 2013, Pasadena, CA, October 23-27, 2013

Engaging the NAVSA 2013 conference theme of “Evidence,” this panel looks for proof of what remained invisible within the urban sphere. London, it is often noted, amplified the Victorian awareness of visuality – with its ocular inundation of advertisements, public spectacles, even glass windows and gas-lighting. But as Kate Flint and Lynda Nead have professed in their works on the visual imagination and the image-rich city, respectively, the fascination with visibility prompted a concomitant interest in (and anxiety over) that which remained shadowed and unseen.

This panel intends to accomplish two things. First, it will map the invisible territories of London still underexplored in Victorian criticism, searching out forms of urban suffering that were, for various reasons, out of reach of the gas-lamps' rays and beyond the grasp of sight. Second, it will bring to light how the obscurity of form prompted authors, artists, and commentators to play with formal elements and blur generic borders in their portrayals of urban strife. While keeping this dual intention in mind, papers might consider a wide range of topics linked with invisibility, such as the unconscious, physiology, spectrality, hidden women, mad men, the lower classes, prostitution, criminality, etc.

If your work falls along similar lines, please submit a 500 word abstract along with a one-page c.v. to Adam Watkins at aewatkin@purdue.edu and Laura Eidam at leidam@purdue.edu by February 26, 2013.

CFP: MLA 2014 Victorian Division panels on Victorian Informatics & Victorian Temporalities (3/1/2013; 1/9-12/2014)

MLA 2014, Chicago, 9-12 January 2014

The Victorian Division seeks abstracts for a panel on Victorian Informatics. 

What were the properties of information in the Victorian period? Was there a Victorian culture of information? How did Victorians, amass, manage, propagate information? How did ideologies and economies of information shape forms of cultural expression—and vice versa?

Topics might include:

• Producing, organizing, or circulating knowledge
• Information taxonomies and technologies
• Economies and ecologies of information 
• Narrating information
• The poetics or aesthetics of information
• Wanting facts—or having too much information

500-word abstracts and brief cvs to Richard Menke (rmenke@uga.edu) by 1 March 2013.

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The Victorian Division also seeks abstracts for a panel on Victorian Temporalities. 

What distinguished the experience of time in the period, or the Victorian temporal imagination? How did the Victorians make sense of simultaneity; of different time scales; of discontinuity or mistiming?

Topics might include:

• Instantaneity
• Lived time, realtime
• Geological time or deep time
• Duration
• Synchrony and asynchrony
• Intermittence
• Spending, saving, or wasting time

500-word abstracts and brief cvs to Richard Menke (rmenke@uga.edu) by 1 March 2013.

CFP: Neo-Victorianism and Tactility panel (1/2/2013; 7/19-20/2013)

Dr Duc Dau and Dr Caitlin McGuinness are seeking to organise a panel for the conference “The Victorian Tactile Imagination,” 19-20 July 2013, at Birkbeck, University of London. They are looking for two papers to complete our panel on Victorian reimagining and tactility. Abstracts that complement their paper on amputation, illustration and fairy tales in Jane Campion's film The Piano would be highly desirable. But they are also open to anything that sounds interesting. Papers could be about novels, films, theatre, poems, graphic novels, or steampunk, among other things. The conference CFP can be found below. Please send abstracts of 400 words and a brief biographical note to Duc Dau at duc.dau@uwa.edu.au and Caitlin McGuinness at caitlinfmcguinness33@gmail.com by Wednesday 2 January.  Preliminary inquiries would be most welcome. 

Call for Papers
The Victorian Tactile Imagination conference

Birkbeck, University of London, 19-20 July 2013

Keynote speakers:
Professor Gillian Beer (University of Cambridge); Professor William Cohen (University of Maryland); Professor Hilary Fraser (Birkbeck, University of London); Dr Constance Classen (author of The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch)

“You people who can see attach such an absurd importance to your eyes! I set my touch, my dear, against your eyes, as much the most trustworthy, and much the most intelligent sense of the two”. (Wilkie Collins, Poor Miss Finch, 1872)

This conference will explore the various ways in which the Victorians conceptualised, represented, experienced, performed and problematized touch. What does touch signal in nineteenth-century art and literature, and how is it variously coded? How are hands and skin – tactile appendages and surfaces – imagined in the period? By investigating the Victorian imaginary of touch, the conference will address and reappraise some of the key concepts and debates which have shaped Victorian studies in the past twenty years – in particular the emphasis on visuality as the dominant mode via which subjectivities and power were effected in the period: not least Jonathan Crary’s influential thesis that the nineteenth century witnessed a pervasive ‘separation of the senses’. The conference aims to investigate instead the workings of a more textured vision and reanimate the interoperability of sight and touch in nineteenth century culture.

The conference will also extend and build upon recent critical studies that have begun to explore nineteenth-century tactility in relation to material culture, bodies, and the emotions. By focusing closely on touch and tactility, it aims to establish whether and in what terms we might talk about a Victorian ‘aesthetics of touch’, and to explore how touch constructs and disrupts, for example, class and gender identities. It will also consider the historical trajectories of touch, asking, for example, in what ways does touch mark or blur the divide between Victorianism and Modernism?

Proposals of up to 400 words should be sent to Heather Tilley at victoriantactileimagination@ gmail.com by 10 January 2013. Please also attach a brief biographical note. Proposals for panels of three papers are also welcome, and should be accompanied by a brief (one-page) panel justification.

Possible topics might include:

• Tactile/haptic aesthetics (representations of hands and touching; art historical writing on the senses; perspectival theory; nineteenth century sculpture; arts and crafts)
• Rethinking “visual” media and technologies (photography; stereoscopy; cinema)
• Touch in the Museum (handling/viewing objects; curating; museum policy)
• Readers and writers (material cultures of the book; embodied readers and writers; the writer’s hand)
• Social history (domestic violence; hands and work; the gloved hand)
• Travel and place (the imperial touch; haptic geographies)
• The hand, skin and dermal structures in design theory and evolutionary science
• Medicine (blindness; physiology of touch; the medical touch; nerve theory and motor function; pain)
• Theories of mind and body (psychophysiology; cognitive psychology; phenomenology; psychoanalysis)
• The gender and sexual politics of touch, the queer touch (lesbianism, tender masculinities)
• Histories of touch (inheriting and disrupting eighteenth century models of touch; anticipating Modernist touch).

The conference is organised by Birkbeck, University of London’s Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, with support from the Newcastle Institute for the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities.

CFP: “We Are Not Amused”: Victorian Comedy and Humour (11/1/2012; 6/1-4/2013)

CFP for the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario's ACCUTE (Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English) member-organized panel:
“We Are Not Amused”: Victorian Comedy and Humour

Abstracts due: Nov 1, 2012
Conference date and location: June 1-4, University of Victoria, BC

Comedy is under-explored in Victorian literary criticism, but it is pervasive in the texts of the era, from brief moments—Dickens’ caricatures and Thackeray’s asides—to more extended treatments, in Lear’s nonsense verse and Jerome K. Jerome’s widely popular Three Men in a Boat.

This panel invites papers that explore comedy, humour and laughter in Victorian literature and cultural productions. What functions did comedy serve in Victorian texts? When is its humour riotous and anarchic, and when does it reinforce norms? How comfortably did comedy sit alongside the period’s idealization of moral and artistic solemnity? What effect does laughing at, or laughing with, texts and characters have upon our understanding of them? Why are the comic features of a scene or moment important?

Papers may consider such topics as:

• Parody, burlesque, farce and satire
• Ditties, jokes, word-play, wit and puns
• Black humour and the grotesque
• Clowning, the circus, and comic performance
• “Serious cheerfulness” and the mixing of wit and gravity
• Savoy Operas and the music hall
• Eminent Victorians and depictions of Victorian earnestness          
• Failed humour or humourlessness
• Caricatures and stereotypes
• Comedy as social critique or subversive force
• Sentimental humour
• The science and philosophy of Victorian laughter

ACCUTE requires the following of all proposed papers: 

• a 700-word proposal or completed paper (of approximately 8-10 double-spaced pages, not to exceed 20 minutes in presentation). Please note that because of our policy of blind vetting, ACCUTE cannot accept proposals or papers that include identifying marks. These include information in headers, references to your work or to your collaborations with others, your rank or institutional affiliation, or any other information that might identify you to a vettor.
• a completed Proposal Submissions Information Sheet, available from the ACCUTE website: http://www.accute.ca/generalcall.html
• a 100-word abstract of the proposed presentation
• a 50-word bio-bibliographical note on yourself

Email address for submissions: VSAOatACCUTE@gmail.com

CFP: Dickensian Character, NeMLA, (9/30/2012; 3/21-24/2013)

What Becomes a Legend Most: Dickensian Character

This 2013 NeMLA panel invites abstracts for papers exploring the power of Dickens to delineate character. A famous critical crux divided earlier  readers into those, like Chesterton, finding Dickensian characters archetypal and mythic, and those, like Lewes, finding them two-dimensional and mechanical. 15-minute papers wrestling with this crux by either by referencing Freudian psychoanalysis, Jungian myth-criticism, or other approaches are  welcome. Send 1-page abstracts towilliam.moeck@ncc.edu, along with institutional affiliation and contact info by 30 September 2012.  More about the 2013 Northeast Modern Language Association conference can be found at www.nemla.org

CFP: Nineteenth-Century Studies on the Move (9/6/2012; 3/7-9/2013)

34th Annual Conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association

Fresno, California

March 7-9, 2013

Panel: Nineteenth-Century Studies on the Move in the 21st Century

In recent years the field of public humanities has created new ways of building connections among scholars, arts and cultural heritage institutions (libraries, historic sites, archives, museums, etc.), and individuals who have a shared interest in preserving, creating knowledge about, and studying people or cultures.  Some are turning to social justice causes or environmental reform as an outgrowth of their scholarship, while others are collaborating with local museums or communities to educate and preserve the cultural institutions they write about in their work.  

This panel will look at the movement of our field out of the tower and onto the street, to address the intersection of scholarship and civic engagement.  Papers might consider any of the following:  How has public humanities moved interdisciplinary nineteenth-century studies in new directions?  How might nineteenth-century scholarship transform, reform, preserve, or better serve the world in which we live?  How might our collaborations with non-academic institutions and people help to reinvigorate the humanities and/or nineteenth century studies scholarship for the 21stcentury? 

Please submit 300 word abstracts for 20 minute papers and a short CV (2 pages) to Heidi Kaufman at kaufman@udel.edu no later than September 6, 2012.

NCSA: http://www.nineteenthcenturystudiesassociation.org/

CFP: Self-Adornment in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (9/30/2012; 3/21-24/2013)

Panel: “Self-Adornment in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel”

44th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

March 21-24, 2013

Boston, Massachusetts

Host Institution:  Tufts University

From the Eustace family diamonds, to Dorothea’s emeralds, accessories and objects of personal adornment litter the pages of the nineteenth-century British novel. This session investigates objects and practices of self-adornment, including jewelry, cosmetics, accessories, and clothes to contribute to our understanding of both canonical and less well-known works of fiction. This panel might include papers which situate objects and practices of self-adornment in relation to realist description, material culture, or feminist criticism; it also invites papers which consider the special role of self-adornment within specific genres such as the sensation novel, or silver fork fiction.   Abstracts of 500 words or less should be submitted to Danielle Barkley, danielle.barkley@mail.mcgill.ca.

Deadline:  September 30, 2012

Please include with your abstract:

Name and Affiliation

Email address

Postal address

Telephone number

A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

The 2013 NeMLA convention continues the Association's tradition of sharing innovative scholarship in an engaging and generative location. The 44th annual event will be held in historic Boston, Massachusetts, a city known for its national and maritime history, academic facilities and collections, vibrant art, theatre, and food scenes, and blend of architecture. The Convention, located centrally near Boston Commons and the Theatre District at the Hyatt Regency, will include keynote and guest speakers, literary readings, film screenings, tours and workshops.

Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however, panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable.  http://www.nemla.org/convention/2013/cfp.html

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

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.