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.

CFP: M/MLA Travel Panel "The Debts of Travel" (4/15/2012; 11/8-11/2012)

M/MLA, November 8-11, Cincinnati, OH

Travel Writing/Writing Travel
Topic: The Debts of Travel

Travel is liable to produce financial debt, as travelers incur expenses far beyond those of their ordinary lives. But what of the less literal indebtedness that is inherent in the process of traveling? This panel seeks to explore the ways that travel leaves traveling subjects variously indebted. For example, they may be emotionally indebted to traveling companions or to individuals they encounter who help them along their way. They may return home ideologically changed, forever indebted to new cultural experiences and the sense of difference that is endemic of travel. Travelers may leave something of themselves behind and experience travel debts as a kind of loss; or they may experience the process of becoming indebted as freeing themselves from previous restrictions. Proposals may consider any aspects of how travel is predicated upon or results in various forms of indebtedness, whether in travelers or in the people/cultures they encounter. Proposals for perspectives on travel from any historical/literary period welcome, and those from Victorian studies are encouraged. If you, or a particularly promising graduate student of yours, are working on relevant Victorian material, please apply! Inquiries are welcome.

Please send 300-word abstracts by April 15 to Andrea Kaston Tange, Eastern Michigan University, akastont@emich.edu.

For more information on the conference itself, please see: http://www.luc.edu/mmla/annualconvention.html 

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

Mixed Methods Approaches to Dickens and Characterization

A symposium at the interface of language and literature

May 10th 2012 – University of Nottingham

Registration Deadline:  20 April

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

Confirmed speakers

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

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

Registration fee:

£20 (this covers lunch and coffee breaks)

£10 (for students)

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

Exhibition: Dickens and Massachusetts: A Tale of Power and Transformation (3/30-10/20/2012)

This week major Dickens exhibition opens in Massachusetts (Mar. 30 - Oct. 20, 2012):

Dickens and Massachusetts: A Tale of Power and Transformation tells the story of a key moment in history, a moment of transformation for a man and for a nation. To be held at the Lowell National Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts, the interactive exhibition opens this Friday, March 30 and will run through October 20, 2012. We hope you will visit to Lowell to see this major exhibition!

The exhibition features a rich collection of rare Dickens artifacts, on loan from the Charles Dickens Museum of London, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the American Antiquarian Society, the New York Public Library, the Fellman Collection at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the Perkins School for the Blind, and other institutions. The 1842 portrait of the young Dickens, painted by Boston artist Francis Alexander, will receive its first public display in over 30 years. Also included are the charming 1841 Daniel Maclise portrait of the Dickens children (who were left at home when Charles and Catherine Dickens visited America), the Boston Line Type (raised letter) edition of The Old Curiosity Shop donated by Dickens to the Perkins School for the Blind in 1868, Lorwnzo Fowler's report on the 1842 phrenological examination of Dickens, original letters, first editions, and other special artifacts. Interactive elements throughout the exhibit allow visitors to engage actively with our materials.

The exhibition is free to the public, and we are offering 75+ programs over the seven-month run of the exhibition. We are also holding a symposium this summer (see previous blog post).  Please check us out at http://www.uml.edu/dickens.


More about the Exhibition:
In 1842 when Charles Dickens and his wife, Catherine Hogarth Dickens, traveled to North America, he had already achieved immense fame. Blockbuster hits such as Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and The Old Curiosity Shop had established the 29-year-old Dickens as the most popular writer of the era, and, in a new age of mass media culture, he was the first true celebrity. After this trip we see a new vigor and complexity in his writing and a heightened social consciousness. America changed him. He began to see that his role as a pop culture hero came with great accountability. It is no coincidence that the year after he returned home, he published his iconic Christmas Carol, a tale of radical transformation and social responsibility.

The exhibition “Dickens and Massachusetts: A Tale of Power and Transformation” focuses on several pivotal moments from the 1842 and 1867-68 trips to America, exploring these themes:

Dickens Finds His Power
       The Early Years and Literary Fame
       A Growing Family
       A Magnetic Personality: Mesmerism and Celebrity

Bridging Two Worlds
       Departure from Liverpool
       The Passage over Stormy Seas
       Arrival in Boston: "Here we are!"
       Cross-Atlantic Letters

Conscience and Controversy
       Harvard and the Unitarians
       Felton Friendship: "Our hearts are of the largest size"
       A Controversial Stand on Copyright

Models for Reform
       Perkins School for the Blind
       Lowell Mills: "A large, populous, thriving place"

Reading Dickens Reading America
       Capturing Dickens through Art and Phrenology
       Capturing America in a Travel Book :  "slavery, spittoons, and senators"
       The Scourge of Slavery: Dickens, Channing, and Longfellow

Dickens Returns
       Transformations: From 1842 to 1868
       Dickens on the Stage: The American Reading Tour
       The Great International Walking Match
       Farewell Friends

Dickens Lives On

“Dickens and Massachusetts: A Tale of Power and Transformation” is co-curated by Diana Archibald, Associate Professor of English at UMass Lowell and director of the 2002 "Dickens and America" project in Lowell, and David Blackburn, Chief of Cultural Resources and Programs at Lowell National Historical Park. Other contributing scholars include Joel Brattin, Professor of Humanities, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Natalie McKnight, Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development, Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning, and Professor of Humanities, Boston University; Lillian Nayder, Professor and Chair of English at Bates College; and Christie Jackson, Curator of Decorative Arts at the Old Sturbridge Village.

HTTP://WWW.UML.EDU/DICKENS
http://www.facebook.com/DickensinLowell
http://www.twitter.com/dickenslowell

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

Dickens Society Symposium

University of Massachusetts Lowell
July 13 – 15, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

Reminder: “Extending Families” Special Issue: Victorian Review, Fall 2013 (4/1/2012)

We invite submissions for a special issue of Victorian Review mapping out new ideas of the family in the 19th century including:

• adoption and foster care
• cultural directives about proper filial behavior
• romantic marriage
• sibling relationships
• perceived threats to the family
• family formation in a colonial context
• the effect of changing marriage laws
• family unions
• narratives of unusual or idealized families
• discourses about primitive families
• primogeniture and inheritance
• incest and familial unions
• same-sex and non-normative couples
• lateral relations: cousins, uncles, aunts
• domestic fictions
• ex-spouses, love triangles, bigamous relations
• families without parents
• political/journalistic debates about familial roles
• servants, companions, governesses
• in-laws, poor relations, extended family

We aim to showcase the subjects not usually considered in the nuclear family: the servant, the grandparent, the poor relation, the foster child, the ex-spouse. What does family look like when we see it as a permeable, flexible, shifting configuration? Thus, we particularly invite essays that resist the privileging of the nuclear family and work against the teleological narrative of the (heteronormative) courtship plot.

The deadline is April 1, 2012. Submit essays of not more than 8,000 words (including endnotes), in MLA style to both guest editors by email attachment. Please consult the Victorian Review website (http://web.uvic.ca/victorianreview/submissions.html) for further submission guidelines.

Kelly Hager, Simmons College  
kelly.hager@simmons.edu           

Talia Schaffer, Queens College and Graduate Center, CUNY

talia.schaffer@qc.cuny.edu

Sensualising Deformity Conference Programme/Registration (6/15-16/2012)

The preliminary programme for the upcoming conference at the University of Edinburgh, Sensualising Deformity: Communication and Construction of Monstrous Embodiment, is now online at http://sensualisingdeformity.blogspot.co.uk/p/conference-programme.html, and registration is live. We are currently offering reduced rates for anyone who books before 15 April. For more details, visit http://sensualisingdeformity.blogspot.com.

Our keynote speakers include Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (George Washington University), Margrit Shildrick (Linköping University), Peter Hutchings (Northumbria University) and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Emory University). In addition, our programme features a number of fascinating papers pertaining to nineteenth-century constructions/conceptions of exceptional bodies, so we hope to see some of you there!

CFP: 'Nobler Imaginings and Mightier Struggles': Octavia Hill and the Remaking Of British Society (6/1/2012; 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 the University of Oxford, with the support of Octavia Housing

Sutton House, London, 27-28 September 2012

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.

Reminder: VanArsdel Essay Prize (5/1/2012)

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. 

Manuscripts should be 15-25 pages and 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 the accompanying e-mail, applicants should include a description of their current status in graduate school.

For more information, visit http://www.rs4vp.org/prizes.html.