CFP: Travel in the Nineteenth Century: Narratives, Histories and Collections (2/15, 7/14-7/15/2011)

"Travel in the Nineteenth Century: Narratives, Histories and Collections"

14-15 July 2011

Lincoln, UK

In the nineteenth century, railways made distant locations ever more accessible, the Grand Tour became more and more a pastime of the middle classes, and British imperial expansion brought exotic locales and non-Western cultures ever closer to home. New ways of thinking about and communicating experiences of travel and of interactions with other cultures held a significant influence in various areas of nineteenth-century culture. This period saw an enormous expansion in museums and popular exhibition culture, technological innovations, such as photography and film, as well as the vast growth of a popular press that served to deliver these experiences, images, and objects to an increasingly literate public. This public in turn seemed to possess an insatiable appetite for travel narratives, shows, and exhibitions, both fictional and factual.

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the divergent and complex ways in which travel was understood and communicated in the nineteenth century. Contributors are invited to investigate the depiction and representation of travel in as wide a variety of media and for as wide a variety of audiences as possible. We seek submissions from historians, literary scholars, art historians, anthropologists, and material culture scholars, which illuminate the narratives—popular, academic, private or official—that surrounded travel in the period.

Plenary speakers will be James Buzard (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Geoff Quilley (Sussex University), and Nicholas Thomas (Cambridge University).

We invite papers on themes such as:

• The construction of ideas of the real and the virtual or authenticity and distance through travel narratives
• Different venues for narrating travel, including the domestic, and the way such venues affected the consumption of travel narratives
• Forms of travelling individuals, such as the missionary, the explorer, the tourist, the connoisseur, or the scientist, and how they were constructed by texts, images, and objects
• Different audiences for travel narratives – in literature, exhibitions, private patronage of artists, or in museums and private collections
• How different narratives framed and constructed the moment of encounter with the cultural other in travel
• The role of technology in enabling new narratives of travel and how narratives of travel described technology
• Travelling in time as well as travelling in space

We also invite session proposals that map onto the themes listed above. Session proposals should include a brief outline of the session (300 words), as well as three abstracts (300 words each) for the proposed session.

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to Kate Hill (khill@lincoln.ac.uk), Laurie Garrison (lgarrison@lincoln.ac.uk), or Claudia Capancioni (claudia.capancioni@bishopg.ac.uk). The closing date for proposals is February 15, 2011.

Click here for the conference website: http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/conferences/travel_in_the_19th_century/

CFP: VISAWUS 2011: "The Vulgar and the Proper: Victorian Manners & Mores" (3/15, 10/13-15/2011)

16th ANNUAL CONFERENCE of the VICTORIAN INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES ASSOCIATION OF THE WESTERN UNITED STATES (VISAWUS)

"The Vulgar and the Proper: Victorian Manners and Mores"

October 13-15, 2011

Houston, TX

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Helena Michie, English, Rice University, author, The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies; Sororophobia: Differences among Women in Literature and Culture; Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal; co-author, Confinements: Fertility and Infertility in Contemporary Culture, and co- editor, 19th-Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century. PLENARY SPEAKER: Lynn Voskuil, English, University of Houston, author, Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity, and essays in Victorian Studies, Feminist Studies, and ELH. Her current project is entitled "Horticulture and Imperialism: The Garden Spaces of the British Empire."

The 16th annual conference focuses on Victorian obsessions with vulgarity and propriety. We invite proposals on manners and mores in politics, culture, society, religion, art, science, economics, rural life, and other Victorian matters of decorum and propriety and what Victorians deemed vulgar, crude or crass. We encourage papers across all disciplines, including (but not restricted to) art history, literature, gender, history of science, history, material culture, political science, performance, life writings, journalism, photography, popular culture, and economics.

By March 15, 2011 email 300-word abstract and 1-page CV (name on BOTH) to: Laurel.Williamson@sjcd.edu.

Download the full CFP here, and click here for more information on VISAWUS.

CFP: Victorian Epidemics (9/15/2010; 4/29-30/2011)

Victorian Epidemics
Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada
Banff, Alberta April 29-30, 2011

Keynote speaker: Pamela Gilbert, Albert Brick Professor of English, University of Florida

Dr. Gilbert has published widely in the areas of Victorian literature, cultural studies and the history of medicine. Her first book, Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1997, followed by Mapping the Victorian Social Body (SUNY Press, 2004) and The Citizen’s Body (Ohio State University Press, 2007), and Cholera and Nation (SUNY Press, 2008).

This international conference will bring together specialists in Victorian art history, history, gender studies, science, and literature to contemplate the theme of disease in Victorian England and its colonies. Papers will address medical and social histories of disease, literary and artistic representations of disease, and disease as metaphor in Victorian culture.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Victorian plagues: cholera, TB, venereal disease, influenza, smallpox
• histories and narratives of disease
• identity and pathology
• disease and the body
• disease as metaphor, languages of disease, contagion, illness
• disease and colonization, disease and globalization
• art as disease, mass culture as disease
• the spread of commercialism
• visual and literary representations of disease and illness
• sewers, filth, miasma
• slums, prostitution
• health and hygiene
• representations of illness
• mental illness
• imperial anxiety and disease
  

Please submit a 500 word abstract and short (50-75 word bio) by September 15 to Kristen Guest, Program Chair, kguest@unbc.ca

The conference will take place in Banff, Alberta in the heart of the Canadian Rockies. The town of Banff is surrounded by the spectacular scenery of Banff National Park, which offers excellent opportunities for both hiking and downhill skiing in late April. Banff is approximately one hour from Calgary and is easily accessible by car or air (regular and reasonably priced shuttles are available from Calgary International Airport).

Photo by Flickr user currybet / Creative Commons licensed

CFP: Re-Reading Symonds (June 18 / Sept 11, 2010)

(Re)Reading John Addington Symonds

Saturday 11th September 2010

A one-day conference at Keele University

Plenary Speakers: Howard J. Booth (Manchester) and Hilary Fraser (Birkbeck)

Interest in John Addington Symonds has revived in recent years due to the 1984 publication of his Memoirs (edited by Phyllis Grosskurth), a unique and important record of Victorian homosexuality. He has since become an important figure for historians of sexuality and queer criticism. Despite this resurgence, Symonds has remained a marginalised figure; his participation across multiple academic and creative disciplines is largely excluded from the canon of nineteenth century cultural criticism. This has prompted John Pemble to write: ‘[Symonds’s contemporary readership] kept his reputation alive and most of his books in print until the 1930s; but his prestige faded as they aged and died off.’

Interest in Symonds has grown and diversified during the 2000s. This one-day conference will provide a forum within which to assimilate and evaluate this new and emerging work; it will offer a wide ranging re-assessment of Symonds, exploring his contribution to multiple disciplines and his significance for current fields of academic study.

Papers might address (but are not limited to):

• Symonds and art/art history

• Symonds and Hellenism

• Symonds as ‘man of letters’; literary critic; historian; poet; essayist; translator

• Symonds and nineteenth-century science; sexology; evolution

• Symonds and life writing

• Symonds and travel writing

• Symonds in collaboration

• Symonds and his contemporaries

• Symonds and his critics/advocates

• Symonds and publication; textuality; book history

• Symonds’s reception, reputation and ‘afterlife’

• Symonds and gender/sexuality


Abstracts for 15 to 20 minute papers (c. 250 words) should be emailed to a.k.regis@engl.keele.ac.uk by 18 June 2010.

Informal enquiries should be addressed to the conference organisers: David Amigoni (d.amigoni@engl.keele.ac.uk) and Amber K. Regis (a.k.regis@engl.keele.ac.uk).

This conference is generously supported by the British Association for Victorian Studies.

UPDATE: There's now a conference website: http://sites.google.com/site/johnaddingtonsymonds/

(Image of Symonds is from the Wikimedia Commons.)

CFP: Stead2012

W. T. Stead: Centenary Conference of a Newspaper Revolutionary

British Library, London, 16 & 17 April 2012

When William Stead died on the maiden voyage of the Titanic in April 1912, he was the most famous Englishman on board. He was one of the inventors of the modern tabloid. His advocacy of ‘government by journalism’ helped launch military campaigns. His exposé of child prostitution raised the age of consent to sixteen, yet his investigative journalism got him thrown in jail. A mass of contradictions and a crucial figure in the history of the British press, Stead was a towering presence in the cultural life of late Victorian and Edwardian society.

This conference marks the centenary of his death. We aim to recover Stead’s extraordinary influence on modern English culture and to mark a major moment in the history of journalism. In 2012 the British Library will open its state of the art newspaper reading rooms. In Stead’s spirit we will also investigate our own revolution in newspapers and print journalism in the age of digital news.

With Stead as a focal point, we will use aspects of his career to develop multiple avenues into the history of his time and ours. This is not a narrowly focused specialist conference, but one that aims to adopt wide cultural perspectives.

This is a call for expressions of interest. Please send proposals for papers (500 words) or any other suggestions for the conference to stead2010@googlemail.com by the end of July 2010. A full call for proposals will follow in 2011. Further details are here: https://sites.google.com/site/stead2012/

We welcome proposals on the following, in respect of Stead and/or related topics:

• Stead’s ‘New Journalism’. The Pall Mall Gazette, Review of Reviews and other journals were crucial in the emergence of the modern day broadsheet and tabloid press. Stead provides the opportunity to re-assess some of the key phases in the influence and structures of the press in modern Britain.
• Stead and technology. Stead was one of the best recorders of the second industrial revolution of the late Victorian period, when telegraphs, gramophones, microphones, telephones, Kodak cameras, wireless telegraphy, horseless carriages, typewriters and new printing technologies transformed everyday life.
• Stead and the New Imperialism. Stead’s support for English colonies was part of his advocacy for a white commonwealth that would be united through journalism and new communication technologies. We welcome papers on specific elements of Stead’s imperialism, from the support for General Gordon, his opposition to the South African War, to his friendship with Cecil Rhodes.
• Stead and the Titanic. Rumours about Stead’s manly self-sacrifice and Christian acceptance of death in the last hours of the boat were still being repeated as late as the film A Night to Remember (1958). How was Stead’s death reported? What was his cultural significance in 1912? We also particularly welcome papers on any aspect of the Titanic, especially on the role of newspapers in securing the mythic place the sinking has in our culture.
• Stead and the occult. Stead tended to report Spiritualism favourably, as part of the non-conformist world of religion. He became active in the movement in the 1880s and tried to foster support for the Society for Psychical Research. He ran the journal Borderland from 1893-7, which reported on ghosts, psychical experiments, hypnotic rapports, astral doubles and messages from the dead.
• Stead and religion. We aim to trace his early non-conformity, conversion to secular Evangelicism, and his advocacy of a National Church through investigative annuals, such as If Christ Came to Chicago. We also hope to examine his alliance to William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, whom he helped compose In Darkest England and the Way Out in 1890.
• Stead and women’s rights. Stead employed women journalists and writers and championed their role in public life. Typically conflicted, this support derived in part from a Christian sense of women’s benign influence on public purity (so that he was disturbed by the overtly sexual New Woman literature of the 1890s). Stead is an exemplary figure to explore the anxieties and contradictions of the gender and sexual liberations of the late 19C.
• Stead’s ‘invention’ of the tabloid moral campaign. Through his famous campaigns (‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, the relief of General Gordon, British re-armament) Stead interceded into contemporary political and social debates and pioneered this major journalistic genre.
• Stead and politics. Stead’s political radicalism put him at the centre of events in the 1880s, including the ‘Bloody Sunday’ riots of 1887 and the Match Girl Strike in 1889. He was also a notable campaigner for world peace, speaking at international gatherings in the United States and Russia.
• Stead and the industry of print. As journalist, editor, publisher, proprietor, with a career that includes regional as well as metropolitan dailies, various monthly magazines, annuals, and a stream of serialised works in part issue, including his ‘Penny Poets’, Stead is a rich node for new research.
• Stead’s non-conformist, Northern origins. Stead’s career, which includes the editorship of the daily Northern Echo in Darlington for eight years in the 1870s offers an opportunity to investigate the provincial press in the late 19C and today.
• The continuing newspaper revolution. 2012 is the date when the British Library Newspaper Library moves from Colindale to new, state of the art reading rooms. What will the new digital archive mean for historical research? And what will be the future of print journalism?
  

Conference Organisers:

Professor Laurel Brake (Birkbeck College)
Ed King (British Library): Head of Newspaper Collections.
Professor Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck College)
Dr James Mussell (University of Birmingham)

For more information, contact Jim Mussell

CFP: Special Issue of Victorian Poetry on the Globalization of Victorian Meters

Stressing English: The Globalization of Victorian Meters

A special issue of Victorian Poetry (Winter 2011) edited by Max Cavitch, University of Pennsylvania

Thanks to some superb recent conferences and publications in Britain and the U.S., the study of the proliferation of old and new metrical forms in 19th-century poetry in English has shown itself to be anything but ahistorical formalism--not least by emphasizing the historicity of meter's mediation of voices and conditioning of ears. And we can see and hear more clearly now that the metrical history of English poetry is, among other things, an intersectional history of English-speaking nations and regions. Indeed, the last few years have brought major advances in the dialectical framing of the transatlantic "traffic in poems" between Britain and the U.S. Yet the Anglo-American binary continues to predominate, and the more broadly transnational, transformational circulation of 19th-century poetry in English remains largely to be charted. For this special issue of Victorian Poetry, we invite articles that extend this work throughout the Atlantic world and beyond: for example, to the Caribbean and North Africa; to South Asia and Australasia; to Canada and Hawaii; to sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. We would welcome submissions on the dispersal of Victorian meters into British provinces from Wales to Bengal; on poetry and the global rise of English; on "world literature" and the global constitution of the sounds of English poetry; on ethnographies of rhythm; on poetic meter and the rhythms of labor and migration; on the metrical dimension of translating poetry from and into English; on the poetry of pidgins and creoles; on the dissemination of English hymnody and other verse forms; on the racialization and deracination of rhythms; on comparativism and the institutionalization of the study of poetry; on prosody and colonialism; on pedagogical uses of meter; on metrical notation, transcription, and recording; on performance, syncretism, and acculturation.

Initial proposals and inquiries, which are welcome but not required, may be sent to the editor at cavitch@english.upenn.edu. Article submissions of five to seven thousand words, prepared in accordance with The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed., will be due November 1, 2010, and should also be sent to cavitch@english.upenn.edu.

Deadline EXTENDED: Museum Artworks in the 19thC

This CFP is for a session that Laurence Roussillon and Stephen Wildman will be chairing at the IAWIS conference at Belfast this June 4-6:

Revisiting the Canon: famous museum artworks in the hands and eyes of writers and artists in the nineteenth century

Stephen Wildman, Lancaster University, UK &
Laurence Roussillon-Constanty, Université Toulouse 3, France

In his introduction to Le musée Imaginaire, André Malraux notes that every museum goer knows that even the greatest museums such as the Louvre, the Tate Gallery or the Prado cannot encompass every work of art in the world. However, the very selection they offer calls up a myriad of other art works that are just as worthy of admiration. In a similar way, one can suggest that the artist (whether he/she be a painter, sculptor, writer or poet) who pays a tribute to a famous (and recognizable) piece of art translates his/her reception of the piece of art into another object that is either clearly identifiable - in a classical ekphrastic gesture - or bears a more subtle relation to the original piece of art so that it becomes other. In the margins of the museum canon or as a reaction to it, the transaction from word to image or from image to word thus allows modern artists to write a history of their own that, in the expression found on the Ulster Museum webpage, 'unravels the past to reveal the future'. This session will explore the word-image relation in cases where famous European artworks found themselves as a subject for new creation from the mid-nineteenth century onward.

Full details of the conference can be found at: http://www.adbe.ulster.ac.uk/dwi

All submissions welcome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more information, please contact

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

CFP: Reading & Writing in Prison (4-5 June 2010 / Edinburgh Napier U)

Reading and Writing in Prison: An Interdisciplinary Conference

Edinburgh Napier University

4-5 June 2010

This conference aims to bring together scholars, writers and practitioners to share their perspectives on the significance of reading and writing in prisons.

Writing about imprisonment raises key issues that go beyond an immediate concern with incarceration and its institutions, involving notions of subjectivity, citizenship and nationhood. Scholars and practitioners alike have long been arguing that opportunities for reading and writing in prisons can become a dignifying tool for prisoners to re-evaluate and reconstruct their lives, with positive impact on recidivism rates. The conference will act as a platform for exchange about existing scholarship and practice in the area, with the long-term goal of facilitating future research networks, publications and practical projects.

This event explicitly seeks conversations across the disciplines and between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. Contributors are invited to address reading, writing and imprisonment in any geographical location, in both historical and contemporary contexts. Some of the questions this conference wishes to address are: what defines the genre of prison literature or prison autobiography and how has it changed historically? How do institutional contexts and penal policies impact on reading and writing in prison? What effect do creative practice, prison education and reading groups have on groups of offenders and, conversely, society at large? What is the role of researchers and universities in contributing to debates around narratives of imprisonment, reading and writing in prison?

Possible topics include:

• Prison literature and prison (auto)biography as a genre
• The history and publishing context of prison writing
• Representations of prison reading and writing experiences
• Gender, class, ethnicity/race and age and their impact on reading and writing in prison
• Writing and political imprisonment
• Prison libraries and reading groups
• Creative writing in prisons: practice and problems

Invited speakers who have agreed to participate (subject to funding) include:
Ed Wiltse on student-prisoner reading groups and the object(s) of literary studies; Gowan Calder and Caspar Walsh on creative writing; Jenny Hartley and Rosalind Crone on prison reading in the nineteenth century; Sarah Turvey on prison reading groups; Bashabi Fraser on the imprisoned writer and the nation.

Contributors should submit an abstract of their proposed paper (250 words) and a brief biographical statement to a.schwan@napier.ac.uk by 1 March 2010.

For further information, please contact the organiser:
Dr Anne Schwan
Email: a.schwan@napier.ac.uk

Image by flickr user alias_archie / CC licensed

Victorian Society of America summer schools

Now in their fourth decade, the Victorian Society in America's Summer Schools, in Newport RI, and London, UK, provide in-depth study of the multi-faceted architecture and culture of the nineteenth century.

The courses include lectures by leading experts, site visits and guided tours. The programs are designed to allow students to see and do as much as possible. There is little free time during the programs, the pace is physically demanding, and there are many walking tours.

The Victorian Society in America sponsors the Summer Schools. The tuition fee includes one year's membership of the VSA.

The dates for 2010 have been announced. Save the dates on your calendar!

NEWPORT SCHOOL, RI
Dates: June 4-13, 2010
Cost: $2,300

LONDON, UK SCHOOL
Dates: July 10-25, 2010
Cost: $4,300

A limited number of partial and full scholarships will be available to qualified candidates. To apply refer to the Application information.

For more information on the Summer Schools, please contact:



Susan E. McCallum, Administrator
Victorian Society in America Summer Schools
100 Prospect Street
Summit, New Jersey 07901
Phone: 908 522-0656
Email: vsasummerschools@comcast.net

CFP: Oceania and the East in the Victorian Imagination (3/19/2010; 10/28-10/30/2010)

15th Annual Conference of the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States (VISAWUS)

OCEANIA AND THE EAST IN THE VICTORIAN IMAGINATION

October 28-30, 2010 Honolulu Hawai'i

The 15th Annual Conference will focus on the complex relationships between the Victorians and the East, including India and China, Malay and the East Indies, Australia and New Zealand, and the South Sea Islands. This international conference will bring together specialists in Asian and Victorian art history, literature, gender studies, science, history, literature, politics, and biographical studies, among others, to explore how the Victorians perceived the East and how the Victorians were perceived in the East. We invite paper proposals on political, cultural, social, religious, artistic, scientific, economic, agrarian, and other aspects of this rich interaction. By March 19, 2010 email a 300-word abstract & 1-page CV (put your name on BOTH) to: Richard Fulton fulton@hawaii.edu For further information, log on to VISAWUS.org.


About the image: "Cassini" map of Hawai'i. The original copper plate engraving was published in Rome in 1798 at the Pressola Calcongrafia Camerale and was based on Capt. James Cook's map of 1784. The Death of Cook was added in 1798.

CFP: Victorian Systems and Standardization (11/15/2009)

Congress 2010: Victorian Studies Association of Ontario/ Association of Canadian
College and University Teachers of English Joint Session

VICTORIAN SYSTEMS AND STANDARDIZATION

Our little systems have their day…
Tennyson, In Memoriam, Prologue, st. 5

From the factory to the railway, the telegraph to the postal service, the growth of empire to the establishment of national educational curricula, the nineteenth century was marked by large-scale impositions of system, and by a concurrent emphasis on the standardization of objects, concepts, and people. This panel seeks to explore the imbrications of system and standardization throughout the Victorian era, and to examine how the concept of rationalized organization was imagined and understood by Victorians. How did the generalized abstraction inherent in the process of standardization shape the lived experience of individuals? What supra-individual needs were anticipated in the construction of various kinds of system? To what extent did the Victorians envisage a connection between systematization and knowledge production?

Papers may focus on any occurrence of system or standardization during the
Victorian period, such as:
- Genre as artistic standardization
- Disciplines (scientific and otherwise)
- Domestic conventions
- Bodies in systems
- Heterodox and orthodox belief systems
- Formal and informal economies
- The aesthetics of system

We are also interested in events and ideas that were explicitly figured as
resistances to system, such as:
- Works of genius or inspiration
- Free love
- Anarchy
- Mutiny

For more information see http://www.accute.ca/2010cfp.html#jo. Please send your
700-word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50
word biographical statement, and the ACCUTE submitter information form, to
VSAOatACCUTE@gmail.com by November 15th.

Image by flickr user British Postal Museum and Archive / CC licensed

CFP: Commitment in British Women Writers' Novels

Commitment in British Women Writers' Novelists of the 18th & 19th Centuries

Contributions are invited for a conference which will take place at the University of Caen in France on 17th and 18th June 2010.

As soon as novels developed, women played an important role both as readers and as authors, since among the 2,000 works which were published in the 18th century, 600 were written by women. One can then wonder about the way they used that means of expression and ask whether Mary Wollstonecraft opened the path for a British female literature characterized by commitment through her desire for political and social equality with men. Let us specify that during that seminar the term “commitment” will be used in the sense it had in the 18th and 19th centuries rather than in the sense it took in the 20th century.

Some could focus on the different aspects of commitment whether it is political, social, religious, moral, intellectual, artistic… It would also be quite interesting to consider the sources of inspiration for that commitment in novels by Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, or the Brontës (this is not an exhaustive list). Besides one could deal with the role played by some major figures such as Harriet Martineau or Harriet Taylor Mill, John Stuart Mill’s wife, but also by some ideals and among them that of the “New Woman”.

Other proposals could be centred on the form that commitment takes on. Does it influence women writers’ strategies for articulating their experience? How does commitment characterize the very text? Does it make itself known always strikingly? And more generally are women writers’ means of expression the same as those adopted in the society of the time?

Please send your proposals (one A4 page maximum) before 1st December 2009 to Elise Ouvrard (ouvrard_elise@hotmail.com).

CFP: NCSA Conference on Theatricality & Performativity in the Long 19thC

Call for Papers: Theatricality and the Performative in the Long Nineteenth Century

Submission deadline: September 15, 2009

31st Annual Conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association

The University of Tampa, March 11-13, 2010, Tampa, Florida

Keynote speaker: Michael Fried (Johns Hopkins University)

Plenary Event: Exhibition of Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, with a roundtable discussion featuring Margaret D. Stetz (University of Delaware), curator and author of Facing the Late Victorians; Dennis Denisoff (Ryerson University), and Maria Gindhart (Georgia State University)

Dramatic expression and self-conscious performances marked almost every aspect of nineteenth century life and artistic culture, as theatrical turns and performative mindsets introduced in the 17^th-18^th centuries expanded in the 1780s through the beginning of World War One. We invite paper and panel proposals that explore these themes and subjects in the long Nineteenth Century (1780-1914). Papers might address the theatrical shows—whether serious drama, circus displays, vaudeville, operas, or Shakespearean revivals—that appeared in cities and towns on both sides of the Atlantic (as well as in more distant lands). Or they might investigate how politics, social events, military engagements, domestic affairs, public trials, crime reports, religious rituals, architectural spaces, sculptural moments, exhibition halls, artistic and musical compositions, and the early moving pictures of the cinema, assumed a theatrical sensibility. Welcome also are proposals for papers and panels that bring scholarly and theoretical interests in performativity to bear on concepts of identity, individuality, and audience in the given era.

Please submit abstracts of approximately 500 words along with a brief (one page) c.v. to the Program Co-Chairs, Janice Simon (U of Georgia) and Regina Hewitt (U of South Florida) at the conference address ncsa2010@earthlink.net by Sept. 15, 2009. Speakers will be notified by or before Dec. 15.

Any graduate student whose proposal is accepted may at that point submit a full-length version of the paper in competition for a travel grant to help cover transportation and lodging expenses.

Conference sessions will be held at the University of Tampa , a campus with both a state-of-the-art conference center and the historic late-19^th century Plant Hall, site of the Plant Museum where _Facing the Late Victorians_ will be exhibited and a reception will be held. Excursions to the Tampa Bay History Center and the historic neighborhood of Ybor City are also planned. Accommodations are available at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Tampa, a short walk from campus. For further information, please visit the NCSA website http://www.english.uwosh.edu/roth/ncsa/ or contact Elizabeth Winston, Local Arrangements Director (U of Tampa), at the conference address ncsa2010@earthlink.net.

CFP: BAVS conference on "Victorian Forms and Formations"

CFP: British Association for Victorian Studies 2010 Conference : ‘Victorian Forms and Formations,’ Sept. 2-4, 2010, U of Glasgow

The 2010 BAVS conference seeks to address the question of ‘form’, in all its varied meanings, in Victorian culture. We invite papers that address the topic of literary form, and that engage with current debates in the field over the return to form in literary criticism, but also wish to broaden the topic to encompass forms and formations in other disciplines, including but not limited to art history, science, architecture, politics, religion and history of the book. Papers might consider the role of different social and political groupings and institutions in the Victorian period, or the formation of a particular idea or discipline. They might deal with wide-ranging debates over varied attempts at reform in the nineteenth century, or could focus on the formation or reformation of the individual. Papers considering material forms, including the fashioning of the body in medical and other discourse, are welcome, as are papers on the physical features of the Victorian landscape: urban and rural spaces, natural forms and the built environment. We also invite papers that are concerned with the reworking of Victorian forms in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and culture.

Plenary speakers:

• James Eli Adams
• Matthew Campbell
• Margaret Macdonald
• Catherine Robson

A number of postgraduate bursaries will be available for postgraduate students presenting a paper at the conference or acting as a conference reporter. Please check this site in spring 2010 for details of how to apply.

Deadline for submission of abstract: 15 March 2010. Please send a 200-word abstract to bavs@arts.gla.ac.uk

Suggested topics for consideration:

Poetic form* Narrative form* Generic formation* Neoformalism* Political formations* Social reform* Educational reform* Scientific formations* Geological forms* Religious formations* Imperial formations* Urban forms* Architectural form* Sculptural form* Domestic design* Intellectual formations* Forms of publication* Bodily formations* Gendered forms* Forms of conduct* Forming identities* Moral forms*Neovictorian forms*

The full CFP is online here.

Colby Book Prize: Nominations by 1 December 2009

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals is very pleased to award the annual Robert Colby Scholarly Book Prize for a scholarly book that most advances the understanding of the nineteenth-century British newspaper and/or periodical press. All books exploring periodicals of the period are eligible (including single-author monographs, edited collections, and editions) as long as they have a publication date of 2009. The winner will receive a plaque and a monetary award of up to $3,000, and will be invited to speak at the RSVP conference at Yale University in New Haven (September 10-11, 2010). The prize was made possible by a generous gift by Vineta Colby in honor of Robert Colby, a long and devoted member of RSVP and a major scholar in the field of Victorian periodicals.

Previous winners of the Colby Prize are:

• 2009: Catherine Waters, Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Ashgate)
• 2008: Kathryn Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context (Ashgate)
• 2007: David Finkelstein, Ed., Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition (University of Toronto Press)
• 2005-2006: Linda Hughes, Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (Ohio University Press) and Peter Morton, The Busiest Man in London: Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875-1900 (Palgrave)

Steampunk Exhibit

Lisa Hager forwards a link to the site devoted to an upcoming Steampunk exhibit at Oxford's The Museum of the History of Science.

You'll need to scroll a bit, but there are some fascinating images here.


(Steampunk aficionados might be interested in this interview I did with Ann and Jeff VanderMeer about their recent anthology.)

Victorian Search at the University of Toronto Mississauga

POSITION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, MISSISSAUGA

Applications are invited for a tenure-stream position, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Drama, University of Toronto Mississauga, University of Toronto. Qualifications: Ph.D. in English, with specialization in Victorian Literature. Applicants should be qualified to teach, supervise theses, and carry out research in that area, and have evidence of excellence in research and teaching. The successful candidate will also be a member of the tri-campus Graduate Department of English. Duties will consist of research; teaching undergraduate courses at the UTM campus and graduate courses at the St. George campus; supervision of graduate theses. Salary commensurate with qualifications and experience.

We strongly encourage you to submit your application online at

http://www.jobs.utoronto.ca/faculty.htm

If you are unable to apply online, please mail your application to Professor Leslie Thomson, Chair, Department of English and Drama / Room 290A, North Building / University of Toronto Mississauga / 3359 Mississauga Road North / Mississauga, Ontario L5L 1C6, Canada. Applications should include a curriculum vitae and ONE writing sample of scholarly work of not more than 25 pages. Applicants should also arrange for three letters of reference (or dossier) and graduate transcripts to be sent directly to the departmental address above as soon as possible. Appointment commences 1 July 2010. The deadline for applications is 2 November 2009.

The University of Toronto offers the opportunity to teach, conduct research and live in one of the most diverse and cosmopolitan locations in the world. The University also offers opportunities to work in a range of collaborative programs. The University of Toronto is strongly committed to diversity within its community and especially welcomes applications from visible minority group members, women, Aboriginal persons, persons with disabilities, members of sexual minority groups, and others who may contribute to the further diversification of ideas. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority.

CFP: British Women Writers Conference

The 18th Annual 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers Conference
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX

"Journeys"
April 8-11, 2010

Call for Papers

This year's conference will explore the abundant varieties of journeys found in 18th- and 19th-century British women's writing. We encourage interdisciplinary considerations of topics such as migration, travel, exile, exploration, tourism, border crossing, religion, travel writing, art, fantasy, children's literature and more.

We are pleased to announce that our speakers will include Kate Flint, Felicity Nussbaum, Mary Fissell, Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, and Erika Rappaport.

Proposals for panels and individual papers might consider, but are not limited to, the following issues:

-Travel writing/art
-Biographical narratives
-Marriage/Honeymoon
-Continental tours
-Motherhood/Childhood
-Colonialism and Empire
-Philosophical investigations
-Scientific inquiry
-Religious explorations
-Spiritual awakenings
-Transatlantic movement of persons, ideas, and/or goods
-Immigration/Emigration
-Memory as travel
-Dreams
-Re-envisioning the past/future
-Mapping the body
-Rites of passage
-Crossing class boundaries
-Movement between private and public spheres
-Exile (Social, Political, Familial)
-Women and work
-Education
-Intertextuality

Individual proposals should be two pages: a cover sheet including name, presentation title, university affiliation, address, email address, phone number, and brief biographical paragraph; and a 500-word abstract. Please do not include any identifying information on the abstract.

Panel proposals should include a coversheet--containing panel title, presenters' names, presentation titles, university affiliations, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, brief biographical paragraphs, and the name of the moderator--followed by separate abstracts (500-word) that describe the significance of the panel topic and each presentation. Please do not include any identifying information on the abstracts.

Proposals must be submitted electronically as an attachment in .doc or .rtf format by October 15, 2009 to the conference email address: BWWC18@tamu.edu.

For more information and updates, please visit our conference website:

http://www-english.tamu.edu/bwwc18

Thank you!
Elizabeth Talafuse
BWWC 2010 Organizing Committee
Texas A&M University

Public Lecture at Loyola, Chicago

Public Lecture on Saturday, September 12, 2009
by Professor Simon Gatrell, University of Georgia
Public Lecture: “Sex, Sin, & Revision in Hardy’s Fiction”

Klarchek Information Commons 230, 216
Loyola University Chicago
Lake Shore Campus
Coffee 10:30 AM
Public Lecture 11:00 AM
Panel discussion 12:00 PM
Lunch 1:00 PM

Participation is free.