Edited Collection CFP: Pedagogies of the End: Teaching and Knowledge at the Fin de Siècle (8/1/2012)

Co-Editors: Dan Bivona, Arizona State University, and Helena Gurfinkel, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

500-word abstracts and 1-paragraph bios to dbivona@asu.edu and hgurfin@siue.edu by August 1st, 2012.

This collection explores a possible relationship between the fin in the fin de siècle (the turn of the nineteenth century) and pedagogy. We welcome essays about fin de siècle literature and culture that theorize

*teaching the end/decline, or teaching at the end

*the pedagogical/didactic, implications of catastrophic thinking

*teaching as inaugurating, offering (or not) a new beginning after the end.

Geographically and theoretically, this volume it is not limited to Britain, the US, and Continental Europe. We encourage submissions that leave the precincts of the “West.”

We invite contributions focusing on

• the reinventions of Foucault’s systems of power and knowledge as pedagogical strategies
• fin-de-siècle anxieties surrounding physical, moral, and intellectual decline
• didactic representations of a pending catastrophe and attempts to teach how to avoid it.

Examples include but are not limited to

• Max Nordau’s Degeneration
• Thomas Hardy, the Education Reform Act of 1870, and the dangers of literacy
• George Gissing and concerns about declining literary standards
• The didactics of social Darwinism
• Scientia sexualis as a teaching/didactic tool against perversion and degeneration Eugenics, colonialist education, and protecting the “healthy” national/racial body from decline
• The end of traditional womanhood and the fear of the New Woman.
• Fin-de-siècle approaches to paideia
• Religion, pedagogy, and eschatology at the fin-de-siècle.

"Who Owns the Legacy of Oscar Wilde?" conference and exhibition at Drew University

"Who Owns the Legacy of Oscar Wilde?"
An Interdisciplinary Conference
Drew University, Madison, NJ
1-2 June 2012

Who was Oscar Wilde? An aesthete who subverted philistine values, or pandered to bourgeois taste?  The first modern dramatist, or the last of the Victorian playwrights? An Irish nationalist, or an Anglophile? A socialist, or a shrewd literary entrepreneur? An immoralist, or a new kind of moralist? A philosopher, or a court jester?  A misogynist, or a feminist? A pioneer of  "queer theory," or someone who never quite came to terms with his sexuality?

Join us for a two day conference where we attempt to answer these questions and others.

Presenters include: Susan Bernardo, Felicia J. Ruff, Fred Roden, Shelley Salamensky, Philip Smith, Patrick W. Bixby, Loretta Clayton, Margaret D. Stetz, Anne Margaret Daniel, Marylu Hill, Jonathan Rose, and Christine Kinealy.

To register & get more information, visit http://depts.drew.edu/grad/wilde/Main.html.


"Oscar Wilde's Legacy: A Selection from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection"
Exhibition at Drew University Library
2 May-2 June 2012

Oscar Wilde died in exile in France in 1900. But his writings, his plays, his wit, and his fame lived on. This display, drawn from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, on loan from the University of Delaware Library, focuses on how Wilde's friends and associates dealt with his legacy in the early twentieth century. Among the figures represented  by books and other items are Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde's lover; the artist Aubrey Beardsley; the caricaturist  Max Beerbohm; and the novelist Ada Leverson.

Birkbeck Forum for C19 Studies: Arts Week events (5/14-18/2012)

Birkbeck’s fifth annual Arts Week takes place 14–18 May. There are a number of events with a nineteenth-century focus:

Monday 14 May, 6.00 pm
Helen Cowie (York): ‘Doing a Roaring Trade: Travelling Menageries in Nineteenth-Century Britain’
Room B13, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD
Free, but register here: <http://romanticobjectscowie.eventbrite.com>

Tuesday 15 May, 7.45 pm
Reading of Virginia Woolf’s play Freshwater
Keynes Library, Room 114, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD
Free, but register here: <http://vwfreshwater.eventbrite.com>

Wednesday 16 May, 6.00 pm
Holly Furneaux (Leicester): ‘Dickens’s Gentle Soldiers: Fiction and Journalism of the Crimean War’
The lecture will be followed (at 7.30 pm) by a launch event for Dickens and Feeling, the new issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century guest edited by Bethan Carney and Catherine Waters <http://19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/issue/view/82/showToc>
Room 101, Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square, WC1
Free, but register here: <http://gentlesoldiers.eventbrite.com>

Thursday 17 May, 6.00 pm
Panel discussion on Victorian Sentimentality, with Nicola Bown, Vicky Mills, and Alison Smith
Room B06, Malet Street, WC1E 7HX
Free, but reigster here: <http://victoriansentimentality.eventbrite.com>

Further details about Arts Week events are available here: <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/about-us/our-events/arts-week-2012>.

Programme for Summer Term 2012
Our programme for the summer term includes Robert Bud (24 May), Garrett Stewart and Matthew Rubery (7 June), and Ellen Garvey (20 June). Further details can be found at <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/research_cncs/our-events/programme-for-birkbeck-forum-for-nineteenth-century-studies-summer-term-2012>.

Email <birkbeckforum@gmail.com> to join our mailing list, and follow us on Twitter @BirkbeckC19.

We look forward to seeing you at a Forum event soon!

CFP: The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today

The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today (ISSN 2049-3215) invites contributors to submit scholarly papers (8,000-10,000 or 3500-4000 words), ideas for book reviews, exhibition reviews, news and events, titles of publications and projects in progress, and creative work and abstracts related to John Ruskin and related nineteenth-century scholarship. Scholarly papers should be submitted at least six to eight months in advance to allow for the refereeing and revisions process.

The Eighth Lamp is an online and double blind refereed journal published by Rivendale Press, UK. It is led and managed by Dr Anuradha Chatterjee (Founding Editor and Co-Editor), Lecturer in History and Theory in Architecture and Design, University of Tasmania, and Dr Laurence Roussillon-Constanty (Co-Editor), Senior Lecturer in English, Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France. The journal is also complemented by a ten-strong Editorial Board that provides intellectual and pedagogical support and leadership to the journal. It is part of The Oscholars group of journals (www.oscholars.com) edited
by David Charles Rose.

The scope of The Eighth Lamp is multidisciplinary and it welcomes submissions related to art, religion, historiography, social criticism, tourism, economics, philosophy, science, architecture, photography, preservation, cinema, and theatre. The Oscholars site has a monthly audience of over 45,000. The journal is circulated to over 100 scholars and academics internationally. The journal is listed in key Victorian studies and nineteenth century literature, culture, and visual studies forums. Previous issues of The Eighth Lamp can be accessed via the following link: http://www.oscholars.com/Ruskin/index.htm.

Please email submissions directly to the editors at theeighthlamp@gmail.com.

CFP: Octavia Hill and the Remaking of British Society (6/1/2012; 9/27-28/3012)

'Nobler Imaginings and Mightier Struggles': 

Octavia Hill and the Remaking of British Society

Sutton House, London - 27-28 September 2012

A centenary conference organised by the National Trust and the University of Oxford, with the support of Octavia Housing

In September 2012 an interdisciplinary conference at Sutton House in London will mark the centenary of the death of Octavia Hill. Best known for her housing reform, Hill was also instrumental in founding such diverse present-day institutions as the National Trust, the Chartered Institute of Housing, the Army Cadet force, and Family Action (originally the Charity Organisation Society). In a political climate which once again emphasizes the kind of privately-financed social action that Hill applauded, and where the preservation of open space and the provision of homes are again contentious, a re-evaluation of her life and legacy seems particularly timely.

The two-day conference will incorporate talks from invited speakers Gillian Darley, Jane Garnett, Lawrence Goldman, Astrid Swenson, Robert Whelan, and William Whyte. William Whyte will also lead participants round some of the Southwark housing projects established by Hill. To complement these events, submissions are invited for academic papers to make up a day of interdisciplinary panel sessions exploring Hill’s life, work, writings, and legacy; as well as her contemporaries, and the contexts in which she worked.

Topics might include (but are not limited to):

• Housing reform: slum clearance and the model dwelling movement
• Mapping the slums
• ‘Professional beggars’ and the Charity Organisation Society
• ‘Lady visitors’: women in the slums and women’s voluntary work more widely
• Social work and the professionalization of relationships with the poor
• Conservative feminisms: anti-suffrage and maternal philanthropy
• Working-class leisure and the right to open spaces
• The Kyrle Society and culture for the poor
• The National Trust and the preservation/conservation movement
• Hill’s intellectual and social circle (including John Ruskin, Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, and F.D. Maurice)
• ‘Teaching en-masse’: Octavia Hill and Victorian women writers
• The Army Cadet force: its history and influence

Submissions are encouraged from graduate students, early-career academics, and senior academics, from any academic discipline, and from independent scholars. Hill’s influence and interests were extremely wide-ranging and our conference will reflect this diversity. 300-word proposals (for 20-minute papers) carrying a name and institutional affiliation, should be submitted to octaviahill2012@gmail.com by 1 June 2012.

CFP: Going Underground: Travel Beneath the Metropolis 1863-2013 (7/13/2012; 1/17-18/2013)

Going Underground: Travel Beneath the Metropolis 1863-2013

A Conference to Mark the 150th Anniversary of the London Underground

http://www.history.ac.uk/events/london-underground

17 January 2013 - 18 January 2013

10 January 2013 will mark the 150th Anniversary of the public opening of the Metropolitan Railway in London. It was the world’s first urban rapid transport system to run partly in subterranean sections. As the precursor of today’s London Underground, it was not only a pioneer of technological and engineering advances, but also instigated new spatial, political, cultural and social realms that are now considered to be synonymous with London and modern urban experiences across the globe.

The Centre for Metropolitan History, Institute of Historical Research, is marking the anniversary by organising a two-day conference dedicated to the history and use of the London Underground.

Taking the construction and opening of the Metropolitan Railway as a departure point, this conference seeks to explore the past, present and future of the London Underground from a variety of perspectives that investigate its histories, geographies, cultures, politics and social characteristics.  

The conference organisers invite proposals for papers of 15-20 minutes in length. Submissions are welcome on any subject related to the general theme, but may benefit from connecting with one or more of the following sub-themes.

Underground Histories

• Micro-narratives and marginalised perspectives: individual or oppressed stories from the Underground
• Counter or unrealised histories: unofficial accounts or unfulfilled plans

Underground Geographies

• The relationship between the Underground, city and nation
• Subterranean places and cultural landscapes
• Private and public spaces

Cultures of the Underground

• Representations in literature, music, film, photography and art
• Heritage, identity and memory
• Enthusiasts, collectors, explorers, popular pursuits and pastimes

The Politics of the Underground

• Power and contestation: the Underground as a site of protest, control and propaganda
• The politics of transport planning policy
• The Underground as a platform for strikes and political manifestos

The Social Underground

• Security, surveillance and crime
• Mobility and technology
• Everyday life and experiences

While the focus of the conference is on the London Underground, we encourage papers that provide an international comparative perspective.

Organiser(s): Carlos Lopez Galviz, Sam Merrill, Centre for Metropolitan History

Event Location: Senate House, Malet Street, LondonWC1E 7HU, United Kingdom

Call for papers deadline: 13 July 2012. Please send abstracts and an author biography (including institutional affiliation) each of no more than 250 words by Friday 13 July 2012 by email to the Centre for Metropolitan History at ihrcmh@sas.ac.uk

Registration for this conference will open in September 2012

Contact details:

Olwen Myhill (ihrcmh@sas.ac.uk) Centre for Metropolitan History Institute of Historical Research Senate House Malet Street London WC1E 7HU

Contact phone:  +44 (0)20 7862 8790

Contact fax: +44 (0)20 7862 8793

Join Victorianists for "Summer Convivial" (6/8/2012)

Summer Convivial at Rath al Fresco (west lawn of Caltech's Athenaeum)
5:00-?, Friday, June 8

Join Victorianists in the Pasadena, California area for the inaugural "Summer Convivial" to help plan an on-going series of events for the remainder of the year. All topics are welcome for discussion. Arnold Schmidt (CSUS) and Kathleen Peck (Reader, Huntington Library) will have tables reserved based on the number attending. Please contact Kathleen Peck (kcpeck@earthlink.net) by Wednesday, June 6 if you wish to come.

CFP: M/MLA Special Session “Bernard Shaw and Debt” (6/1/2012; 11/8-11/2012)

Final call for papers for the special session on "Bernard Shaw and Debt" to be held at the 54th Annual M/MLA Convention will be held in Cincinnati, Ohio from November 8-11, 2012 at the Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza.

Sponsored by the International Shaw Society, this session seeks papers focused on borrowers and lenders in Bernard Shaw's plays, debts Shaw and/or his plays owe to other thinkers, writers, and political figures, or Shavian debts accrued by contemporary plays, playwrights, or theorists.

Please submit 300-400-word abstracts by June 1 to session chair Dr. Christopher Wixson, Eastern Illinois University, cmwixson@eiu.edu.

The call is posted at http://www.luc.edu/mmla/callforpapers.html#ss. For all the details on the conference, scroll to the top of the address above or go directly to http://www.luc.edu/mmla/callforpapers.html.

Reminder: special number of Victorian Periodicals Review on the theme of "Work and Leisure" (6/30/2012)

  

This is a reminder that the deadline to submit essays on the theme of Work and Leisure for special number of Victorian Periodicals Review is fast approaching. I also need to inform you of a change of email address to which you should send your essay. Please find again the CFP that was distributed last summer.


Essays of 6,000-7,000 words are sought for a special number of Victorian Periodicals Review on the theme of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals.

Much of the Victorian Press was built on an interdependency of work and leisure. But what was the “leisure” that the press promoted and how different was it from work? Reading the press itself is obviously an insufficient answer: reading could be work for teachers, reviewers or those trying to entertain children or colleagues. To what extent, indeed, was leisure but a ruse? How far did the Victorian press inscribe women’s domestic labour as a form of leisure, or male work as pleasurable? More generally, how did the press fit into the wider context of the entertainment industry: the theatre, travel, music, exhibitions, sport - and shopping?

Not all of the press was devoted to leisure and its limits. What of that enormous sector that unashamedly named their focus as work-related: the trade and professional press, newspaper pages devoted to the stock market and commodity prices, articles worrying over women in the workplace, over the masculinity of the civil servant, or over the demands of labourers on strike?

Finally, what of the “cultural work” of the Victorian press? What was the function of the press in and on society? How might that cultural work relate to the pleasures of leisure?

Please submit completed manuscripts by 30 June 2012 (for publication in 2013) in Word (no PDFs please) to andrew.king@canterbury.ac.uk. In the meantime, informal queries or expressions of interest are welcome.

Please submit completed manuscripts by 30 June 2012 (for publication in 2013) in Word (no PDFs please) to a.king@greenwich.ac.uk. (Please note my new email address as given here.)

I look forward to the pleasure of reading your submission.
With best wishes,

Andrew King

University of Greenwich

Colonial Girlhood Conference, University of Melbourne (6/13-14/2012)

Victorianists, especially those located in Australia and New Zealand, might be interested in attending the upcoming "Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls" conference at the University of Melbourne from 13-14 June.

Parallel conference sessions will include speakers from disciplines including English, history, cultural studies, art history, cinema and education. The program includes participants from across Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, South Africa, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, and the United States.

The conference includes keynote speeches by Professor Angela Woollacott (Australian National University) and Associate Professor Cecily Devereux (University of Alberta) and the launch of the online exhibition "Home & Away: Girls of the British Empire" (hosted by the Girl Museum).

The draft conference program and registration information are available at our conference website: http://www.avsa.unimelb.edu.au/colonialgirls.html

Reminder: Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Literature and Culture (5/30/2012)

CFP: Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Literature and Culture

Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed (from 2012) online journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies.

The sixth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Greta Depledge (Royal Holloway), is dedicated to a reassessment of nineteenth-century constructions and understandings of sex, courtship and marriage. Although the heteronormative and companionate marriage was vital for economic and reproductive reasons - as well as romantic impulses - recent scholarship has illuminated its status as but one of several diverse paradigms of marriage/sexual relationship accessible to the Victorians
Across the nineteenth century, profound crises of faith, extensive legal reforms and the new insights afforded by the emergent discipline of anthropology all contributed to a culture of introspection about the practice of marriage, at the same time as advances in science and medicine opened up new interpretations and definitions of sexual practices and preferences.

We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words, on any aspect of the theme. Possible topics include but are by no means limited to the following:
 

• Victorian narratives of queer desire: text and subtext
• Representations of women’s sexuality (angels, whores and spinsters)
• Prudishness and censorship: “deviant” novels and scandalous dramas
• Adultery, bigamy, divorce and other affronts to the ideal of companionate marriage
• Transgressive relationships
• Nineteenth-century marriage law, including prohibited degrees of affinity, property reform and breach of promise
• Representations of sexual innocence and experience (virginity, puberty and prostitution
• Subversion of traditional courtship narratives
• Sex and class: adventuresses, mistresses, sex workers and blackmail
• Customs of the country: courtship conventions, betrothals and bridal nights
• Performance, stylization and parody: gender scripts, consumer culture, theatrical subversion

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. The deadline for submissions is 30 May 2012.

Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com
Website: http://www.victoriannetwork.org/index.php/vn

Reminder: 2012 Trollope Prize (6/1/2012)

The Trollope Prize at the University of Kansas is pleased to announce the judges for the 2012 essay contest, including two returning judges and one new panel member.  The Prize is also pleased to announce the expanded role of The Fortnightly Review in publishing the winning Prize entries for
this year’s contest.

Andrew H. Miller is Professor of English and Director of the Victorian Studies Program at Indiana University Bloomington, as well as the co-editor of Victorian Studies.  He has been a fellow of both the National Humanities Center and the American Council of Learned Societies.  His work has explored nineteenth-century texts by Dickens, Gaskell, and Thackeray, and his recent publications include The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Cornell University Press, 2008).

Deborah Denenholz Morse is Professor of English at the College of William and Mary.  She writes extensively on Trollope, and her monograph, Women in Trollope's Palliser Novels (1987), is credited as one of the earliest feminist studies of Trollope’s work.  She recently delivered a lecture on Trollope’s Doctor Wortle’s School at the University of Kansas and will present at the Trollope Bicentennial Conference in Belgium in 2015.  Her recent publications include The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope's Novels (Ashgate, 2009); among others, an essay on Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right and the work of John Henry Newman is forthcoming in Critical Survey.

Dorice Williams Elliott is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas.  Her work focuses on the Victorian novel, theories of class, and feminist theory.  She has recently received both a fellowship from the Hall Center for the Humanities and a W.T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence.  Her publications include The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England (University of Virginia Press, 2002).  She is currently researching Australian convict literature.

Additionally, the Prize is pleased to announce that The Fortnightly Review, which published last year’s winning graduate essay, will publish both the winning graduate and undergraduate essays from the 2012 contest.  Additionally, the Review will award a modest honorarium to both the graduate and undergraduate winners.

The deadline for entries to both the undergraduate and graduate essay contests is June 1, 2012.  Also please note that recent PhD recipients may enter the graduate contest.  More detailed information on the criteria for entering the contest is available on the Trollope Prize website.

Please see our website http://trollopeprize.ku.edu for more information on the Prize, or e-mail any questions to trollopeprize@ku.edu. You can also now follow the Prize on Twitter at @trollopeprize.

CFP: SAMLA 2012 Special Session: “Memsahib Memoirs: Women Writing the Raj” (6/10/2012; 11/9-11/2012)

Women occupied a unique social space in colonial India. Unlike British men, they did not make political decisions, build roads and bridges, or serve in the army. They were instead expected to manage the household and support their husbands in whatever way was needed to contribute to the maintenance of a smoothly-working imperial project. However, there were many British “memsahibs” who took their observations of empire a step further. Unburdened from the daily political and administrative pressures of running a colony the size of India and having more time to spend at leisure, socializing with other women and encountering Indian natives in the local markets and bazaars, many British women communicated these first-hand observations in a body of literature that has been undervalued by scholars who generally dismiss them as “lady romancers,” while ignoring what their works can tell us about how the British saw themselves and those they colonized.

In keeping with this year’s theme of “Text as Memoir: Tales of Travel, Immigration, and Exile,” this special session examines how these “lady romancers” can also be read as cultural commentators. What do their works tell us about the colonial presence in India? How did their observations of native peoples and landscape differ from traditional male narratives? In what ways do their personal reminiscences complicate the “official” history of the British in India? How can we read their work through the lens of postcolonial theory? Possible topics include subversive elements in Anglo-Indian popular romances, memoirs as cultural/political statements on the British presence in India, women’s travel narratives while journeying across the subcontinent, and housekeeping guides as cultural artifacts. Contributions that highlight the wide-range of women’s writing during the Raj period, from memoirs and personal journals to periodical publications and fictional works, are welcome.

The Convention will be held November 9-11, 2012, at the Sheraton Imperial Hotel and Convention Center, Research Triangle Park, Durham, NC. By June 10, please submit paper proposals of no more than 500 words (along with a short bio) to Melissa Makala, University of South Carolina, at edmundrm@mailbox.sc.edu.

Proposers need not be members of SAMLA to submit, but panelists must be members in order to present.


SAMLA: http://samla.gsu.edu/

Final Call: Donald Gray Prize (5/7/2012)

NAVSA is now seeking nominations for the Donald Gray Prize for best essay published in the field of Victorian Studies. The prize carries with it an award of $1000 and will be awarded to essays that appeared in print or online in journals from the previous calendar year. Essays may be on any topic related to the study of Victorian Britain. Note that the actual date of appearance trumps the date given on the issue itself since it's common for journals to lag behind official issue dates. (The prize is limited to journal essays; those published in essay collections are not eligible.) The winner will also receive complementary registration at the NAVSA conference at which his or her award will be announced. Anyone, regardless of NAVSA membership status, is free to nominate an essay that appeared in print between 1 January 2011 and 31 December 2011. Nominations will also be solicited from the Advisory Board of NAVSA and the prize committee judges; self-nominated essays are equally welcome. Authors may be from any country and of any institutional standing.

To nominate an essay, please submit by Monday, 7 May 2012 (that's a receipt deadline, not a postmark deadline): (1) a brief cover sheet with complete address and email information for both the essay's nominator and its author, and (2) four hard copies of the essay to the Executive Secretary of NAVSA at the following address:

Meegan Kennedy
English Department
631 University Way
P.O. Box 3061580
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306-1580

Questions may be directed to: meegan.kennedy@fsu.edu

For more details, go here: http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/navsa/Prizes/GrayPrize.cfm

Robert Browning Commemorative Evensong (5/13/2012)

Robert Browning Commemorative Evensong

As 2012 is the bicentenary of the birth of Robert Browning as well as Dickens, the London Browning Society will be holding a Commemorative Evensong at St Marylebone Church on Sunday 13 May from 5pm. The event will include a lecture by Professor Margaret Reynolds (QMUL), a new musical setting of Barrett Browning’s “How do I love thee?”, and a wine reception afterwards.

The event is free and open to all. If you would like to attend, please email Simon Avery, Acting Secretary, Browning Society, at s.avery@westminster.ac.uk

CFP: special issue on Translation Theory in Practice (5/1/2012)

Romantic Circles Pedagogies
Special Issue: Translation Theory in Practice: Teaching Romantic Translation(s)

Romantic Circles Pedagogies invites submissions for a special volume on translation theory in the classroom. We would be very interested in submissions addressing texts from the Victorian Period!
Possible topics include:

• methods for incorporating single or multiple texts in translation into courses on literature and culture in the Romantic era and/or other historical periods;
• arguments for the inclusion of specific translated texts in literature courses as pedagogically (or otherwise) advantageous;
• the role of Romantic translation theory (e.g., Tytler, Staël, Goethe, Novalis, Schleiermacher) in courses on Romanticism and/or literary theory;
• the role of contemporary translation theory (e.g., Derrida, Venuti, Robinson, Spivak, Apter) in courses on Romanticism or Romantic literary theory;
• methods for incorporating translation theory into contemporary or historical literary theory courses.

Texts in translation are now finding their way into Romantic (and other historically and nationally specific) literature courses, yet until recently, translations were rarely deemed acceptable for inclusion in such reading lists. Romanticists now recognize the significant ways that disavowing the inclusion of translations in course syllabi has skewed our perceptions of the period’s literary public sphere. Romantic-era readers were enthusiastic about texts originally written in French, German, Arabic, and Sanskrit: why wouldn’t our own students be?

But how should we, as teachers of literature, approach translated texts? Recent conferences of the MLA and ACLA have been organized around the central issue of translation in literary studies, while Emily Wittman, in a recent issue of College English, suggested that English departments should consider mandatory undergraduate courses in translation studies in their curricula. Since most departments have yet to incorporate such a course, how can we, as instructors of literature, responsibly and effectively bring translations into our undergraduate and graduate courses?

What sorts of questions should we ask our students to bear in mind while reading in translation? What are the roles of translators in literary history in general and/or during the Romantic period in particular? How do translations complicate our understanding of authorship? How do connections between translation and gender, translation and class, and translation and race help to create productive and stimulating classroom discussions? How do more recent planetary conceptions of literary history foreground the significance of translators and translations? How do translations and translation theory alter as we teach them (teaching in/as translation)? Can translation theory enhance discussions of related phenomena such as literary adaptation and inter-media aesthetics? How can technological innovations in our own time (google translate and other forms of machine translation) assist and/or undermine the way we approach foreign texts in literary history?

And perhaps most significantly for a special volume on translation in the Romantic-literature classroom: what works in translation, what doesn’t, and why?

Articles should be in English, with translations provided of texts from other languages. Hyperlinks to texts in other languages are encouraged.  Please send a 500-word abstract and brief vita to C.C. Wharram (ccwharram@eiu.edu) by May 1, 2012. The deadline for articles from accepted abstracts will be October 2012. Articles should be between 3000-5000 words. All articles will be peer-reviewed.

Please direct all inquiries to C.C. Wharram, Associate Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University (ccwharram@eiu.edu).

Dickens Tours at Highgate Cemetery

£10 for adults and £8 for students

Pay in cash on the day, but book in advance on 020 8340 1834

Highgate Cemetery, a Grade I-listed Victorian cemetery in North London, has just started running special Dickens Tours in honour of the bicentenary. The tours take place every Saturday at 16.30 and last about an hour and a quarter, taking in all of the cemetery's Dickens graves (parents, siblings, wife and daughter) as well as a number of other famous Victorians who played important parts in Dickens's life. It takes in areas of the cemetery not visited on regular tours and aims to provide a picture of Dickens, his connections to Highgate, and the history of the cemetery itself. Tickets cost £10 for adults and £8 for students, paying (in cash) on the day, but spaces should be booked in advance by calling the cemetery on 020 8340 1834.

At the moment tours are running on a trial basis subject to public demand so it would be great to have some enthusiastic Victorianists along! You should be able to book any Saturday throughout the summer but certainly through April, May and perhaps June. More info can be found on the cemetery website,  http://www.highgate-cemetery.org/, or contact Jessica Hindes (PhD student in English, Royal Holloway, University of London):jessica.hindes@gmail.com.

CFP: Book History @ PAMLA 2012 (4/30/2012; 10/19-21/2012)

Newly added to the Pacific MLA Conference this October 19-21, 2012 at Seattle University, with an extended deadline of April 30^th:

 Material Readings, Material Readers

This session invites papers on a wide range of topics related to books produced or read in Britain or America in the 16th-19th centuries.  Papers that broadly relate to this year’s PAMLA theme of “Migration, Immigration, and Movement” are especially welcome.  Talks might address any number of topics, including (though not limited to): reading conventions/prescriptions/protocols; transmission of ideas within a reading community; circulation of books; book production as it relates to interpretation; authors employing meta-textual awareness of text-as-material-book; etc.

The Pacific MLA’s convention will be held October 19-21, 2012 at Seattle University in Washington. Please submit 300 word proposals and contact information by April 30th to Jen Mylander, San Francisco State University, at mylanderj@gmail.com.

PAMLA: http://www.pamla.org/

Reminder: OScholars Conan Doyle Special (5/30/2012)

Articles of between 1500 and 2500 words are sought for a special issue of the OScholars to be edited by Karen Devlin. Submissions will be accepted by Karen Devlin on the basis of an abstract of c.250 words and will then be double-blind peer reviewed. Subjects may include but are not limited to:

• Conan Doyle and Scotland
• Conan Doyle and Ireland
• Conan Doyle and his contemporaries
• The literary legacy of Conan Doyle
• The influence of Maupassant on Conan Doyle
• The 'Sherlockian' or 'Holmesian' phenomenon
• London as metonym in the work of Conan Doyle
• Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot
• Conan Doyle as mediaevalist
• Conan Doyle and masculinity
• Conan Doyle's depiction of women
• Conan Doyle and imperialism
• Pastiche parodies and plagiarism

Contributors are encouraged to look beyond the Holmes canon. Abstracts should be sent to Karen Devlin at oscholars2012@gmail.com to arrive not later than 30th May 2012. 

Birkbeck Forum for C19 Studies Programme for Summer Term 2012

Birkbeck Forum for C19 Studies

Programme for Summer Term 2012

Our programme for the summer term includes Robert Bud (24 May) and Garrett Stewart and Matthew Rubery (7 June). In addition to our own programme of events, Birkbeck’s fifth annual Arts Week takes place 14–18 May. There are a number of events with a nineteenth-century focus, including Helen Cowie (14 May) on travelling menageries in nineteenth-century Britain, a reading of Virginia Woolf’s play Freshwater (15 May), Holly Furneaux (16 May) on the figure of the gentle soldier in the Crimean War, and a panel discussion on Victorian Sentimentality featuring Nicola Bown, Vicky Mills and Alison Smith (17 May). Further details can be found at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/research_cncs/our-events/programme-for-birkbeck-forum-for-nineteenth-century-studies-summer-term-2012.

Email <birkbeckforum@gmail.com> to join our mailing list, and follow us on Twitter @BirkbeckC19.

We look forward to seeing you at a Forum event soon!

Final Call: VanArsdel Essay Prize (5/1/2012)

Final Call: VanArsdel Essay Prize

Deadline: May 1

Graduate students are invited to submit essays for the 2012 VanArsdel Prize for the best graduate student essay on, about, or extensively using Victorian periodicals. The winner will receive $300 and publication in Victorian Periodicals Review. Submissions should be 15-25 pages, excluding notes and bibliography. Manuscripts should not have appeared in print. Send e-mail submissions to vpr@rs4vp.org by May 1, 2012. Submissions should be formatted as Word files in Chicago style with identifying information removed. In an accompanying e-mail, applicants should include a description of their current status in graduate school.

CFP: 2012 M/MLA: Permanent Section: English Literature 1800-1900 (6/1/2012; 11/8-11/2012)

The English Literature 1800-1900 panel seeks papers for the 2012 Midwest Modern Language Association Convention, November 8-11, 2012. Cincinnati, Ohio.

In keeping with the informal theme of “debt” for the M/MLA 2012 convention, the English II: English Literature 1800-1900 panel seeks to present discussions of works and writers that deal in some fashion with that nineteenth-century juggernaut, debt.

Possible themes include indebtedness and influence, borrowers and lenders, bonds and contracts, economics of lack, states of debt, oaths and promises, gift-giving, cultures of expenditure, occupy literature, trans-cultural capital, deferring, symbolic economics, ecological materialism, rethinking civic missions/practices, forgiveness, gratitude, literature of demand, emotional obligation, debts of affect, and student loans.

Papers on any form or genre of British literature between 1800 and 1900 are welcome. Proposals of 200 to 400 words should be sent by June 1st to Nancee Reeves, Purdue University, nreeves@purdue.edu. Selected presenters will be informed by June 15th, 2012 and must register for the conference by July 1, 2012.

Workshop on Teaching English Studies Through Blended Learning (with Victorian Plenary) (5/8/2012)

Teaching English Studies Through Blended Learning
School of English, University of Leeds, 
Tuesday 8 May 2012, 10am-4.30pm

This HEA-funded workshop aims to enhance the use of blended learning in English Studies by enabling good practice to be shared and by providing a forum to discuss how it can improve the student experience. Although virtual learning environments and new teaching technologies are ubiquitous in UK universities, they are often underused by academics and students. Sometimes technology is seen as a distraction from the real business of learning and teaching. The workshop will address how the learning opportunities created by technology can be successfully blended with more traditional forms of interaction in the context of English Studies as a discipline.

The event will feature a plenary talk from Dr Rosie Miles (National Teaching Fellow and former E-Learning Consultant for the English Subject Centre), presentations from academics using blended learning, and discussions of the variety and value of blended learning. An important aspect of the day will be the afternoon workshop in which attendees will be encouraged to share and discuss their ideas about how they might incorporate blended learning into their own teaching, and to get guidance from others about how to put those ideas into practice.

Registration is free (including lunch and refreshments). Places will be allocated on a first come, first served basis. To register, please email the workshop administrator, Alberto Gomez (eng6ag@leeds.ac.uk), with your full name, institution, details of where you heard about the event, and information about any dietary or other requirements. A small number of slots are available for ten-minute presentations on particular examples of blended learning. If you are interested in giving a presentation, please email the workshop organiser, Dr David Higgins (d.higgins@leeds.ac.uk).

Programme
9.45-10.25   Registration.

10.30-11.15   Plenary: Dr Rosie Miles (Wolverhampton), “@likeabatoutofhell @ClosetCase @MsDisillusion @TheBlooferLady: Tweeting the Victorians -- New Adventures in #OnlineEnglishTeaching”.

11.15-11.45   Discussion: What is the value of blended learning? (20 mins groups;10 mins plenary).

11.45-12.00   Coffee.

12.00-13.00   Presentations #1.
Dr Fiona Douglas (Leeds), “Developing Engaging Study Skills Resources for English Studies: An Impossible Task?”
Dr Alison Johnson, Alberto Gomez, and David Wright (all Leeds), “Learning to Research Forensic Linguistics: Student and Tutor Perspectives”.

13.00-14.00   Lunch.

14.00-15.00   Workshop: Putting Ideas into Practice (40 mins groups; 20 mins plenary).

15.00-15.15   Coffee.

15.15-16.15   Presentations #2.

Dr Paul Maddern (Leeds), “The Seamus Heaney Centre Digital Archive: Metadata, Context, and Application”.
Dr Greg Garrard (Bath Spa), Title tbc.

16.15-16.30   Closing Remarks.

Reminder: Gaskell Journal Interdisciplinary Essay Prize (4/30/2012)

Joan Leach Memorial Interdisciplinary Essay Prize 2012

The essay competition is open to all graduate students currently registered for an MA or PhD in Victorian Studies. Preference will be shown to essays with a clear interdisciplinary focus, i.e. those that consider Elizabeth Gaskell within contemporary Victorian cultural, aesthetic and scientific debates, or else, through recent critical theory. Essays that treat Gaskell's work in more traditional ways, but which nonetheless demonstrate a compelling style and focus, are also very much welcomed.

The winning essay will be published in the 2012 edition of the Gaskell Journal and its author will receive £200 from the Gaskell Society, as well as a year’s free subscription to the journal.

Essays should be no longer than 7,000 words and not under consideration for publication elsewhere. The closing date for the essay prize is April 30, 2012.

Essays will be judged by members of the Gaskell Journal Editorial Board, with the final decision being made by the International Editor, Prof. Jill L. Matus.

Please see the Gaskell Journal website gaskelljournal.com for further submission details.

Call for Bloggers: Journal of Victorian Culture Online: Bloggers' Fair (4-5/2012)

At the Journal of Victorian Culture online, we’ve decided to showcase blogs written by Victorianists on any area of nineteenth-century studies. If you are a blogger, you can contribute by sending a short description of your blog and yourself to Lucie at l.m.matthew-jones@ljmu.ac.uk throughout April and May. You can also send images (as jpegs) as well as a hyperlink to your blog. We would also like you to think of key terms or tags that we could use to link your blog with others. We plan to showcase one blog a day throughout May on our website which will be announced on Twitter and Facebook. If you have a Twitter account please let us know your username and then we can link you into the thread. If you have any questions, please contact Lucie on the email address above.

Journal of Victorian Culture Online: http://myblogs.informa.com/jvc/

2012 CUNY Victorian Conference: Victorianopolis (5/4/2012)

Please come to "Victorianopolis," the 2012 CUNY Victorian Conference! It's on the theme of Victorian cities this year, with an all-star lineup, including Deborah Nord, Julian Wolfreys, Nancy Rose Marshall, Michelle Allen-Emerson, Matthew Beaumont, William Cohen, David Pike, and keynote speaker Judith Walkowitz.

It's free and open to the public. We'll be in the Segal Theater at the Graduate Center (34th and 5th Ave, NY) on Friday May 4 from 9 to 6. Here's the website: http://victorian.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

Reminder: Victorians Institute 2012 "Victorian Mixed Media" (5/1/2012; 10/19-21/2012)

The Victorians Institute, an interdisciplinary scholarly organization founded in 1972, invites proposals for papers for the 2012 meeting, to be held at Virginia Commonwealth University in downtown Richmond, October 19-21.

Deadline for proposals is May 1.

Please go to http://www.vcu.edu/vij/CFP--VI2012.pdf for the call for papers, and http://www.vcu.edu/vij for information about the Institute and the scholarly annual Victorians Institute Journal.

Summer 2012 Seminar on the Brontës

If you have undergraduate or graduate students who will be in the Williamsburg-Richmond-Norfolk area this summer, they might want to take advantage of a senior/graduate seminar on the Brontës that I am teaching at William and Mary from the day after Memorial Day for five weeks, M-R, except for the first week, which is T-F because of Memorial Day.  I can accommodate a few more students.

Deborah Denenholz Morse
Professor, English
Murphy Faculty Fellow, 2009-2011
Chair, RPT, Fall 2011

http://www.wm.edu/as/english/facultystaff/directory/morse_d.php

William and Mary Summer Courses:

http://www.wm.edu/as/undergraduate/curriculum/summer/courses/index.php

NVSA 2012 "Victorian Clichés and Orthodoxies" (4/13-15/2012)

If any of you will be in New York City or its environs next weekend, do think about attending the annual conference of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association (http://www.nvsa.org/). The theme is “Victorian Clichés and Orthodoxies,” and the conference will be held at Columbia University, April 13-15, 2012. The keynote panel will feature Nicholas Dames (Columbia U), Yopie Prins (U of Michigan), and James A. Secord (U of Cambridge). For the conference program and additional details, visit http://nvsa2012.wordpress.com/.

Registration Open: Politics, Performance and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain (4/19-20/2012)

Registration is open for the April symposium on "Politics, Performance and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain" which is part of the AHRC-funded research project, "The cultural politics of English pantomime, 1837-1901" We're meeting in the Arts Building, University of Birmingham, from 2pm Thursday 19 April, to 6pm, Friday 20th April.

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edacs/departments/drama/research/pantomime/index.aspx

You can find the schedule and information about speakers at:
https://sites.google.com/site/victorianpantomime/2011-symposium_politics-and-performance

Speakers include:

• Mike Sanders (Manchester): on Platforms, Correspondences and Theatrical Metaphor.
• Jim Davis (Warwick): Victorian pantomime and the Politics of Gender Variance
• Jane Pritchard (Victoria and Albert Museum): on Ballet, class and identity
• Jill Sullivan (Independent): on The Irish question in regional pantomime
• Marcus Morris (Lancaster): on Labour leaders, political rhetoric and performativity
• Richard Gaunt (Nottingham): on Peel as actor-dramatist (parliament itself as theatrical institution)
• Caroline Radcliffe (Birmingham): on Theatrical hierarchy and Cultural capital: East and West London
• Anselm Heinrich (Glasgow): on Gladstone, national theatre and contested didactics of theatre.
• Janice Norwood (Hertfordshire): on East End Socialism, performance techniques in protest/marches
• Peter Yeandle (Lancaster): on Christian Socialism and performing arts: politics, theology and theatricality

Registration details and online registration can be found here:
http://online-payments.lancaster-university.co.uk/browse/product.asp?compid=1&modid=1&catid=307

Directions to Birmingham (Edgbaston Campus): http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/contact/directions/index.aspx

Recommended Local Accommodation: http://www.nmr.bham.ac.uk/documents/HotelsRestaurants.pdf

CFP: Dickens Day 2012 (5/31/2012; 10/13/2012)

Dickens Day 2012
Dickens and Popular Culture
Saturday 13th October 2012, Senate House, London
Keynote speaker: Professor Juliet John

Dickens Day, now in its 26th year, is celebrating 2012 with a theme that explores Dickens’s popularity and his engagement with non-elite cultures from his own time to the present. On the evidence of bicentenary Dickens fervour, the author is as popular now as he has ever been. This year has been punctuated by Dickens serials on TV, heartfelt tributes from popular writers, mass-selling biography, collective reading projects, Dickens hip-hop performances, and a global read-a-thon. How can we account for this continuing engagement, across different genres and various cultural contexts? What is it that allows Dickens’s work its particular “portability” (to use Juliet John’s term)? And what are the political and personal investments in forms of Dickensian popularity? How does this relate to Dickens’s own aspirations, and to the forms in which his work first appeared? These are some of the questions that the day seeks to address.

We warmly invite proposals for 20-minute papers from Dickensians of all backgrounds and career stages. There will be a panel featuring research inspired by that of the late Sally Ledger, whose book Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination is an important foundation for our thinking about this event. Please indicate on your proposal if you would like to be considered for this panel.

Our plan (in line with the momentous scale of this year) is to consider Dickens’s role in popular culture from his own age to ours. The day will be divided in two, with morning sessions looking at Dickens ‘Then’ (i.e. – the nineteenth century) and the afternoon at ‘Now’.

Topics might include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

• Popular entertainment and culture, fairs, circuses, street performers, Astley’s, ‘The Amusements of the People’, Hard Times;
• Theatre, film, television, adaptations in all media;
• Neo-Dickensiana, re-tellings and re-imaginings, Drood completions;
• Public Readings (by Dickens and others), Penny reading groups;
• The Press, journalism, editing, reporting;
• Charitable activities, Urania Cottage, Hospital for Sick Children, Working Men’s Institutes;
• Christmas;
• Schools and education;
• Literary festivals, Dickens tourism, museums, homes, walking tours, the ‘Dickens World’ theme park;
• Global impact, the reception of Dickens abroad, Dickens in non-Western and colonial and postcolonial cultures and contexts;
• Celebratory exhibitions and events;
• Advertising; technological developments;
• Rap, hip-hop, dance, performance art: non-literary mediations of Dickens’s work;
• Bicentennial representations and interpretations of Dickens, his life and his work.

Please send proposals (maximum 500 words) to Bethan Carney, Holly Furneaux and Ben Winyard at jcarn02[at]mail[dot]bbk[dot]ac[dot]uk,hf35[at]le[dot]ac[dot]uk and benwinyard[at]hotmail[dot]com. The deadline for paper proposals is 31 May 2012.

Bart’s Hospital Pathology Museum Spring Seminar Series (4/18-6/27/2012)

Bart’s Hospital Pathology Museum Spring Seminar Series 2012

Weekly Event - Every Wednesday: 18:30 to 20:30 (GMT)

London, United Kingdom

These seminars may be of interest to readers living in and around London. For more information see http://springseries.eventbrite.co.uk/ or follow the museum on Twitter @bartspathology

Seminar 1: 18th April
Prof. Iwan Rhys Morus (Aberystwyth University) ‘Science and the Senses’
Dr. Claire Brock (University of Leicester) 'Risk, Responsibility, and the Female Surgeon, 1890-1910'

Seminar 2: 25th April
Dr. Tatiana Kontou (Oxford Brookes University) 'Florence Marryat and Maternal Impressions: from the spiritualistic to the literary'
Dr. Shane McCorristine (University of Leicester) 'The Ethereal Woman in Victorian Arctic Exploration'

Seminar 3: 2nd May
Dr. Martin Willis (University of Glamorgan) ‘Catalepsy, Case Notes and George Eliot’
Kirsty Chilton (Old Operating Theatre) ‘Bart’s, Bellingham and the Body Snatchers’

Seminar 4: 9th May
Dr. Anna Maerker (Kings College London) ‘Models vs Specimens: Debating the utility of artificial anatomies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’
Dr. Katherine Watson (Oxford Brookes University) ‘‘In my opinion it was a child at full time’: Infanticide in English and Welsh Medico-Legal Practice, 1730-1914’

Seminar 5: 16th May
Karen Howell (Old Opertaing Theatre) ‘Curating the Old Operating Theatre’
Dr. Alan Bates (University College London) 'London's Lost Anatomy Museums'

Seminar 6: 30th May
Dr. Karl Harrison (Cranfield University) ‘Case Studies in Forensic Archaeology’
Prof. Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck College) ‘The Mummy Unwrapp’d!’

Seminar 7: 13th June - The Centre for the History of Emotions (Queen Mary, University of London)
Dr. Tiffany Watt-Smith ‘Turning aside and looking askance: body parts and the choreography of spectatorship’
Jen Wallis ‘Disturbing images ... not to be produced: Visualising Pathology in the Nineteenth-Century Asylum’

A Special Event on 27th June:
Alastair Duncan (The Sherlock Holmes Society) ‘A Study in Barts: Sherlock Holmes, John Watson and England's Great Hospital’, see http://sherlocksociety.eventbrite.co.uk/ to book your place.

Drinks and nibbles will be served from 6:00pm for a 6:30pm start.

Venue:
The Pathology Museum
3rd Floor Robin Brook Centre (outpatients entrance)
(Bart’s Hospital site)
West Smithfield,
London EC1M 6BQ
t: 020 7882 8766 or 2216

Directions:
Underground: St. Paul’s station on the Central line, Barbican Station on Circle, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City lines are all within a short walking distance. Follow signs for St.Bartholomew’s Hospital.

Bus: Routes 25 and 8 stop by St Paul’s. Route 56 stops outside Bart’s Hospital.

Car: NCP car park in West Smithfield charges £2 per hour all day. On-street metered parking available. Bart’s Hospital lies within the congestion charge zone.

Overground: First Capital Connect services to Hertford North and Welwyn Garden City from nearby Moorgate.