Event: Birkbeck University "Steampunk: A Symposium" (11/30/2013)

Steampunk: A Symposium
The Guildhall Art Gallery

Birkbeck University
November 30, 2013
1:00-5:00pm

Steampunk is one of the more peculiar genres to mutate out of Neo-Victorianism. Although tethered to an aesthetic idea of the past, it has severed any link to authenticity, freely reinventing and repurposing Victorian technology and culture in order to imagine a counter-factual world of hybridity and playfulness. Ranging across media from film to fashion, literature to design, its identity is fluid but unmistakable. But do these impossible pasts and futures tell us something about our present reality?

Programme
1.00-1.15: Welcome

1.15-2.45: Panel discussion: Steampunk: remaking the past and the future
Jeanette Atkinson – ‘Top Hats, Corsets and Tea Duelling: the Well Mannered World of Steampunk’
Tony Venezia – ‘Science and Monsters:  A Guide to Steampunk Comics’
Anna Powell – ‘Mixing the Planes in Hellboy’

2.45-3.45: Viewing of the exhibition

3.45-4.15: Q&A with Steampunk artist Ian Crichton (aka Herr Döktor) and Guildhall curator Katty Pearce

4.15-4.45: Discussion of the exhibition

4.45: Closing remarks and thanks

This symposium is free to attend but please reserve a place using our online booking form found here:http://www.bbk.ac.uk/events-calendar/steampunk-a-symposium

There will be a concessionary £5 charge for entry to the Guildhall's exhibition on the day.

This event forms part of our Victoriana series, which includes an exhibition and film screenings - see full details here: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/news/victoriana-the-art-of-revival-exhibition-and-film-series

Registration Open: "Challenger Unbound" A One-day Symposium on Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger Narratives(12/9/13)

Institute of English Studies, Senate House, University of London

Course Description

A century has passed since the publication of Arthur Conan Doyle’sThe Lost World. This one-day symposium offers an ideal opportunity to take stock of the Professor Challenger narratives and to reassess what these three novels and two short stories can offer to new generations of scholars, students, and enthusiasts.

Introduction: Professor John Sutherland, Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern English Literature, University College London

Keynote Speakers: Professor Ian Duncan: Professor and Florence Green Bixby Chair in English, University of California Berkeley; Professor Michael Saler, Professor of History, University of California, Davis; Professor Jeremy Tambling, Professor of Literature, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester.

For more information visit the website. 

Lecture: 2nd Bran Stoker Birthday Lecture and Symposium (11/8/2013)

2^nd Bran Stoker Birthday Lecture and Symposium

Prof. Sir Christopher Frayling

Whitby Museum

November 8, 2013

The 2nd Bram Stoker Birthday Lecture and Symposium will take place at Whitby Museum on November 8, 2013 (11am – 5:45pm). PROF. SIR CHRISTOPHER FRAYLING will deliver the Bram Stoker Birthday Lecture, “Mr Stoker's Holiday in Whitby”, at 4:30pm. The Lecture will be preceded by papers from 11am by David Pybus, Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society, on Stoker and Victorian Whitby; Dr Martin Arnold (University of Hull) on Celts, Goths and the Old North; Dr Catherine Wynne (University of Hull) on Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde and Egyptomania. Professor Martin Goodman (Professor of Creative Writing, University of Hull) will read from the manuscript of his new vampire novel. The True book of the Vampires reveals aspects of ancient vampire lore hitherto unknown to humans. A lunch-time walk to St Mary's Churchyard will be included (optional).

Tickets (full day): £15 (half-day from 2.30pm): £10

To book a place, contact Dr Catherine Wynne (c.wynne@hull.ac.uk) by November 4, 2013.
Organized by Dr Catherine Wynne, Department of English, University of Hull, UK

Symposium: Damaging the Body "Body and Mind: Mesmerism in Nineteenth Century Culture and Literature" (10/17/2013)

Free symposium

Damaging the Body "Body and Mind: Mesmerism in Nineteenth Century Culture and Literature"

Barts Pathology Museum

Thursday 17th October 2013, 6-9 pm

This symposium will seek to explore the relationship between the sciences and Victorian mesmerism, psychical research and parapsychology. This event has been kindly sponsored by the British Society for Literature and Science.

Speakers:

• Prof. William Hughes (Bath Spa University) "'The Theatre of His Beastly Exhibitions': The Erotic Nature of Early Victorian Magnetism'"
• Andreas Sommer (UCL Centre for the History of Psychological Disciplines) 'Mesmerism, hypnotism and the formation of modern psychology in Germany'

This event is free but tickets will need to be booked in advance. Book online here.

The event will take place at St Bartholomew's Hospital, Pathology Museum and Gallery, 3rd Floor, Robin Brook Centre, West Smithfield, London, EC1A 7BE. Nearest tube: St Paul's 

Doors open at 6pm, when there will be a chance to view the exhibits in the museum. The event will run from 6.30 - 8.30pm

The Damaging the Body website can be found here: www.DamagingtheBody.org

Symposium: New Approaches to the Victorian Short Story (7/4/2013)

Symposium: “New Approaches to the Victorian Short Story”

Thursday, July 4, 2013

University of Birmingham

This symposium aims to address the lack of critical attention that the Victorian short story has received by bringing together academics working on different aspects of the form. Owing to the popularity of the periodical press, the genre flourished throughout the period; Dickens, Gaskell, Collins, Eliot and James as well as lesser-known authors all produced short stories. The limitations of the form allowed for a degree of experimentation, which may have been too much of a commercial risk in a full-length work. As John Bowen writes, “The short story is in many ways a marginal form, which often takes marginal or outlaw figures as its central concern. It troubles itself, and thus its readers, with remarkable or strange events, with the inexplicable, disorderly or queer.” We aim to start a critical conversation regarding the nature and functions of the short story genre within the larger context of Victorian literature.

For more details please see  ':http://jimmussell.com/2013_new_approaches_programme.pdf. For inquiries, contact Lizzie Ludlow (e.ludlow@bham.ac.uk) or Maddie Wood (madeleine.wood@brunel.ac.uk).

Symposium: Ruskin (7/13/2013)

No Wealth but Life: Why John Ruskin Matters Today

The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar Street, at Arch Street (Berkeley, CA)

Saturday, July 13, 2013, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (lunch included) with reception to follow.

Few have more powerfully criticized the impoverished notion of wealth embraced by the modern world than John Ruskin (1819-1900), yet his voice is curiously absent from today’s debates. Join us as we take a fresh look at Ruskin’s ideas and consider the ways in which his deep concern for true civilization, the well-being of the earth and humanity, and a life restored to its basis in real wealth, offers us both profound insight and hope for a more wholesome and happy future. Berkeley author Gray Brechin (UC Berkeley’s Living New Deal; author, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin), and Ruskin scholars James L. Spates (Guild of St. George; Professor of Sociology, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY) and Sara Atwood (Guild of St. George; author, Ruskin’s Educational Ideals).will speak about Ruskin’s lasting contribution to our understanding of modern civilization.

For more information or to purchase tickets: 

510-848-3277 

info@hillsideclub.org

CFP: “Contact and Connection”: Travel and Mobility Symposium (5/1/2013; 6/27/2013)

Thursday 27th June 2013, University of Warwick

Keynote speakers:

Dr Cathy Waters (University of Kent)

Professor Tim Youngs (Nottingham Trent University)

Submissions are invited for the first annual symposium of the University of Warwick Travel and Mobility Studies Research Network, on the theme of “Contact and Connection”.

The symposium aims to address the various connections and forms of contact produced through different forms and representations of travel practice. How does travel connect cultures? What new cultural formations are produced through the process of travel? What are the implications of connection across local, national and global mobile networks? How does travel connect people to the spaces around them and through which they move? What new theoretical connections are produced through the intersections of travel and mobility theory with other disciplines?

Proposals are welcome from researchers working across the arts, humanities and social sciences, including such subjects as travel literature (fiction and non-fiction), the visual arts, tourism studies, migration and migrants, commodity circulation, transnationality, philosophies of travel, and mobility theory in any historical period and within any global context.

Topics might include:

• Cultural connections forged through travel
• Contact zones in colonial contexts
• Intra-national and local networks of mobility
• Global networks and transnationality
• Connections within and between literature, visual arts, and other cultural modes
• Circulation of people, commodities, texts
• Connections between people and places
• Theoretical connections within travel studies
• Touristic connections with spaces of travel
• Meeting points and places of contact

Deadline extended: Please send abstracts of 300 words for a 15-20 minute paper or expressions of interest by 1st May 2013.

Email: Dr Charlotte Mathieson c.e.mathieson@warwick.ac.uk or Dr Tara Puri T.Puri@warwick.ac.uk

For more information on the Network visit http://go.warwick.ac.uk/travelstudies

CFP: Summer Shaw Symposium (5/1/2013; 7/26-28/2013)

The 10th Annual Summer Shaw Symposium on July 26-28, 2013, co-hosted with the International Shaw Society by the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, invites proposals for papers to be submitted to Professor Brad Kent at Brad.Kent@lit.ulaval.ca for 20-minute presentations. The ISS and the Shaw Festival also offer a combination Travel Grant/Bryden Scholarship for Emerging Scholars that provides free accommodation for the three days of the symposium, free registration, and some help with paying for travel. Most papers will probably be on the two Shaw plays offered at the Festival, Major Barbara and an adaptation of Geneva, or on comparisons of those two plays with other plays offered by the Festival (see www.shawfest.com), but other topics will be considered. Registration for the symposium includes tickets for the two plays. 

The deadline for submitting an abstract is May 1, 2013, and the same deadline applies to applications for the Grant/Scholarship. There is much more information at http://www.shawsociety.org/SummerSymposium-2013.htm. Send queries to Brad.Kent@lit.ulaval.ca and copy the ISS President Michael O'Hara at mohara@bsu.edu.

CFP: Literary London Symposium (11/15/2012; 12/15-17/2012)

We would like to invite you to attend the Literary London Symposium to be held at The Oxford and Cambridge Club in London during the dates of December 15 – December 17, 2012. 

The symposium will entertain papers written on subjects of literature, culture, arts, religion, capitalism and public education of the Dickensian Era through the Victorian Age. The Age of Dickens and the Age of Victoria were, combined, possibly the most dynamic century ever to exist in the English speaking world. It was in 1837 that Victoria assumed the crown and in that same year Dickens’ published the final installment of the serial publication of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. 

If you are interested in presenting a paper related to the Victorian Age or Charles Dickens, the abstracts are due by November 15, 2012 . You are invited to make a presentation and to provide a paper to our advisory council for possible inclusion in a special Literary London volume. 

The meeting will begin on Saturday afternoon at 1:30 pm at The Oxford and Cambridge Club and end on Monday at 5:30 pm that evening. Lunch will be provided on Sunday and Monday along with tea/coffee breaks. The conference will host a special ‘Dickens and Victorian Age’ tour of London on Sunday afternoon after lunch. The conference fee is 645 British Pounds. 

Participants in the meeting will have access to an array of academic, cultural and social resources including the Charles Dickens Museum and Westminster Abbey, where Charles Dickens is buried. It is also well worth exploring the streets, courts and alleys on either side of Fleet Street. Dickens' publishers' offices were in the area and he used it in many of his novels including Barnaby Rudge, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Martin Chuzzlewit, Pickwick Papers, The Tale of Two Cities and Our Mutual Friend. Fleet Street is one of London's ancient roads, linking the merchants of the City of London with King's palace at Westminster, and the area has many interesting “Dickensian” buildings, some dating back to the 12th century. 

Registration will close on November 15, 2012 . You can register on our web site at www.literarylondonsymposium.com If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know via email at administrator@literarylondonsymposi um.com 

Symposium: "Victorian Things: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Material Culture" (9/22/2012)

Victorian Things: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Material Culture   

Oxford Brookes University, Saturday 22 September 2012

This one-day symposium will reflect on, and respond to, the current materialist turn in Victorian Studies and Thing Theory. Nineteenth-century literature is crowded with objects, but traditional methods of interpretation have directed us to focus on characters and plots. Through three thematic sessions, ‘Desirable Things’, ‘Anatomical Things’ and ‘Objects and Memory’, this symposium aims to explore the story of objects as ‘things’ with specific values and meanings in Victorian culture. This exciting day of presentations and discussion will be concluded with a plenary lecture by Professor Isobel Armstrong: ‘“The Thing-Character of the World”: four artefacts in the nineteenth-century novel and four materialisms.’               

Delegate fee (including lunch and coffee): £15
Students and unwaged (including lunch and coffee): £10

For bookings and further information contact: Dr. Tatiana Kontou, Dr. Verity Hunt, Dr. Andrew Mangham or Verity Burke: victorianthings12@gmail.com

Schedule

10am-10.30am: Registration

10.30-11am: Welcome and Coffee with Tatiana Kontou, Verity Hunt and Andrew Mangham

11am-12.30: Panel 1: Desirable Things   

Erika Kvistad (University of York) 'Objects for Desire: Sex Toys in Villette'

Kara Tennant, University of Glamorgan 'Elegant Exotics: Fur, Feathers and Fashionable Femininity in Mid-Victorian Britain'

Tatiana Kontou (Oxford Brookes University) 'Paste Jewellery: Courtship in Florence Marryat's actress novels'

12.30-1.30: Lunch

1.30-3pm: Panel 2: Anatomical Things

Katherine Inglis (University of Edinburgh) ‘No sympathy for the revenant? The resuscitated body in Scott, Dickens and Eliot’

Andrew Mangham (University of Reading) 'Collateral Objects and the Science of Suicide: Rereading The Pickwick Papers'.

Verity Burke (University of Reading ) ‘“What have beauty and grace to do with Trials, Poisonings, Horrors?” The clue and the body in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady’

Helen Hauser (Independent Scholar) ‘Hand on my heart: The consequences of taking people apart and putting icons together’

3-3.30pm: Coffee

3.30-5pm: Panel 3: Objects and Memory

Adelene Buckland (University of East Anglia) 'James Tennant's mineral shop, 149 Strand'

Verity Hunt (University of Southampton) '"Please keep this for me": Memories and Souvenirs of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham'

 Martin Willis (University of Glamorgan) ‘A Solidified Fantasy of Things: Archaeologists and Travel Writers Memorialize Egypt’

5-6pm: Plenary Lecture

Isobel Armstrong (Birkbeck College, University of London) ‘“The Thing-Character of the World”: four artefacts in the 19thC Novel and four materialisms.’

Symposium: “Richard Marsh: Re-Reading the Fin de Siècle” (7/20/2012)

Richard Marsh: Re-Reading the Fin de Siècle

A one-day symposium at the University of Brighton, Friday 20th July 2012

Richard Marsh is best-known for his 1897 novel The Beetle, a gothic bestseller at the time more popular than Dracula. Indeed Marsh was a prolific and extremely successful writer in the 1890s and the early 20th century. Strikingly, however, his writing has until recently been mostly forgotten. With several of his novels and shorter fictions now being republished, this situation is set to change. The symposium seeks to harness renewed academic interest in Marsh towards a reappraisal of his significance for a fin de siècle culture that is often considered to offer a kind of mirror onto our own culture at the start of the 21st century. It will bring together literary and historical specialists of the period to examine Marsh's oeuvre as a whole. A central concern will be to examine how Marsh's ambivalent fiction often works against the grain of more canonical texts and therefore has the potential productively to unsettle what it is thought is known about fin de siècle culture. Understanding late-Victorian / Edwardian questions about gender and sexuality, imperialism, science and the nature of history, surely remain incomplete without negotiating the complex terrain of Richard Marsh's writing.

Further information, including the provisional programme and details of how to register, is now available here: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/study/humanities/news/richard-marsh-re-reading-the-fin-de-siecle-a-one-day-symposium

CFP: Moving Towards Science in the Long Nineteenth Century (7/30/2012; 9/12/2012)

‘Moving Towards Science in the Long Nineteenth Century’: 

Postgraduate Symposium

12 September 2012, 
The Literary and Philosophical Society, 
Newcastle upon Tyne.

Guest speakers:

Professor Jennifer Richards and Dr Anne Whitehead (Newcastle University), Professor David Knight (Durham University), and Dr Peter Garratt (Northumbria University)

The North East Postgraduate Research Group for the Long Nineteenth Century (NENC) invites proposals for a one-day postgraduate symposium held on Wednesday 12 September 2012.

The theme of the symposium reflects two parallel ‘moves’ towards science. First, it references the rise of the ‘natural sciences’, the scientific method, and the professional scientist across the long nineteenth century. Second, it recognises moves in contemporary arts and humanities scholarship towards a more nuanced disciplinary relationship with the sciences and the possibility of ‘one culture’.  Adopting an exploratory methodology, the day will allow postgraduate delegates to think widely about how literary culture of the period approached, adapted, and rejected emergent scientific, technological, and medical discourses and methods. More broadly, we will consider how and why literature and science might move together in the contemporary academy.

Ranging across the early modern period to the end of the long nineteenth century in their areas of specialisation, our guest speakers will consider in particular how they have approached or made use of scientific discourses in their own research. This will provide delegates with an opportunity to gain insight into some of the methodological and theoretical benefits and challenges of a turn towards science. Accordingly, we invite proposals from postgraduates for papers which broadly consider ‘moves’ towards science in the literature of the long nineteenth century, or in contemporary approaches to nineteenth-century literature.

Possible topics could include, but are not limited to:

• Defining science then and now: shifting linguistic terms
• Science in the public arena: the role of institutions in shaping relations between literature and science
• The popularisation of science through literary forms: prose, poetry, periodical, and pamphlet
• Reading in new ways: approaching the scientific text across disciplinary lines
• Specialisation and the figure of the professional scientist
• Evolution: approaches, responses, reactions
• Developing narratives: the Enlightenment, discovery, invention
• Science in literary forms and the literary form of science
• Medicine and the burgeoning medical industry
• Science at the margins: gender, class, race, and geography
• The collaboration of scientific and literary circles
• Science and anxiety: resistance to scientific ideas in literature
• The rise of psychology and theories of the mind
• Pseudoscience and quackery: authenticity, belief, demonstration, and revelation

Abstracts of 250 words for 20-minute papers should be submitted to movingtowardsscience@gmail.com by 30 July 2012.

The symposium is being generously supported by the British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS) and by the three host Universities (Newcastle, Durham, and Northumbria). The day will therefore be free to attend, and we are delighted to be able to offer a number of postgraduate travel bursaries.

Please indicate in your abstract if you would like to be considered for a bursary.

For more information please visit the NENC website: www.northeast19thcentury.org

Mixed Methods Approaches to Dickens and Characterization (5/10/2012)

Mixed Methods Approaches to Dickens and Characterization

A symposium at the interface of language and literature

May 10th 2012 – University of Nottingham

Registration Deadline:  20 April

This symposium will illustrate innovative approaches to both Dickens Studies and studies of characterization more generally. Scholars from both language and literature will present cutting-edge research that suggests a mixed methods approach to the study of characterization in literary texts and specifically the novels by Charles Dickens. The talks will address the concept of character in the framework of cognitive poetics, Dickens’s characters in the context of popular culture, corpus methods and the tool CLiC for literary texts, psycholinguistic methods to investigate the reading process and the psychological reality ofcharacters, Dickens and book history, and the reading experience in the 19th century.

Confirmed speakers

• Professor Juliet John, Professor in Victorian Literature, Royal Holloway University of London
• Professor Peter Stockwell, Professor of Literary Linguistics, University of Nottingham
• Professor Josephine Guy, Professor of Modern English Literature, University of Nottingham
• Dr. Kathy Conklin, Lecturer in Psycholinguistics, University of Nottingham
• Dr. Michaela Mahlberg, Associate Professor in English Language and Applied Linguistics, University of Nottingham
• Dr. Catherine Smith, Technical Officer, Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing, University of Birmingham
• Dr. Simon Preston, RCUK Research Fellow, School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Nottingham

Introduction to the Symposium by Professor Brean Hammond, Professor of Modern English Literature, University of Nottingham

Registration fee:

£20 (this covers lunch and coffee breaks)

£10 (for students)

To register, please download a registration form from the Symposium webpage: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cral/events/dickens-symposium.aspx. A detailed programme will be available at the webpage shortly. Registration Deadline: 20 April 2012.

Reminder: Dickens Symposium in Lowell, MA (3/31/2012; 7/13-15/2012)

Dickens Society Symposium

University of Massachusetts Lowell
July 13 – 15, 2012

As part of its Dickens in Lowell celebration, the University of Massachusetts Lowell will host one of the two 2012 Dickens Society Symposia being offered in this bicentennial year.  Scholars will present their work July 13–15, 2012 at the Tsongas Industrial History Center.

Hotel accommodations in downtown Lowell at the UMass Lowell Inn & Conference Center will provide easy access to a major exhibition at the National Park’s Boott Gallery, "Dickens and Massachusetts: A Tale of Power and Transformation." The exhibition will include several rare artifacts, including the 1842 portrait of Dickens by Boston painter Francis Alexander, the Daniel Maclise portrait of the Dickens children, and the Boston Line Type edition of *The Old Curiosity Shop* donated by Dickens to the Perkins School for the Blind in 1868.

The popular Dickens walking tour of Lowell (first offered at the Dickens and America conference in 2002) and an interactive workshop at the Tsongas Industrial History Center will also be featured offerings of the symposium. Evening events include participation in “Dickens and Steampunk” and other "Dickens in Lowell" community programming. For more information, see http://www.uml.edu/dickens.

Paper proposals on any aspect of Dickens and his works are invited. Final papers must be readable in twenty minutes. Please send one-page proposals by email, as an attachment, to Joel J. Brattin no later than March 31, 2012: jjb@wpi.edu.  Scholars at all stages of their careers are encouraged to submit proposals. Registration fee is $100 standard fee, $50 graduate students. The Dickens dinner is $25. Contact DickensinLowell@uml.edu for more information.  A downloadable registration form and symposium schedule information will be available soon on our website: http://www.uml.edu/dickens.

Announcement: The Partlow Prize may be awarded to one or two graduate students, independent scholars, or non-tenured faculty, in the amount of $300 to $500. Those who wish to be considered for the Partlow Prize should submit a cv and a proposal/synopsis of 500-1000 words. The Partlow Prize includes a monetary award, a waiver of the symposium registration fee, and the cost of the Dickens dinner. Dickens Quarterly has the right of first refusal for publication. The Secretary/Treasurer will inform the host(s) of the symposium of the sum available for support.

Reminder: Politics, Performance and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (3/16/2012; 4/19-20/2012)

Politics, Performance and Popular Culture in 
Nineteenth-Century England: A Research Symposium
University of Birmingham, Edgbaston Campus, 19-20 April 2012

As part of Birmingham/Lancaster's AHRC project on the Cultural History of Pantomime, we are hosting a research symposium on the theme of Politics, Performance and Popular Culture.

Panels of speakers have been arranged, but we welcome contributions to a roundtable panel in which speakers will talk briefly about how their research addresses key questions on the interrelationships between 'performance' (howsoever defined), politics, and popular culture. We would be especially interested in short position-papers which reflects on: performance 'space' (church, hustings, streets, courtroom, etc); use of theatrical metaphor; the performative language of politics; reference to politics in performances, the politics of performance (censorship, adaptation, etc); and politics as performance (protest, campaigning, etc). There will be plenty of opportunities to discuss research in question sessions and over extended refreshment breaks.

If you would like to share your research as a speaker, please get in touch by no later than Friday 16th March. Alternatively, please get in touch if you'd like to attend. Further information, including list of confirmed speakers, topics, and details of local accommodation can be found here: https://sites.google.com/site/victorianpantomime/2011-symposium_politics-and-performance

Costs: £35 (£20 p/g)

For further information, please contact Peter Yeandle (p.yeandle@lancaster.ac.uk).

Reminder: Celebrating Mr. Dickens (2/18/2012)

Celebrating Mr. Dickens

University of Delaware

February 18, 2012, 10:30am –  4:30pm

Join UD alumni and friends for a Saturday Symposium on February 18, 2012 in honor of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. The program will include faculty talks on Dickens and his world, a buffet lunch, a tour of two special exhibits on Dickens in the University Library and a performance of Dickens’s most celebrated public reading, “Sikes and Nancy” by Mic Matarrese from the Resident Ensemble Players.

Register today at http://www.udconnection.com/Events/2012/Feb/UD-Saturday-Symposium-Discussion

The cost is $50 per person, Registration for the first 25 students/staff is free (lunch not included), space is limited!

Produced by the Department of English along with generous support given by the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library. Exhibits of Dickens in the library are curated by Mark Samuels Lasner and Jaime Margalotti. 

Symposium: Celebrating Mr. Dickens (2/18/2012)

"Celebrating Mr. Dickens"
Saturday symposium, February 18, 2012
University of Delaware, Newark, DE

The University of Delaware will hold a special Saturday Symposium on Feb. 18 in honor of the 200th anniversary of the birth of novelist Charles Dickens.

The "Celebrating Mr. Dickens" program includes talks on Dickens and his world by faculty members, a tour of two exhibitions in the University of Delaware Library, and a performance of the author's most celebrated public reading, "Sikes and Nancy."

The Symposium will begin at 10:30a a.m. in Gore Hall, room 103, on the UD campus. Following coffee, participants will first hear Margaret D. Stetz, the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of Humanities, speak on "He wanted a wife and a family: Charles Dickens and Women."

The second speaker will be Thomas Leitch, Professor of English and Director of the Film Studies Program, who will speak on "Dickens, Dickens, and Adaptation."

Following the two morning sessions, a buffet lunch will be served.

Participants will then visit the University of Delaware Library to tour two exhibitions of rare books and Dickensiana: "Dickens at 200: 1812-2012," in the Special Collections Gallery, 2nd floor, Morris Library, on view January 24, 2012-June 8, 2012 and "Dickens and the Late Victorians," an exhibition in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, Morris Library 115A, on view January 24, 2012-March 1, 2012

The third talk of the day will be by Heidi Kaufman, Associate Professor of English and Jewish Studies, who will speak on "The Fagin Myth."

Following Professor Kaufman's talk and a break for coffee and tea, Iain Crawford, Acting Chair of English, will discuss Dickens's public readings and introduce a performance of "Sikes and Nancy" by Mic Matarrese, who is a member of UD's professional acting company, the Resident Ensemble Players (REP).

The cost is $50 per person, including lunch. Registration for the first 25 University of Delaware students or staff is free, with lunch not included. Space is limited.

To buy tickets, see the UD Connection Saturday Symposium website: http://www.udconnection.com/saturdaysymposium

The symposium has been made possible through the support of the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library.

CFP: 9th Annual Summer Shaw Symposium (5/1/2012; 7/27-29/2012)

The 9th Annual Summer Shaw Symposium, July 27-29, 2012

Deadline: May 1, 2012

Sponsored by The Academy of the Shaw Festival and the International Shaw Society, the 9th Annual Summer Shaw Symposium at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario will take place on July 27-28-29, 2012 at the Festival Theater, centered around the two Shaw plays in the 2012 repertory. For details about Bryden Scholarships/ISS travel grants, registration, accommodations, schedules, etc., please go to www.shawsociety.org/SummerSymposium-2012.htm. For the full repertory season, see www.shawfest.com.

Proposals for papers (of 20 minutes maximum and focused as much as possible on Bernard Shaw’s  Misalliance and/or The Millionairess, or on comparisons between them and other plays or between Shaw and other playwrights in the Festival repertory) should be sent to Dr. Brad Kent, preferably as an attachment to an email (to Brad.Kent@lit.ulaval.ca), or by mail to Professor Brad Kent, Département des littératures, Pavillon Charles De Koninck, bureau 3307, Université Laval, Québec, QC G1V 0A6, CANADA. Include a 300-500 word abstract and, if you’re new to him, a brief letter of introduction and a c.v.  Those applying for scholarships/grants should submit additional information (see website for a form and instructions). Deadline for both abstracts and scholarship/grant applications is May 1, 2012.

Mediums, Media, Mediation: Visual Culture & Haunted Modernities (3/26-27/2010)

The 2010 Mellon Symposium at Haverford College brings together scholars from the fields of art history, media studies, and literature to consider the terms “medium,” “media,” and “mediation” in nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture. Speakers will consider perceptions of modern media as haunted, the figure of the Spiritualist medium, and the centrality of mediation to modern theories of representation.

Speakers include Isobel Armstrong, David Peters Corbett, Jill Galvan, Tom Gunning, Dana Luciano, and Pamela Thurschwell.

The symposium is organized by Haverford’s 2008-10 Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow Rachel Oberter.

Haverford College is located in a suburb of Philadelphia, accessible by SEPTA Regional Rail and Amtrak.

This symposium is free and open to the public; registration is not required.

For a full schedule, speaker bios, and directions, see the symposium website: http://www.haverford.edu/hauntedmodernities.

For more information, please contact

James Weissinger
Associate Director
John B. Hurford ’60 Humanities Center
Haverford College
370 Lancaster Ave.
Haverford, PA 19041
Phone: 610-795-6518
Email: jweissin@haverford.edu