CFP: Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century (3/25, 5/13/2011)

Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century

A one-day conference on Friday 13th May 2011

Birmingham, UK

"The place where optimism flourishes most is the lunatic asylum" - Havelock Ellis

This interdisciplinary conference will address a range of issues concerning the perception of insanity and madness in the nineteenth century, its manifestations and treatments, and the patients themselves. The conference will take place on Friday 13th May, 2011, in the chapel of the Birmingham Lunatic Asylum, an impressive building used to restrain and treat patients from 1862 until 1964.

We invite papers on a range of subjects related to this theme. Please submit an abstract of 350 words to serena.trowbridge@bcu.ac.uk by 25th March, 2011. Subjects covered might include:

• The life of patients in lunatic asylums
• The literary treatment of madness and lunatic asylums
• Early psychiatry in the asylum
• The architecture and physical space of the lunatic asylum
• Artists and writers and insanity
• Poetry and madness
• Insanity and/or the asylum in the nineteenth-century novel

CFP: Pre-Raphaelite Audiences: Artists, Critics, Readers - William Morris Society Session at the MLA Convention (3/15/2011, 1/5-8/2012)

Call for Papers MLA 2012:
Pre-Raphaelite Audiences: Artists, Critics, Readers
5-8 January 2012

Seattle, WA

Papers are sought for a proposed session at the Modern Language Association 2012 annual convention on "Pre-Raphaelite Audiences: Artists, Critics, Readers," co-sponsored by the William Morris Society in the United States and SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Readers and Publishing). Abstracts or proposals (250 words maximum) should be sent by 15 March to Florence Boos atflorence-boos@uiowa.edu and Gregory Barnhisel atbarnhiselg@duq.edu.

For more information about the William Morris Society visit www.morrissociety.org.

CFP: The Monster Inside Us, The Monsters Around Us: Monstrosity and Humanity (6/1, 11/18-20/2011)

The Monster Inside Us, The Monsters Around Us: Monstrosity and Humanity

A three-day conference, 18, 19, 20 November 2011

De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

Keynote Speakers:

• David Punter, University of Bristol
• Andy Mousley, De Montfort University, Leicester

The Oxford English Dictionary locates the origin of the word "monster" in the 12th-century Old French word mostre, meaning a prodigy or marvel, originally used to denote a mythical being, half-human, half-animal. From the 13th century the term was used derogatorily to indicate something other than "normality": something large, gross, malformed or abnormal. The monstrous now created fear and loathing rather than awe, and was not limited to physicality, but included difference through race, culture, society, ideology, psychology, and many other Others.

The fear raised by Otherness is not produced through the presentation of something entirely alien, but by the recognition of ourselves within the Other. In his Introduction to Cogito and the Unconscious Slavoj Žižek argues that the Cartesian Subject has at its heart the monster which emerges when deprived of the "wealth of self-experience." At the heart of the human is the monster; at the heart of the monster is the human. The instability of the individual subject and the ease by which the ever-changing border between "human" and "monster" is transgressed has long been debated in literature; Frankenstein makes a monster by trying to perfect the human, while both nineteenth-century Flora Bannerman, in Varney the Vampire, and twenty-first-century Sookie Stackhouse recognise the human origins of the vampire.

This conference seeks to understand the relationship between the human and the monstrous across the centuries and across disciplines. In what ways and to what ends have the human and the monster been defined and polarized? How has the monster been subdued, and with what success? How do definitions and separations of the human and the monstrous change and through what pressures and motivations? How does the emerging field of posthumanism enable us to conceptualize the monstrous in relation to the human and humanism?

Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers which may address, but are not limited to:

• Monstrosity in the humanities
• The monster and criminality
• Psychology and the monster
• Monstrosity and the internet
• The human and the monster in the post-national world
• Monstrosity and miscegenation
• Liminality and transgression
• Theories of monstrosity and/or the human
• Historical monsters
• Humanism, the post-human, and monstrosity

Please send abstracts of 300 words to Dr Deborah Mutch, Department of English, Clephan Building, De Montfort University, Leicester, LE1 9BH, email: dmutch@dmu.ac.uk

Conference Fee: £30 / £15 post-graduate/unwaged including lunch and refreshments

Deadline for abstracts: 1 June 2011

Click here for the conference website.

CFP: Fin-de-Siècle Pedagogies - Special Session of the MLA Convention (3/10/2011, 1/5-8/2012)

Fin-de-Siècle Pedagogies

Special Session: the MLA Convention

Seattle, WA

January 5-8, 2012

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Disseminating sexual “knowledge”
• Lecture tours
• Public health education
• Schools & universities
• Homoeroticism & pedagogy
• Education & the New Woman
• Teaching the fin de siècle today

Not limited to Anglophone literature and culture. Send an abstract of 300 words and C.V. by March 10, 2011 to Helena Gurfinkel (hgurfin@siue.edu ). This special session is subject to approval by the MLA. Panelists must be MLA members by 7 April 2011.

CFP: "Performing Philanthropy" - Panel Proposal for NAVSA 2011 (2/15, 11/3-6/2011)

Call for Papers
NAVSA 2011

Panel Proposal: Performing Philanthropy

When Charles Dickens first satisfied his longing to be on the stage, he made sure to appear in benefit performances. As long as he was raising funds for charity, even the stage was respectable. When the Anti-corn Law League wanted to fill its waning coffers and boost its public image, it opted to stage a fund-raising bazaar. The event filled London's Covent Garden Theater to capacity for over two weeks during the 1845 London season, the fair-goers flocking to see the entire theater transformed to look like a Gothic hall, filled with every variety of manufactured goods and ladies' work for sale. Philanthropic work invited play and performance, a fact about which the Victorians were quite frank. Benefit performances were often listed in the entertainment sections of newspapers. Organizers solicited patrons who would attract a large crowd and lecturers who could elicit tears and coins for the most unfortunate.

Given the variety of fund-raising methods employed, the vast number of causes espoused, and the plethora of ideologies and motivations claimed, Victorian philanthropy defies simple classifications. With the rise of institutional giving, philanthropy became a primary means of mediating class relations and thus a widespread social practice and a pervasive literary theme. How did novels and related forms of social investigation-slum surveys, works of political economy, and moral commentaries-figure the performative, ritualistic aspects of philanthropy? What aspects of play were involved in these seemingly staunch and serious rituals?

We propose a panel on Performing Philanthropy for the 2011 NAVSA conference. We invite paper proposals of 500 words dealing with issues pertaining to the play and performance involved in Victorian philanthropy and charity work. Please submit proposals, along with one-page c.v.'s, by February 15th to Frank Christianson (frank_christianson@byu.edu) or Leslee Thorne-Murphy (lesleetm@byu.edu).

Possible topics:

• Performing poverty and/or benevolence
• Philanthropy as social classification: modes of discrimination, the "deserving poor," detecting pauperism.
• Social surveys as ethnographic tourism-slumming, the philanthropic gaze, the aesthetics of street life
• The rhetoric of altruism: public morality vs. private charity
• Performing gender through philanthropy
• Philanthropic imperialism: charity work and colonial allegiance
• Negotiating class identity through philanthropic work
• Philanthropy as social ritual
• Fictional philanthropy as entertainment/Authorship as philanthropy
• Mass mediated philanthropy and popular culture/visual culture/photography

CFP: "Digital Play and Deformance; or, Screwing Around with Victorian Literature" - Panel Proposal for NAVSA 2011 (2/21, 11/3-6/2011)

A panel proposal for NAVSA 2011, “Performance and Play”
Vanderbilt University, November 3-6, 2011
http://vanderbilt.edu/navsa

Digital Play and Deformance; or, Screwing Around with Victorian Literature

Is Victorian studies “ready to accept surfing and stumbling—screwing around, broadly understood—as a research methodology”? In “The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around,” Stephen Ramsay proposes a seriously playful attitude to the challenges and opportunities posed by super-abundant digitized resources, computing tools, and networked scholarly communication. Ramsay’s “screwmeneutical imperative” updates for the digital humanities what Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels proposed in “Deformance and Interpretation,” moving modes of inquiry “beyond conceptual analysis into the kinds of knowledge involved in performative operations.” This panel invites theoretical and practical perspectives on performative, deformative, or “screwmeneutical” approaches to Victorian studies, particularly those involved with computing and digital media.

Submit proposals of no more than 500 words and a very brief statement of relevant experience (or a one-page CV) by February 21, 2011 to pfyfe@fsu.edu. Please note that, regardless of panel acceptance, all abstracts will be considered for the conference by the organizers.
--
Paul Fyfe
Assistant Professor
English, History of Text Technologies
Florida State University
http://hott.fsu.edu

CFP: 2011 North American Conference on British Studies (3/15, 11/18-20/2011)

North American Conference on British Studies

ANNUAL MEETING

DENVER, COLORADO

NOVEMBER 18-20, 2011

The NACBS and its Western affiliate, the Western Conference on British Studies, seek participation by scholars in all areas of British Studies for the 2011 meeting. We will convene in Denver, Colorado, from November 18-20. We solicit proposals for panels on Britain, the British Empire, and the British world. Our interests range from the medieval to the modern. We welcome participation by scholars across the humanities and social sciences.

We invite panel proposals addressing selected themes, methodology, and pedagogy, as well as roundtable discussions of topical and thematic interest, including conversations among authors of recent books and reflections on landmark scholarship. North American scholars, international scholars, and Ph.D. students are all encouraged to submit proposals for consideration. Strong preference will be given to complete panel or roundtable proposals that consider a common theme. Panels typically include three papers and a comment; roundtables customarily have four presentations. Individual paper proposals will also be considered in rare cases. We urge those with single paper submissions to search for additional panelists on lists such as H-Albion or at venues such as the NACBS Facebook page. Applicants may also write to the Program Chair for suggestions (nacbsprogram@gmail.com).

All scholars working in the field of British Studies are encouraged to apply for the 2011 conference, though we particularly welcome submissions from those who did not appear on the 2010 program. Panels that include both emerging and established scholars are especially encouraged, as are submissions with broad chronological focus and interdisciplinary breadth. We welcome the participation of junior scholars and Ph.D. candidates beyond the qualifying stage. To enable intellectual interchange, we ask applicants to compose panels that feature participation from a range of institutions. No participant will be permitted to take part in more than one session and no more than one proposal will be considered from each applicant.

Submissions will be taken at www.nacbs.org/conferences.html through March 15, 2011.

If you have questions about the submission process or suggestions for program development, please contact

Lara Kriegel

NACBS Program Chair

Associate Professor of History and English

Indiana University, Bloomington

nacbsprogram@gmail.com

CFP: Manipulation: Victorian Variations on Hands, Handling, and Underhanded Behaviour (1/28, 4/30/2011)

Victorian Studies Association of Ontario 44th Annual Conference

MANIPULATION: VICTORIAN VARIATIONS ON HANDS, HANDLING, AND UNDERHANDED BEHAVIOUR

30 April 2011

Glendon Campus, York University

We are seeking papers that explore Victorian variations on manipulation, hands, and handling. In what ways did manipulation resonate in the Victorian period? In what ways did hands resonate in the Victorian period? Papers may focus on any of the following topics on their own or in combination:

• Literal hands (working, drawing, writing, growing things, playing music)
• Tricks of the hand (magic, shadow theatre)
• Handicrafts (arts and crafts, textiles, pottery)
• The etiquette of the hand (handshakes, greetings, gloves, rings)
• Hidden hands (masturbation, strangulation, prosthetics, "the dead hand")
• Gendered hands (fighting, being brought up by hand)
• Reading the hand (fortune telling, class, signing)
• Manipulating hands ("by another's hand," "having a hand in," "bad hands")
• Economics and the hand (industrialization and hands," work by hand, injuries to the hand)
• Handwriting (forgery, deceit, shorthand); etc.

We welcome papers on any dimension of the hand, handling and/or manipulation in the Victorian period.

The VSAO (Victorian Studies Association of Ontario) will hold its 44th annual conference at the beautiful Glendon Campus of York University, Toronto on 30 April 2011. This one-day event includes a morning panel of three speakers, followed by lunch, the VSAO business meeting, and two plenary speakers in the afternoon. Plenary Speakers are James Eli Adams (Columbia University), "The Dead Hand: George Eliot and the Uses of Inheritance," and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (Ryerson University), "The Dyer's Hand and What it Works in: Laurence Housman and the Book Arts."

In keeping with this year's theme, Manipulation: Victorian Variations on Hands, Handling, and Underhanded Behaviour, the VSAO executive invites abstracts for papers to be presented at our morning panel. Please send electronic copies of proposals (300-500 words) and a brief biographical statement to Barbara Leckie (barbara_leckie@carleton.ca) by 28 January 2011. Alternatively, hard copies can be sent by mail to Barbara Leckie / Department of English / Carleton University / 1125 Colonel By Drive / Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6.

Click here for more information.

CFP: Bram Stoker Centenary Conference: Bram Stoker and Gothic Transformations (5/1/2011, 4/12-14/2012)

Bram Stoker and Gothic Transformations

12-14 April 2012

University of Hull, Hull Campus

and Whitby, North Yorkshire, UK

— “My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side.” (Dracula, 1897)

Count Dracula’s declaration from Bram Stoker’s iconic 1897 vampire novel is, in many ways, descriptive of the Gothic genre. Like the shape-shifting Transylvanian Count, the Gothic encompasses and has manifested itself in many forms since its emergence in 1764 with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Its revenge has just begun. It has spread over centuries and time is on its side.

When Stoker wrote Dracula the genre was well over a hundred years old but the novel marks a key moment in the evolution of the Gothic – the text harks back to early Gothic’s preoccupation with the supernatural, decayed aristocracy and incarceration in gloomy castles in foreign locales. Dracula speaks to its own time but also transforms the genre – a revitalization that continues to sustain the Gothic today.

On the eve of the centenary of Stoker’s death, which occurred in April 1912, the University of Hull’s Department of English and School of Arts and New Media, in association with the Centre for Victorian Studies, will host a three-day international conference, Bram Stoker and Gothic Transformations. The conference will take place at the Hull Campus of the University and in Whitby.

In Dracula Mina describes Whitby as a “lovely place” but it soon becomes a site of horror, when Dracula lands from the Demeter in the form of a dog to make his first appearance on English soil. At Whitby Abbey, Lucy becomes the Count’s first English vampire bride.

The conference is interested in the iconic significance of Stoker’s vampire novel and seeks to reappraise Stoker’s work within its fin-de-siècle cultural climate. It is also interested in exploring the broader context of the changing nature of Gothic productions from the late eighteenth century to the present. Using Dracula as a key point in the evolution of the genre, it seeks to explore the novel’s Gothic predecessors and influences, and the manner in which Stoker’s work renewed the Gothic for future generations.

How do the Gothic’s early themes of despotic rulers and fathers, grim prophecies, supernatural embodiments, incarceration, labyrinthine passages and corridors, threatened females, and sexual deviancy transform in subsequent cultural outputs from novels, theatre, films, television and computer games? How has the Gothic in its modern manifestations and variations sustained itself into a fourth century?

“At once escapist and conformist,” Clive Bloom argues, “the Gothic speaks to the dark side of domestic fiction: erotic, violent, perverse, bizarre and obsessionally connected with contemporary fears.” How does the new Gothic of the twenty-first century engage in fantasy and fear?

Please send an abstract of 250-300 words for a 20 minute paper to Dr Catherine Wynne (c.wynne@hull.ac.uk) by 1 May 2011.

Topics may include, but are not restricted to, the following areas:

• Stoker’s work in its social, political and cultural context
• The development of the Gothic from Otranto to the twenty-first century
• Stoker’s influence on the genre
• Irish and British Gothic
• Gothic theatre and drama
• Gothic visualities
• Gothic technologies
• Gothic bodies
• Gothic monstrosities
• Gothic sexualities
• Gothic psychologies
• Gothic narratives
• Gothic intertextualities
• Gothic places and spaces
• Hauntings and spectrality
• Criminality and the Gothic
• Science and the Gothic
• Reincarnations of Dracula
• Vampirism and the ‘Young Vampires’ of the twenty-first century
• Anti-Gothic, Gothic Parody, Comic Gothic

The conference committee (Chair: Dr Catherine Wynne; Dr Charles Mundye; Dr Anna Fitzer; Dr Sabine Vanacker, Victoria Dawson, and Sara Williams) welcomes delegates to the University of Hull and Whitby to mark Stoker’s centenary and to celebrate his contribution to the Gothic.

Click here for the conference website.

CFP: NAVSA 2011 at Vanderbilt "Performance and Play" (3/1; 11/3-6/2011)

The North American Victorian Studies Association invites proposals for its annual conference in Nashville, TN, November 3-6, 2011. We seek papers related to the conference theme of “Performance and Play,” in keeping with the conference’s location in Nashville, a historic center for musical and artistic innovation. Featured speakers will include Tom Gunning, Catherine Robson, and Carolyn Williams. Participants will also have the opportunity to sign up for topic-based seminars in which members pre-circulate 5-page position papers for discussion. Each seminar will be led by an expert in the topic and participants will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis (limit of 15 presenters per seminar).

Conference threads might include:

• Music, musicians, singers, music halls
• Opera, light opera, dance, melodrama
• The theater world: players, playwrights, producers, directors, stagecraft
• Early cinema, magic lantern shows, optical toys
• Audiences, publics, receptions, reviews
• Performances of the self, gender, race, nationality
• Posture, pose, gesture, manner, style
• Timing, training, discipline, skill, perfectionism
• Imitation, impersonation, masquerade, theatricality
• Ceremonies, rituals, routines
• Art-making in public, studio tours, readings
• Performance at home, in private; female accomplishments
• Tourist productions, ethnographic shows
• Leisure, recreation, sport, games, holidays
• Entertainment, fairs, pageantry, parades
• Sexual play, eroticism, dalliance, hedonism
• Gambling, gaming, horse-racing, card games
• Bodies in motion: fighting, fencing, hunting, exercising
• Jokes, jests, wordplay, comedy, playfulness, fun
• Forms of play, linguistic play, nonsense, verse play
• Children’s play, toys, games

Proposals for individual papers should be no longer than 500 words, and should be accompanied by a one-page curriculum vitae. The organizers welcome panel proposals, as well. Panel proposals should include 500-word abstracts for each paper and a one-page c.v. for each presenter, along with a panel title and 250-word panel description. All abstracts will be considered for the conference, regardless of panel acceptance. Proposals for papers and panels should be submitted electronically to navsa2011@gmail.com as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format, and are due by March 1, 2011. All presenters at the conference must be current members of NAVSA.

For more information visit http://vanderbilt.edu/navsa/

CFP: Graduate Prize - 2011 VanArsdel Prize (4/1/2011)

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) invites graduate students to submit essays for the 2011 VanArsdel Prize for the best graduate student essay on, about, or extensively using Victorian periodicals. Manuscripts should be 15-25 pages and should not have appeared in print. The winner will receive $300 and publication in Victorian Periodicals Review. Send paper submissions by 1 April 2011 to Kathryn Ledbetter, Department of English, 601 University Drive, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas 78666-4616. Please include a description of current status in graduate school.

For more information about RSVP and the VanArsdel Prize click here.

CFP: The Popular Imagination and the Dawn of Modernism: Middlebrow Writing 1890-1930 (1/31, 9/15-16/2011)

The Popular Imagination and the Dawn of Modernism:

Middlebrow Writing 1890-1930

15-16 September 2011

Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Keynote speakers: Professor Ann Ardis (University of Delaware, USA),
Professor Adina Ciugureanu (Ovidius University Constanta, Romania)

The increase in modernist and avant-garde cultural manifestations in the early years of the twentieth century displaced realist and traditional literary works from, in Bourdieu's sense, "legitimate" culture. The former came to represent "highbrow," with a concomitant exclusion of all that highbrow was not. Even influential and critically acclaimed writers, such as H. G. Wells, were derided for maintaining their realist style, as well as for catering to popular taste. Retrospectively, the conception of modernism has been expanded in order to be able to accommodate less obviously avant-garde works, but this expansion may not be continued indefinitely. Lines of demarcation between high, low, mass, and middle, in their varying media and forms, need to be identified to enable a more nuanced understanding of the evolution of literary and other cultural forms in this period, and the contemporary reception of the texts and ideas expressed therein.

This conference seeks to examine the emergence of modernism outside elitist, avant-garde notions, particularly focusing on middlebrow literature in its relation to these socio-cultural developments. We assume that, even though middlebrow fiction usually adheres to conspicuously affirmative structures of plot development in order to meet genre expectations and publishers' requirements, this narrative framework is often in a disintegrative state, in form and subject. Such narratives raise disturbing issues concerning the crumbling Empire, collapsing class structures, and the deterioration of the Victorian family ideal. For women, in particular, the middlebrow novel provided a space for the negotiation of and experimentation with alternative social and gender roles. In this sense, middlebrow writing can be regarded as a domestication of modernist themes also prevalent at the time, allowing unsettling issues to be raised while maintaining at least a superficial impression of (narrative) stability and security. Based on the assumption that such works reached a far wider audience than those of the avant-garde, by exploring such issues of stability and disintegration this conference aims to advance research on the production, dissemination, and reception of middlebrow and popular fiction between 1890-1930.

Papers are invited which address these themes, and those linked to them, with the common factors being the study of textual works produced during the period 1890-1930, in the "British" world.

The conference is organised by Professor Christoph Ehland (University of Paderborn) and Dr. Kate Macdonald (University of Ghent). Please send proposals tokate.macdonald@ugent.be and to cornelia.waechter@uni-paderborn.de by 31 January 2011.

For the conference website, click here.