Reminder: NVSA 2013 "1874" (10/15/2012; 4/5-7/2013)

All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee:

—Robert Browning

CFP: Northeast Victorian Studies Association 2013

1874

Boston University: April 5-7, 2013

NVSA solicits submissions for its annual conference. The topic this year is 1874.

The conference will feature a keynote panel including Isobel Armstrong, Robert J. Richards, and Herbert Tucker, and a walking tour of Victorian Boston led by Martha Vicinus.

* * *

The Northeast Victorian Studies Association calls for papers from all disciplines on any aspect of 1874, the year in which The Way We Live Now was serialized in monthly numbers, John Tyndall delivered his “Belfast Address” on scientific materialism, Benjamin Disraeli was appointed prime minister for the second time, and red became the standard color for pillarboxes of the Royal Mail. We welcome submissions on any topic relevant to 1874, as well as papers that engage with the conceptual and methodological issues raised by taking a single year as a focus for study.

What are the consequences of thinking about Victorian works of art, texts, objects, and events in relation to their specific year in history? How is our perspective on the period—or on periodization itself—altered by this vantage point? What does the close examination of a single year—a year literally picked out of a hat by the program committee rather than chosen for its significance—reveal about the relationship between dates that “matter” in Victorian Studies and dates that do not? Is the calendar year a significant unit of time or useful organizational framework for our exploration of the Victorian period as a whole? How is our understanding of annual publications, commemorations, and other yearly events and forms changed when we concentrate on a single occurrence of each? In 1874 S. O. Beeton’s Christmas annual Jon Duan sold 250,000 copies in three weeks, vastly outperforming Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. Which, then, is the “major” text under the rubric of our conference? How does our sense of the canonical and non-canonical shift as a result of such micro-periodization?

Other texts and events from 1874 worth considering:

Texts

M. E. Braddon’s Lost for Love

William Benjamin Carpenter’s Principles of Mental Physiology

Wilkie Collins’s The Frozen Deep and Other Stories published; The Law and the Lady serialized

John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science

Amelia Edwards’s A Night on the Borders of the Black Forest

George Eliot’s The Legend of Jubal, Arion, and A Minor Prophet; first one-volume edition of Middlemarch

F. W. Farrar’s Life of Christ

John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens, final volume

Francis Galton’s English Men of Science

W. S. Gilbert’s Charity

John Richard Green’s Short History of the English People

Thomas Huxley’s “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata”

G. H. Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind, Vol. 1

Henry Maudsley’s Responsibility in Mental Disease

George Meredith’s Beauchamp’s Career serialized

Margaret Oliphant’s A Rose in June and For Love and Life

John Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, Vol. 4

Henry Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics

James Sully’s Sensation and Intuition

Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Bothwell: A Tragedy

James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night

Anthony Trollope’s Lady Anna and Phineas Redux

Alfred Russell Wallace’s “A Defence of Modern Spiritualism”

Mrs. Henry Wood’s Johnny Ludlow

Events

London School of Medicine for Women founded

Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge founded

Fiji Islands annexed by Britain

Ghana established as a British colony

Shipton-on-Cherwell train crash (and other notable train crashes)

David Livingstone’s body returned to England

Victoria Embankment opened

Astley Deep Pit disaster

Public Worship Regulation Act

Factory Act of 1874

1874 Transit of Venus

Wilkie Collins’s readings in America

Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease founded

First Impressionist exhibition, Paris

*     *     *

Proposals (no more than 500 words) by Oct. 15, 2012 (e-mail submissions only, in Word format):

Professor Tyson Stolte, Chair, NVSA Program Committee (tmstolte@nmsu.edu).

Please note: all submissions to NVSA are evaluated anonymously. Successful proposals will stay within the 500-word limit and make a compelling case for the talk and its relation to the conference topic.

               

Please do not send complete papers, and do not include your name on the proposal.

 

Please include your name, institutional and email addresses, and proposal title in a cover letter. Papers should take 15 minutes (20 minutes maximum) so as to provide ample time for discussion.

For information about NVSA membership and travel grants, please visit the NVSA website at http://nvsa.org/

Last Chance to Register: Octavia Hill and the Remaking of British Society (9/17/2012; 9/27-28/2012)

‘Nobler imaginings and mightier struggles’: 

Octavia Hill and the remaking of British society

A centenary conference organised by the National Trust and University of Oxford

Sutton House, London, 27 and 28 September 2012

Registration is now open for the Octavia Hill centenary conference. Speakers include Gillian Darley, Jane Garnett, Lawrence Goldman, Paul Readman, Astrid Swenson, Robert Whelan, and William Whyte. Registration closes Monday evening, 17 September 2012. 

Conference rate £50 (£40 unwaged/student)

For full details, a draft programme, and a registration form go to http://octaviahill2012.wordpress.com/

Exhibit: Dickens Down-under (9/21-12/13/2012)

In this year of world-wide Dickens Celebrations, we too at Special Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, are participating. On 21 September begins our “Celebrating Charles Dickens, 1812-1870: A Man of His Age”, which runs through to 13 December 2012.

Not only will the first and second edition works be on display, including those memorable images by artists who collaborated closely with Dickens, but in order to contextualise his life and works, a select number of themes that figure so strongly during the reign of Queen Victoria will be on display. They include the City of London; the poor and dispossessed; Punch; the Great Exhibition; and the Crimean War. Dickens’s enduring legacy will also feature, including those ‘down-under’ Dickens Societies.

   

The physical exhibition will start in the de Beer Gallery, Special Collections, 1st floor, Central University Library, on 21 September. Hours: 8.30 to 5.00 Monday to Friday. As usual, an on-line exhibition will follow.

For any further details, please contact Dr Donald Kerr, Special Collections Librarian Donald.kerr@otago.ac.nz ; phone (03) 479-8330

CFP: Victorian poetry panels, 2013 NeMLA (9/30/2012; 3/21-24/2013)

Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

March 21-24, 2013

Boston, Massachusetts

Host Institution: Tufts University

www.nemla.org

CFP #1: Engendering the Victorian Female Poet

There has been a historic tide of scholarship arguing the merits of Victorian poetry written by women. From Aurora Leigh to “Goblin Market,” nineteenth-century female poets created a canon of verse that questioned gender categories and troubled the status quo. While scholars from Oliphant to W.M. Rossetti added valuable interpretations that legitimized the genre, contemporary critics such as Armstrong, Tucker, and Prins have used modern lenses to probe the subtleties inherent in the work of a “poetess.” This roundtable will discuss the ways gender is mapped onto and inherent in nineteenth-century female poetics. We will probe how the female poet changed/expanded/problematized form, and how poets addressed the sexual, moral and class conventions of their time. What were the cultural responses to these poems, and what were some significant male responses? What was the effect of working-class poems authored by women? How did the concept of boundaries smite or enforce a female poet’s project? We will also discuss the transatlantic implications of publishing and editing, as well as how poets represented the adversity of gender in their verse—what Barrett Browning called a “disheveled strength in agony.”

This roundtable examines the ways gender is mapped onto and inherent in verse of Victorian female poets. Participants should examine through theoretical lenses canonic or non-canonic poems (metapoems, verse-novels, lyric, epic, sonnet, elegy) throughout the long nineteenth-century. 500 word abstract/CV by 9/30 to blavin@optonline.net with subject line “NeMLA VFP”

CFP #2: Nineteenth-century Eco-Poetics

How does nature operate in nineteenth-century poetry? From Arnold’s “Scholar-Gypsy” to Leopardi’s “La Ginestra,” nineteenth-century poets privileged the nature motif in their verse. While literary critics have queried these poetic projects by focusing on Empire, religion, gender, and form, few scholars have explored eco-critical approaches to this global canon. This panel will consider poems where science interrogates landscape, faith interacts with nature, and industrialization pocks the pastoral. We will begin by exploring how the systematic and organized study of nature—and the advent of the natural sciences—impacted verse forms. We will also ask how literary legacies, such as Romanticism, influenced the positioning of nature in the nineteenth-century verse. Panelists will explore through theoretical lenses the evolving notions of nature and how they manifest in the poetry of various nation-states. We will query how the genre responded to the burgeoning sciences and technological innovations, and we will explore the theoretical implications of a nineteenth-century eco-poetics.

This panel queries how nineteenth-century poets privileged the nature motif in their verse. Panelists should examine through theoretical lenses canonic or non-canonic poems (lyric, epic, sonnet, verse-novel, elegy, etc.) that manifest nature in verse. 500 word Abstract/CV by 9/30 to blavin@optonline.net with subject line “NeMLA 19th Eco_Poetics”

Robert Browning Bicentenary Celebration at SUNY-Stony Brook (20 Sept. 2012)

Thursday, 20 September, 4 p.m.
Poetry Center, Humanities Building 201, 
SUNY-Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY

Participants:

• Rosanna Warren, Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities, University Professor and Professor of English and Romance Studies, Boston University
• Mark Samuels Lasner, Senior Research Fellow, University of Delaware Library
• Edward Giuliano, President, New York Institute of Technology

The SUNY-Stony Brook English Department is celebrating Robert Browning's bicentennial with a poetry reading by the prize-winning poet, Rosanna Warren; a display of Browning items from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, on loan to the University of Delaware Library; and introductory remarks by Edward Giuliano, President of New York Institute of Technology.

The event is free and open to the public, with transportation to campus available on the LIRR and a parking garage near the Humanities Building.

For additional information contact:
Adrienne Munich
Professor, English, SUNY-Stony Brook
(631) 432-7406
adrienne.munich@stonybrook.edu

CFP: VSAWC 2013 “Victorian Humanity and its Others” (10/1/2012; 4/27-28/2013)

The Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada invites proposals for a conference on Victorian Humanity and its Others. The conference, hosted by the University of the Fraser Valley and Douglas College, will take place 27-28 April 2013 at the Coast Hotel, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, located right near English Bay and the beautiful Stanley Park seawall walk.

We seek proposals for papers that examine the theme of humanity and its others in Victorian culture and society. We warmly welcome papers from the perspectives of history and art history, literary studies, gender studies, race and ethnicity studies, animal studies, and science. Papers will address Victorian definitions, expressions, and contestations of humanity and its others, as well as the way these definitions and debates were shaped by new developments in natural science, anthropology, religion, technology, and industry.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• human others/other humans
• the animal/human divide
• technologies of the human
• human/gender rights
• the divine vs. the human
• philanthropy
• the (in)humanity of imperialism/colonialism
• reproductivity
• (un)dignified labour
• human-machine relationships
• visual representations of the human
• human environments
• human (dis)ability
• human improvement and perfectibility
• disciplinary histories
• Sciences vs./and Humanities

The conference’s keynote speaker will be Amy King (Department of English, St. John’s University), author of Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel (Oxford UP, 2003). Dr. King has published extensively on the nineteenth-century novel, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between Victorian science and literature. Her current book project, “Reverent Form: Natural History and Natural Theology in the British Novel, 1789-1867,” examines the role of natural history and theology in the early-Victorian novel.

Please submit proposals of not more than 500 words plus a 75-word biography and 100-word abstract to Heather.McAlpine@ufv.ca by 1 October 2012.

The conference will also feature a publishing workshop entitled “How to Get Published: Top Ten Tips from Two Editors.” Victorian Review co-editors Lisa Surridge and Mary Elizabeth Leighton will offer a Saturday panel on publishing advice for graduate students and recently minted PhDs, followed by a 3-hour workshop on Monday 29 September (9-12 a.m.). Participants will submit a draft article (on any Victorian topic) via email a week before the conference, receive 20 minutes of individual oral feedback during the conference plus written editorial advice, and revise part of their own article during the 3-hour workshop. Their names will appear in the conference programme. The workshop will be limited to 10 participants and will run on a first come, first served basis; all participants must register for the conference. To participate, send an email to vreview@uvic.ca with “Victorian Humanity and its Others Conference” in the subject heading.

CFP: Interiority in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain: Beyond Subjectivity (12/15/2012; 4/3/2013)

Rutgers British Studies Center, April 12, 2013

The potential for discovery of what is or was “interior” fires the curiosity of scholars of British history and culture, whether the subject of investigation is the parlor of a middle-class Victorian family or the emotional life of an eighteenth-century Methodist.  The Rutgers British Studies Center will hold a one-day interdisciplinary conference on April 12, 2013 at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey on interiority in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.  Broadly understood, "interiority" might include any topic that concerns mental or material phenomena that are conceived to be interior, internal, inner, or inward, often but by no means always in explicit distinction from what is exterior, external, outer, or outward. We encourage topics that in some fashion reflect on historical changes in the concept of interiority.

Below we suggest five broad topics that should provide a general sense of the range of papers that are relevant to the theme of the conference. In two or three weeks we’ll issue a second call for papers with an extended list of suggested sub-topics that fall under these broad ones.  Alternatively, this can be accessed by visiting http://britishstudies.rutgers.edu/events/2012-2013/details/96-interiority-in-eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century-britain-beyond-subjectivity. 

Why “beyond subjectivity”?  A great deal of excellent work has been done in these period fields on the idea of interiority as psychological subjectivity. We value this work. At the same time—and with no intention of proscribing papers  that thoughtfully extend it —we’re  especially interested in papers that go beyond this focus and that allow relations and correlations to be drawn between different senses of interiority. In this spirit we also aim to bring together a range of interdisciplinary scholarship.

We invite those interested to submit proposals of about 250 words by December 15, 2012 to Kathryn Yeniyurt at kathryn.yeniyurt@rutgers.edu.

Interiority:

• Emotional/Experiential
• Persons and the Interpersonal
• Bodily/Physical
• Architectural Spaces
• Geographical Spaces

CFP: Victorian Poetry: Forms and Fashions (11/15/2012; 4/19-20/2013)

Victorian Poetry: Forms and Fashions

A Conference in Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Victorian Poetry

19-20 April 2013

West Virginia University

Please send 300-500 word proposals for papers and a 1-page c.v. via email to

John.Lamb@mail.wvu.edu by 15 November 2012. Papers on any aspect of Victorian Poetry and Poetics are invited, especially those devoted to: the reconsideration of poetic forms and formal innovations; fashions, trend, and modes in poetry; the publication and commerce of poetry; poetry book history; and Victorian prosody and stanzaic forms.  Papers devoted to the “fashions” of scholarship on Victorian poetry for the last fifty years are also invited.

Keynote address by Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature at Texas Christian University.  Professor Hughes’ books include The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry, Graham R.: Rosamund Mariott Watson, Woman of Letters, and The Manyfaced Glass: Tennyson’s Dramatic Monologues.

NCSA Emerging Scholars Award (11/15/2012)

The Nineteenth Century Studies Association (NCSA) is pleased to announce the 2012 Emerging Scholars Award. The work of emerging scholars represents the promise and long-term future of interdisciplinary scholarship in 19th-century studies. In recognition of the excellent publications of this constituency of emerging scholars, this award recognizes an outstanding article or essay published within five years of the author's doctorate. Entries can be from any discipline focusing on any aspect of the long 19th century (the French Revolution to World War I), must be published in English or be accompanied by an English translation, and must be by a single author. Submission of essays that are interdisciplinary is especially encouraged.

Entrants must be within five years of having received a doctorate or other terminal professional degree, and must have less than seven years of experience either in an academic career, or as a post-terminal-degree independent scholar or practicing professional.

Only articles physically published between September 1, 2011 and August 31, 2012 (even if the citation date of the journal is different) are eligible for the 2012 Emerging Scholar Award. Articles published in any scholarly journal, including on-line journals, or in edited volumes of essays are eligible and may be submitted either by the author or the publisher of a journal, anthology, or volume containing independent essays. In any given year, an applicant may submit more than one article for this award.

The winning article will be selected by a committee of nineteenth-century scholars representing diverse disciplines. Articles submitted to the NCSA Article Prize competition are ineligible for the Emerging Scholars Award.

The winner will receive $500 to be presented at the annual NCSA Conference in Fresno, California, March 7-9, 2013. Prize recipients need not be members of the NCSA but are encouraged to attend the conference to receive the award.

Deadline for submission is November 15, 2012.

Send three off-prints or photocopies of published articles/essays to the committee chair: Professor Judith W. Page, Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, PO Box 117352, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611. (Electronic submissions will not be accepted.) Address all questions to page7@ufl.edu. Please note that applicants must verify date of actual publication for eligibility and provide an email address so that receipt of their submissions may be acknowledged.

CFP: 2013 NeMLA Panel, Under Her Skin (9/30/2012; 3/21-24/2013)

Under Her Skin: Victorian Literature, the Female Body, and Touch

44th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
March 21-24, 2013
Boston, Massachusetts
Host Institution:  Tufts University

A recent trend in feminist scholarship explores the role the skin plays in formations of the self. The skin functions as a boundary between self and other that is permeable, specifically in relation to touch. This panel invites abstracts that explore constructions of female subjectivity and sexualities in Victorian literature, focusing on the skin surface localized to the hand, or more generally to the female body, as a site of tactile exchange. Send 250-500 word abstracts to Kimberly Cox, SUNY Stony Brook, kcox006@gmail.com

Deadline:  September 30, 2012 (Fast approaching!)

Please include with your abstract:

Name and Affiliation

Email address

Postal address

Telephone number

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

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

Lecture on the Watts Gallery in NYC (10/3/2012)

"An Artists’ Village, Compton, England: A Center of Nineteenth Century Art and Design"
Lecture by Richard Ormond and Perdita Hunt
 Wednesday, October 3, 2012,  6 p.m. 
The Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York, NY

Sponsored by the William Morris Society in the United States

G. F. Watts, OM, RA and Mary Seton Watts were bright lights in Victorian art and the Arts and Crafts movement. These two creative artists left a great legacy in Compton, Surrey--a splendid Ernest George house and studios, an ornate cemetery chapel (considered by many to be a fin-de-siecle masterpiece), a pottery which was a center for social enterprise, and the remarkable Watts Gallery, the only purpose-built art gallery for a single professional artist as well as a hostel for apprentice ceramicists. The Watts Gallery has just been restored and re-opened by HRH The Prince of Wales to universal acclaim.

Richard Ormond CBE, Chairman of the Watts Gallery Trust, and Perdita Hunt, the Gallery Director, who together have led the restoration and the renaissance of this artists' village and national museum, will describe the founders’ lives, ethos, and vision, and how this translates into the 21st century and beyond.

Tickets $12 for members of the William Morris Society, $18 for others. To order go to the William Morris Society's website:

http://morrissociety.org

or send a check to:
William Morris Society
P.O. Box 53263
Washington, DC 20009

Reminder: Robert Louis Stevenson (NCSA, CSU/Fresno) (9/30/2012; 3/7-9/2013)

Special Session on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Life & Works

“Loco/Motion” 34th Annual Conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association

Fresno, California, March 7-9, 2013

As part of next year’s NCSA conference, Arnold Anthony Schmidt is seeking papers for one or more panels about Robert Louis Stevenson that address the theme of “Locomotion.”  Scholars may consider the theme literally (treating images of travel and physical movement in Stevenson’s works), or metaphorically (e.g. chronological, ethical, historical, intellectual, psychological, or spiritual “motion”).  Feel free to email Arnold if you have questions about the appropriateness of a topic for presentation. 

A representative of the Robert Louis Stevenson Silverado Museum will join us to discuss the library’s rare books/manuscripts and to display exhibits from the collection.

To submit, please e-mail 250-word abstracts of 20-minute papers and one-page vitae to Arnold Anthony Schmidt at aschmidt@csustan.edu by 30 September 2012.  Graduate students may, upon acceptance of their abstracts, submit complete papers in competition for a travel grant to help cover transportation and lodging expenses. 

For more information, please see the general conference CFP below or visit http://www.nineteenthcenturystudiesassociation.org/

Historians of British Art: Travel Award (9/15/2012) and Publication Grant (1/31/2013)

The Historians of British Art Travel Award

The award is designated for a graduate student member of HBA who will be presenting a paper on British art or visual culture at an academic conference in 2013. The award of $750 is intended to offset travel costs.

To apply, send a letter of request, a copy of the letter of acceptance from the organizer of the conference session, an abstract of the paper to be presented, a budget of estimated expenses (noting what items may be covered by other resources), and a CV to Renate Dohmen, Prize Committee Chair, HBA, brd4231@louisiana.edu. The deadline is September 15, 2012.  

The Historians of British Art Publication Grant

The Historians of British Art invites applications for its 2013 publication grant. The society will award up to $600 to offset publication costs in the field of British art or visual culture that has been accepted by a publisher. Applicants must be current members of HBA.

To apply, send a 500-word project description, publication information (name of journal or press and projected publication date), budget, and CV to Renate Dohmen, Prize Committee Chair, HBA, brd4231@louisiana.edu. The deadline is January 31, 2013.

http://www.historiansofbritishart.org/

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

What Becomes a Legend Most: Dickensian Character

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

Last Call for Registration: Edward Lear: The Bicentennial Conference (9/21-22/2012)

Edward Lear: The Bicentennial Conference

Jesus College, Oxford, 21-22 September 2012

http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/news-events/upcoming-events/201209/edward-lear-bicentennial-conference

Edward Lear (1812-1888): zoological illustrator, landscape painter, cartoonist, travel writer, drawing master to Queen Victoria, depressive, diarist, friend of the Tennysons, epileptic, exile, and nonsense poet of genius. Praised by Ruskin and Eliot, elegized by Auden, analysed by Orwell and Huxley, Lear has never ceased to fascinate and delight. His life and works intersect major artistic currents of the nineteenth century, and his influence can be felt in successors as diverse as Stevie Smith and John Ashbery, James Joyce and James Thurber.

This two-day conference will be the first ever gathering of scholars to celebrate and discuss Lear’s work in his various creative fields. Interdisciplinary in scope, it will set the agenda for future study, resituating Lear as a major figure in his own time, and showing how he continues to speak to our own.

Speakers: Anna Barton * Gillian Beer * Matthew Bevis * Aingeal Clare * Richard Cronin  * Christopher Decker * Hugh Haughton * Daniel Karlin * Robert M. Peck * Adam Phillips * Seamus Perry * Peter Robinson * Anne Stillman * Peter Swaab * James Williams

Registration is now open at: http://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&prodid=108&deptid=110&catid=22. Registration closes September 14, 2012. 

For further information, please contact james.williams@jesus.ox.ac.uk

Reminder: Other Worlds (9/14/2012; 12/3/2012)

Other Worlds
Victorian Network Conference
3 Dec 2012, Senate House, University of London

Keynote Speakers: Dr John Holmes (Reading) and Professor Cora Kaplan (KCL)

From other lands to other planets to other dimensions, the nineteenth-century imagination thrived on the idea of ‘elsewhere’. Alongside a developing rhetoric of geographically and intellectually bounded identities grew a fascination with alterity. Other Worlds seeks to explore the many ways in which Victorians looked beyond their quotidian spheres to imagined alternatives. We invite submissions which explore nineteenth-century modes of thought which position themselves as other, alternative, transcendent, secret or hidden.

This conference also seeks to explore how we, as a network of Victorian scholars, construct the ‘other Victorian’. We use ‘Victorian’ to denote a period of time, describe our research, talk of a people and a nation. Yet this casual use is juxtaposed with a tacit recognition of the instability of the term and its homogenizing tendency as it collapses differences to construct an ideologically seamless era. Abandoning the quest for what ‘Victorian’ really means – an inevitable failure – this conference seeks to embrace the multiplicity of worlds that the term denotes and inhabits and the rebellious tendencies of the ‘Victorians’ themselves towards the idea of a single world.

Other Worlds aims to bring together scholars working in a wide range of disciplines to explore in greater depth the many fields of thought covered by the conference theme.  Papers might deal with some of the following topics:

• Private worlds; confessional writing; secrecy
• The spiritual world; prayers, religious writing; heaven, hell and purgatory
• Fantastical and imaginary worlds
• Children's writing; childhood fantasy
• Marginal or subversive communities
• Travel, exploration, unknown countries
• Alternative histories
• The Victorians as ‘other world’

Please send abstracts of around 250 words to otherworldsconference@gmail.com along with a brief biography by 14th September 2012.

Other Worlds is a joint conference between King’s College London and Victorian Network and is organised by Sarah Crofton, Melissa Dickson and Fariha Shaikh. It is supported by the AHRC.

Curran Fellowship for Research on the Victorian Press (10/15/2012)

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) is pleased to announce the competition for the fifth annual Curran Fellowship, a travel and research grant intended to aid scholars studying 19th-century British magazines and newspapers in making use of primary print and archival sources. Made possible through the generosity of Eileen Curran, Professor Emerita of English, Colby College, and inspired by her pioneering research on Victorian periodicals, the Curran Fellowship is awarded annually in the form of two grants of $2,500 each.

The projected research may involve study of any aspects of the periodical press in any of its manifold forms, and may range from within Britain itself to the many countries, within and outside of the Empire, where British magazines and newspapers were bought, sold, and read
during “the long nineteenth century” (ca. 1780-1914).

Applications for the Curran Fellowship for research to be undertaken in 2013 must be submitted in electronic form and sent to curranfellowship@rs4vp.org by October 15, 2012. Applicants should send a c.v., the names and contact information of two scholars who are familiar with the applicant and his or her research goals, and a description of the project to which these funds would be applied. Any queries about the application may be sent to the same address.

Applicants will be notified by January 15, 2013. Successful applicants will be required to submit a brief report to RSVP at the conclusion of the funded portion of their project, describing the results of their research, and are asked to acknowledge the fellowship in any published work based on that research.

This call for applications may be found on the RSVP website at http://www.rs4vp.org/prizes.html A set of additional guidelines for applicants may be found at http://www.rs4vp.org/curran_fellowship_guidelines.pdf

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

Mothering, Motherhood, and the Ideal of the Mother in Victorian Literature

This panel invites papers on Victorian motherhood: the literal figure and/or its literary incarnations. What is the evolution of this role, its ideals and their practicality? What is the intersection between literature and these concepts? Topics to consider include but are not limited to: philosophical constructs of motherhood, societal expectations and realities, idealizing the Victorian mother, radical motherhood, and literary mothering. Please email 250-500 word abstracts to Kristin.LeVeness@ncc.edu.

Chair: Kristin Le Veness

New Tenure-Track C19 Job in English, U of Washington (11/16/2012)

Assistant Professor: The Global Nineteenth Century, Department of English, University of Washington

The English Department of the University of Washington is seeking a full-time, tenure-track Assistant Professor whose primary research and teaching expertise include 19th-Century British and/or British Empire Fiction. Preference given to candidates working in one of the following areas: comparative colonialisms, slavery, gender/sexuality, popular culture, law, performance and visual studies, trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific studies, religion/secularization. Applicants should have PhD degree by the start of appointment.  University of Washington faculty engage in teaching, research and service.  As a public institution, the University of Washington seeks candidates committed to working with diverse student and community populations; applicants are encouraged to describe in their applications how their scholarship and teaching contributes to diverse communities. Please submit application materials including a letter of application, c.v., dossier, dissertation abstract, teaching portfolio, and writing sample to the MLA Interfolio ByCommittee Job Application Web site.  Contact information: Gary Handwerk, Chair, Department of English, University of Washington, Padelford Hall A101, Box 354330, Seattle, WA, 98195.  Priority will be given to applications received by November 16, 2012.

The University of Washington is an affirmative action, equal opportunity employer.  The University is dedicated to the goal of building a culturally diverse and pluralistic faculty and staff committed to teaching and working in a multicultural environment and strongly encourages applications from women, minorities, individuals with disabilities, and covered veterans.

Reminder: Essay Collection on Thomas Hardy’s Short Stories (9/7/2012)

Hardy’s short stories have had little attention as compared to his novels and poetry. Therefore, I am organizing a volume of previously unpublished essays and seek articles of 6,000 to 8,000 words on any aspect of Hardy’s short stories which help deepen our understanding of his use of the genre. Proposals may address a story individually or the stories as collected in the volumes Wessex Tales (1888), A Group of Noble Dames (1891), Life’s Little Ironies (1894), A Changed Man (1913).

Key themes and topics might include:

Implications of periodical publication;

Readership of individual stories and/or collected stories;

Use of sensationalism;

Use of humor;

Emphasis on class and cultural issues;

Importance of music;

Gender relations;

Use of setting;

Use of supernatural, mystery, mythical aspects;

Use of religion;

Emphasis on community relations and mores;

Use of narrative form

Please send proposals of up to 500 words, for articles of between 6,000-8,000 words, by 7 September 2012 to Juliette B. Schaefer: schaefej@ohiodominican.edu Ohio Dominican University (614) 251-4667. Proposals should include the article’s working title, the author’s academic affiliation, and a 100-word biography.

Inquiries are welcome. I will aim to inform authors that they have been selected for the volume by the second week of October. 

Job Listing: Children’s/Victorian Literature at East Carolina University

The Department of English at East Carolina University (http://www.ecu.edu/english) seeks a tenure-track assistant professor specializing in Children’s Literature and Victorian Literature, to begin August 12, 2013. Ph.D. or equivalent by August 2013 is required.

Candidates should demonstrate expertise in each field and contribute to teaching and course development in both areas at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The successful candidate will be expected to pursue an ongoing research agenda in either area and provide appropriate service to the university, community, and profession.

Screening begins November 1, 2012, and will continue until the position is filled. Candidates for this position must complete a candidate profile and submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae, one-page statements of teaching philosophy and research agenda, and writing sample online at www.jobs.ecu.edu.  In addition, arrange for three current reference letters to be sent to:

Jeffrey Johnson, Chair
Department of English
Mail Stop 555, Bate Building 2201
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC 27858-4353

East Carolina University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action University that accommodates individuals with disabilities. Individuals requesting accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) should contact the Department for Disability Support Services at (252) 737-1016 (Voice/TTY). Proper documentation of identity and employability is required at the time of employment. Official transcript required upon employment.

CFP: Architecture of Cultures and Identities in Canada (9/30/2012; 5/13-15/2013)

The House that Isaac Built:

The Architecture of Cultures and Identities in Canada

May 13-15, 2013        

Huron University College at Western

London, Ontario, Canada

Huron University College, Western's founding college, is pleased to announce an interdisciplinary conference in celebration of its Sesquicentennial, 1863-2013 —“The House that Isaac Built: The Architecture of Cultures and Identities in Canada”— focused on the history, context, and influence of Huron's founding generation.  As a global citizen in the Victorian age, Isaac Hellmuth, Huron's first principal, embraced a broad vision for the future of Canada. The conference invites a reassessment of that vision and its implications, in their full complexity.

Born near Warsaw, Isaac Hellmuth began life as Isaac Hirschmann, changing his name following a painful break with his family in the wake of his conversion from Judaism to Christianity. Hellmuth moved to England, and then to Canada, where was ordained in the Church of England, and began a career that included a professorship in Hebrew at Bishop's University, oversight of the Colonial Church and School Society operations in Canada, and the office of Bishop in the Diocese of Huron. His role in expanding institutions of higher learning as the first Principal of Huron College and founder of Hellmuth College for Boys, Hellmuth Ladies' College, and, in 1878, Western University was shaped by the powerful tenets of evangelical liberalism. It was in accord with his engagement in the movement to abolish slavery, and to extend the work of the church "without distinction of race."

Hellmuth emerges from the historical record as an institution-builder whose work embraced a broad and liberal vision of progress in Victorian Canada, but "the house that Isaac built" has always been a work under construction, and opens outward on more expansive vistas than might first be supposed. Hellmuth spent much of his life challenging established expectations, crossing and transgressing boundaries of nation, empire, and religion. “The House that Isaac Built” begins by taking new measure of Huron's first global citizen and the contested cultural landscape that his work helped to shape.

Taking its lead from the diverse intellectual interests and global engagement of Hellmuth, “The House that Isaac Built” seeks papers from multiple disciplinary perspectives including history, education, political science, literature, theology, Canadian studies, First Nations studies, and cultural studies.

Paper and panel themes may include, but are not limited to:

• the age of Huron's founders in international context
• education and the liberal arts
• anti-slavery in Victorian Canada and the Atlantic world
• evangelicalism and religion
• race, gender, and identity
• First Nations history
• the regional history of south-western Ontario
• contemporary scholarship on Canadian culture and evolving conceptions of community

We invite academics, independent scholars, and graduate students to submit proposals for individual papers and complete panels. Suggestions for roundtables are also encouraged.  Presenters may be invited to submit papers for a proposed edited collection reassessing Isaac Hellmuth, and his historical context and influence. 

Please direct proposals to huron150conference@uwo.ca  by September 30, 2012.

For individual 20-minute papers, send the title and a 250-word abstract; for panels, include the panel title and a brief description, plus a 250-word abstract with title for each paper. Applicants should also provide a one-page CV or short biographical statement. Notification of acceptance will be provided by mid-November 2012.

Visit the conference website at: www.huronuc.ca/conference150

CFP: Exhibiting Human Remains (9/1/2012; 6/4/2013)

History and Cultural Representations of Human Remains

This series of 3 interdisciplinary conferences will examine the relationship between anatomical knowledge and practice and their cultural representations so as to offer an overview of the cultural reception of the exhibition of human remains. The conferences are aimed at scholars from a variety of medical humanities.

Medical Museums and Anatomical Collections

Natural History Museum – Toulouse, February 4, 2013

Anatomical Models

Academy of Medicine – Paris, April 4, 2013

Exhibiting Human Remains

Hunterian Museum – London, June 4, 2013

Call for Papers: Exhibiting Human Remains

Hunterian Museum – London

June 4, 2013

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the issue of emotional responses related to the dissection and exhibition of human remains was increasingly at the heart of debates related to the constitution (and closing down) of medical museums. This last conference will analyse the reception of medical museums and their exhibited human remains, focusing more particularly on the impact of an increasingly fragmented and commodified human body. The conference will therefore look at the history of and debates around the exhibition of human remains and how these debates were represented in literature and the arts. It will investigate the changes in representation, tracing the evolution from the aestheticized bodies of the Renaissance to the human remains exhibited in nineteenth-century medical museums, and also explore how the exhibition of human remains radically changed ideas about the diffusion of knowledge and the relation between science and nature as well as suggested new epistemological strategies. Using literature and the arts as significant media in the popularisation of a new scopic regime (examining, for instance, literary and artistic representations of embalmed corpses, exhibited skeletons or bottled specimens), the conference will highlight the way in which the artistic field often offered a more humanized or ethically more complex version of the gruesome business of dissection that anatomists and curators were daily trying to make presentable to their audiences. In this way, the conference will probe the links between episteme and transgression, and call attention to the ethical questions that were raised (and still are) by the exhibition (or even trafficking) of human remains.

We invite 20-minute papers that engage with, but are not limited to, the following topics :

• the history of the exhibition of human remains in medical essays, journals, manuals of dissection
• the reception of human remains, audiences and gender issues
• the policing of the gaze in medical museums
• audience responses to natural anatomies and artificial models
• the links between human remains and other anatomical tools
• human remains, ethics and medicine
• exhibited human remains and anatomical legislation
• representations of human remains in broadsides, pamphlets, caricatures, advertising and fiction
• representations of the corpse as commodity/anatomical material
• representations of tissue trafficking
• the reception/representation of human remains and the issue of mortality
• the meaning(s) of human remains
• human remains in Gothic/sensation/detective fiction
• representations of anatomists and bodysnatchers in fiction and non-fiction (essays, manuscripts, letters, diaries, etc.)
• stories and testimonies relating supplies of cadavers, the relation between anatomists and grave-robbers, dissection

Please send 300-word proposals (attached as a .doc-file; in English only), together with a short biographical note to Laurence Talairach-Vielmas (talairac@univ-tlse2.fr) & Rafael Mandressi (rafael.mandressi@damesme.cnrs.fr). Please write ‘EXPLORA/Exhibiting Human Remains/Abstract’ as email object. Deadline for submissions: September 1, 2012. Contributors will be notified that their proposal has been accepted by mid-October 2012.

Registration Open: Victorian Things (8/22/2012)

Victorian Things: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Material Culture

22 September 2012, Oxford Brookes U

Booking has now opened on Victorian Things: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Material Culture. To confirm a place, please visit http://shop.brookes.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&prodid=45&deptid=24&catid=37 .

Details about the symposium can be found on the linked site. 

For any further information or for a full schedule, please email Dr. Tatiana Kontou, Dr. Verity Hunt, Dr. Andrew Mangham or Verity Burke at victorianthings12@gmail.com

Please also see our facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/victorianthings) or hashtag #VicThings on twitter.

Reminder: “Loco/Motion,” 34th annual NCSA conference (9/30/2012; 3/7-9/2013)

Loco/Motion

34th Annual Conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association

Fresno, California, March 7-9, 2013

The long nineteenth century set the world on the move. Travel became increasingly important for business and pleasure, for war and peace. At the same time, new forms of moving people arose: the balloon, ships, undergrounds, funiculars, the railroads. Each carried riders to great distances, different locales, and novel pursuits. But motion wasn’t purely spatial; new movements arose as well, sweeping the inhabitants of the period into fresh vistas of thought and endeavor. We seek papers and panels that capture the sense of movement at work and at play during the long nineteenth century (1789-1914). Papers may address the intersections of movement/s, focus on technologies of motion in isolation, or reveal the desires—for gain, glory, greed—that set the world on its feet.

Some suggested topics:

• Gold Rushes (Mineral Manias and Speculative Destinations)
• Literature of the Sea
• Maps and Cartography
• The Science of Exploration (Darwin’s Voyages)
• Narratives of Time Travel, Travel into Space (Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle)
• The West as Destination and Concept
• Celebrity Performance Tours
• Movement of Goods and Ideas
• Migration and Relocation
• Expeditions
• Concepts of Motion and Stasis
• New Forms of Creative Motion and Locomotion (Moving Pictures, Photography, Dance, Music)

We also welcome other interpretations of the conference theme.

The campus of California State University, Fresno, will host us in 2013. Its setting makes it the perfect place to explore the conference theme, since Fresno is ringed by the original Gold Rush towns and three superb national parks (Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon), two of which are nineteenth-century creations. As a result, Fresno still bears evidence of the vast changes caused by the movements of the nineteenth century. The library of CSU Fresno houses the Donald G. Larson Collection on International Expositions and Fairs; material from this archive will be featured in a special exhibition for the conference.  Please note: submission of a proposal indicates intent to present.

Please e-mail abstracts (250 words) for 20-minute papers that provide the author’s name and paper title in the heading, as well as a one-page cv, to Prof. Toni Wein at NCSA-2013@sbcglobal.net by September 30, 2012. Please note that submission of a proposal indicates intent to present. Presenters will be notified in November 2012. Graduate students whose proposals are accepted may, at that point, submit complete papers in competition for a travel grant to help cover transportation and lodging expenses.