Holding up the Magic Lantern: Dickens in the Classroom - a one-day conference for teachers (12/12/2011)

Dickens and London

Holding up the Magic Lantern: Dickens in the Classroom

A One Day Conference for Teachers

12 December 2011, The Museum of London

The English Association's forthcoming 'Dickens and London' Conference will be held at the Museum of London on Monday 12^th December 2011, sponsored by the Museum of London, The Charles Dickens Museum, The Dickens Fellowship, and The English Association.  We would be delighted to see you there.

The one day event features panel discussions as well as presentations from Schools and History Specialists at the Museum of London.  In addition, this conference offers the exciting opportunity to view Dickens in his Victorian context.  Why not recreate Dickens' world through the objects  of the past, chosen from the Museum's 19th century collection; take a stroll around Dickens' London with Tony Williams, discovering the connections between the streets around the Museum of London today and those of the 19th century; take part in an evocative exploration of Dickens' story-telling and illustrations with Ian Brinton; or even play the part of a journalist questioning Dickens himself in the recreated Victorian Street of the Museum of London's Drama Gallery?

These events and talks are designed to enable teachers of English to find out more about what is on offer to schools and colleges from the Museum of London as well as to enhance knowledge of resources and pupil engagement in the teaching of Dickens.

For more details please and for booking please see http://www.le.ac.uk/engassoc/conferences/D2011.html

CFP: Violent Women in 19th-Century England (Collection) (11/12/2011)

The number of women who are victims of crime has always been higher than the number of women partaking as offenders.  However, women were very often involved with crime - not always petty in nature. Previous research in women and crime in 19th century England has focused attention on the lives of women who committed crimes such as infanticide, or the social and economic situations that led to their working in the sex industry, and in doing so have explored the lives and times of women in 19th century England. This collection aims to write more women back into the criminal record by focusing on those women who committed violent crimes during this period.  This collection asks what narratives were created about these women (and possibly their femininity), what were societal and cultural responses to these women and crimes, and what methodologies are employed by scholars to reveal the stories about women who have, until now, been ignored or overlooked?

Possible topics (but by no means limited to this list):

• Treatment of violent women by the courts early, mid- and late nineteenth century (changes to the punishment of violent offenders, perceptions in the courtroom of violent offenders)
• New methodologies by which we could study violent female criminals in the nineteenth century
• Possible crimes these violent women partook in: women who were part of street gangs; women involved in violent robberies; women who murdered for commission, revenge or jealousy;  women who were involved in abductions, blackmail or extortion; women who were serial killers
• Violent women from the working vs middle or upper classes (outside of the traditional Madeline Smith;  Constance Kent and Florence Maybrick cases): representations, responses to them
• Narratives from the offenders themselves and how they saw their place in English society, the significance of their crime, how they saw themselves as women etc.
• Newspaper narrative creation about violent female offenders
• Social changes that women’s crimes were in answer to

Entries to this collection will be in the range of 7,000-9,000 words due in early June 2012.
Please send abstracts (250 words) and short bio by 12th November 2011 to vicnagy AT gmail.com

Reminder: NVSA 2012: Victorian Clichés and Orthodoxies (10/15/2011; 4/13-15/2012)

This message is a reminder that the October 15 deadline is approaching to submit proposals for this year's NVSA conference. The topic this year is Victorian Clichés and Orthodoxies.  The conference will be held at Columbia University on April 13-15, 2012, and will feature a keynote panel including Nicholas Dames, Yopie Prins, and Jim Secord as well as a visit to the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The text of the official CFP follows below. If you'd like a PDF copy of the call for papers emailed to you in order to post it in your department, please contact this year's program committee chair, David Kurnick, at david.kurnick@rutgers.edu.

The Northeast Victorian Studies Association calls for papers on cliché and orthodoxy in and about the Victorian period. We encourage papers that reflect on Victorian conceptions of conventional thinking, practice, and expression as well as on the critical orthodoxies that govern contemporary approaches to the period. How did the Victorians understand cliché—a term that comes into its current use only in the 1890s—in literary culture, or in aesthetics (art, music and theater) more generally? What orthodoxies organized scientific inquiry, and what was science's relation to religious orthodoxy? How do we understand the marriage of heterodoxy and orthodoxy in religious movements as various as the Oxford movement and low-church revivalism? How did orthodoxy regulate education and domestic life? While the supposed political stability, liberalism, and realistic aesthetics of the Victorian period have often been contrasted with the social and artistic experimentation of Romanticism and modernism, such features of the period have been both vigorously debunked and vigorously defended as more dynamic than previously thought. We invite papers that reflect on the status of those critical shibboleths (and on the catch-phrases used to express them: “age of equipoise,” “the marriage plot,” “the gospel of work”) as well as on the literary touchstones that the nineteenth century seems to have produced in higher volume than any other. We also invite reconsiderations of older and newer critical texts—from The Victorian Frame of Mind to Culture and Imperialism and beyond—that have set the terms of debate for generations of scholars.

Topics for consideration:

Form and Cliché
Victorian melodramas and tearjerkers
ideology and form
“normal literature” and extraordinary texts
the invention of genre fiction
readers’ pleasures in repetition and recognition
canonicity as critical orthodoxy
poetic and prosodic orthodoxies
parody as ridicule of literary convention

Religious and Scientific Orthodoxies
religious authenticity and belief
religious orthodoxy as an adventure
Christian orthodoxy and its opponents (atheism, agnosticism, free thinking, spiritualism, etc.)
revivalism and the Oxford movement
scientific naturalism’s attack on orthodoxy
science as orthodoxy
scientific orthodoxies

Victorian Cliché
“We are not amused”
“Spare the rod, spoil the child”
“The angel in the house”
“The dismal science”
“Lie back and think of England”
clichés in Victorian advertising
cliché and mass media (cliché as a function of printing technology)
the history of clichés; how do innovations become clichés?
ready-made phrases, generic expressions

Victorian Social and Cultural Orthodoxies
political and economic orthodoxies
were the Victorians sexually orthodox?
unspoken orthodoxies; what goes without saying in the Victorian period?
orthodoxy as truth and as convention: did the valence of orthodoxy change in the period?
orthodoxy and authority
conduct manuals, self-help, etiquette guides
educational orthodoxies

Our Critical Orthodoxies
separate spheres
“Always historicize!”
prudery and repression
the marriage plot
the ideology of progress
liberalism and individualism
the hermeneutics of suspicion
modernist clichés about the Victorian period
angel/whore view of women
round vs. flat characters
the Bildungsroman

Critical Stock Phrases
“the crisis of faith”
“the gospel of work”
“the age of equipoise”
“the age of doubt”
“the age of compromise”
“the Victorian sage”
“the two nations”

Canonical Critical Texts
Buckley’s Victorian Temper
Armstrong’s Victorian Poetry
Langbaum’s Poetry of Experience
Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity
Marcus’s Other Victorians

Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic
Williams’s Culture and Society
Houghton’s Victorian Frame of Mind
J. Hillis Miller’s Disappearance of God
Levine’s Realistic Imagination
D. A. Miller’s Novel and the Police
Sedgwick’s Between Men
Said’s Culture and Imperialism

Literary Touchstones
“Reader, I married him.”
“Theirs not to reason why,/ Theirs but to do and die.”
“Why always Dorothea?”
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
“The Everlasting Yea/Everlasting No”
“nature red in tooth and claw”
“sweetness and light”
“How do I love thee?”
the “Dickensian” and Dickens’s characters’ tag-lines
Trollope’s titles

*     *     *

Proposals (no more than 500 words) by Oct. 15, 2011 (e-mail submissions strongly encouraged, in Word format):
Professor David Kurnick, Chair, NVSA Program Committee (david.kurnick@rutgers.edu)
English Department, Rutgers University, 510 George Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901

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.

The Coral Lansbury Travel Grant ($100.00) and George Ford Travel Grant ($100.00), given in memory of key founding members of NVSA, are awarded annually to the graduate student, adjunct instructor, or independent scholar who must travel the greatest distance to give a paper at our conference. Apply by indicating in your cover letter that you wish to be considered. Please indicate from where you will be traveling, and mention if you have other sources of funding.

CFP: ACCUTE/NAVSA Joint Session: Victorian Technologies and the Technologies of Victorian Studies (11/1/2011; 5/28-31/2012)

From railways to telegraphy, typewriters to telephones, Victorians were engaged with new, and developing, technologies of connection and communication. Innovations in technology over the course of the Victorian period influenced wider cultural ideas of connection, of scale and of human capacity. Like the Victorians, researchers in Victorian Studies are using new technologies of reading, writing, research and social connection that are changing the nature of our work and its dissemination.

This call is for papers that critically address Victorian Technologies and/or the technologies of Victorian Studies. Whether you are interested in the Blackberry or the trans-Atlantic cable, you are invited to submit a proposal for a 20 minute paper to be presented at the ACCUTE/NAVSA joint panel at the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities in Waterloo, Ontario from May 28-May 31 2012.

 Possible topics may include:

• technologies of reading, writing, printing and publishing
• photography, phonography, telephony and other media and information technologies
• from horses to railways: technological innovation vs. the natural world
• industrial innovations and working with/as machines
• technologies of the body: medical instruments, prostheses
• the railway, the telegraph and other social networks
• theories, histories and discourses of the technological
• Archives then and now
• the history and future of the [Victorian/Victorian Studies] Book
• Victorian Studies e-journals and archive digitization projects
• Victorian Studies social media: blogs, facebook groups and twitter
• Victorian Studies and the digital humanities

Please submit your proposal by November 1 to Jennifer Esmail at jesmail@wlu.ca. Submission instructions are available at http://www.accute.ca/joint.html#submit. All submitters must be members in good standing of either NAVSA or ACCUTE.

CFP: Charles Dickens and the Mid-Victorian Press (1850-1870) (12/30/2011; 3/28-31/2012)

Charles Dickens and the Mid-Victorian Press (1850-1870)
28-31st March 2012, University of Buckingham UK

The School of Humanities at the University of Buckingham and the Victorian Studies Centre at the University of Leicester are delighted to announce an international Dickens Bicentenary conference, featuring the launch of the Dickens Journals Online project, and an exhibition of archive materials curated by Antony Burton. Our list of invited speakers currently includes:

Laurel Brake, John Drew, Holly Furneaux, Louis James, Patrick Leary, Hazel Mackenzie, Robert Patten, Joanne Shattock, Michael Slater, John Sutherland, John Tulloch, Cathy Waters, Tony Williams, and Ben Winyard.

Household Words and All the Year Round are key mid-century weekly journals, showcasing the work of over 350 contributors as well as that of their illustrious founder and 'Conductor.' Critical analysis of their contents is an increasingly diverse and dynamic field, soon to be assisted by an open-access scholarly online edition (see www.djo.org.uk) based at the University of Buckingham. To celebrate the Bicentenary of Dickens's birth, and the public launch of the website, you are warmly invited to an international conference that aims to position Household Words and All the Year Round within the broader context of nineteenth-century periodical culture, through invited papers and contributions from experts in these and a range of rival publications, and website workshops.

Submissions are invited, in three main areas relating to the conference theme:

• original close readings of one or more articles from Household Words and All the Year Round, or the work of an individual contributor. Many articles in the journals―whether by Dickens, a known contributor, or anonymous―repay close scrutiny, whether approached in stylistic, rhetorical, ideological, or historical terms. Yet the published literature in the field is small, and something that the conference seeks to redress.
• appraisals of the contribution made by either or both journals, more generally, to key areas of debate in the mid-Victorian press. Public health, social policy, science and technology, education, gender roles, the urban experience, imperial expansion, emigration and the law, are just some of these. Aesthetic and cultural analysis of the journals, as miscellanies, in terms of the dynamics of genre they present, or in terms of broad thematic or bibliographic concerns that the paper sets out to explore, will also be welcome.
• contrastive readings of other contemporary periodical publications―whether weekly, monthly or quarterly―in relation to Household Words and All the Year Round, that will assist us in positioning the latter in relation to the crowded mid-century marketplace. Such publications might include Chambers's Journal, The Examiner, Punch, Bentley's Miscellany, the Illustrated London News, The Cornhill Magazine, as well as political and literary reviews, and 'penny bloods.'

Submissions from graduate students and as yet unpublished scholars will be particularly welcome. 500-word proposals for 20-minute papers to reachDJO@buckingham.ac.uk by Friday 30 December 2011.

An edited selection of the Conference Proceedings, embracing the three main areas above, will be published by the University of Buckingham Press in 2012. A complimentary copy will be included with every conference booking. For further details, see www.buckingham.ac.uk/djo

CFP: 2012 International Conference on Narrative (10/17/2011; 3/15-17/2012)

2012 International Conference on Narrative, March 15-17
Harrah’s Las Vegas Hotel and Casino Las Vegas, Nevada

Plenary Speakers
Steven Mailloux, Loyola Marymount University
Ramón Saldívar, Stanford University
Vanessa Schwartz, University of Southern California

Contemporary Narrative Theory Session Speakers
Heather Dubrow, Fordham University
Margaret Homans, Yale University
Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois Chicago
Mark McGurl, UCLA
Alan Nadel, University of Kentucky
Peggy Phelan, Stanford University
 
Conference Coordinators
Eddie Maloney, Alan Nadel, James Phelan, Robyn Warhol

Call for Papers
We welcome proposals for papers and panels on all aspects of narrative in any genre, period, discipline, language, and medium.

Proposals for Individual Papers
Please provide the title and a 300-word abstract of the paper you are proposing; your name, institutional affiliation, and email address; and a brief statement (no more than 100 words) about your work and your publications.
 
Proposals for Panels
Please provide a 700-word (maximum) description of the topic of the panel and of each panelist’s contribution; the title of the panel and the titles of the individual papers; and for each participant the name, institutional affiliation, email address, and a brief statement (no more than 100 words) about the person’s work and publications. Please send proposals by email in PDF, Word, or WordPerfect to: narrative@georgetown.edu.

Deadline for Receipt of Proposals:  Monday, October 17, 2011

All participants must join the International Society for the Study of Narrative. For more information on the ISSN, please visit: http://narrative.georgetown.edu/.
  

CFP: The News of the World in History (11/15/2011; 2/24/2012)

The News of the World in History
King’s College London
24 February 2012

Founded in 1843, The News of the World was one of the UK’s longest-running Sunday newspapers when it came to its inauspicious end in the summer of 2011. Gone, but not forgotten, the NOTW continues to be of interest as the full ‘story’ of the hacking scandal is revealed in the wake of parliamentary and other investigations. The NOTW will continue to make the news for some time to come.

Initially a broadsheet transformed into a tabloid by News International only in 1984, the NOTW  has always been one of the most read newspapers in Britain. During the Victorian period, it had one of the largest circulations, catering in particular for the working classes, and at the time of its closing, it was the highest selling newspaper of any kind in the UK. Its history has always been lively and controversial, with sensational and investigative journalism a mainstay of its news. As one media historian has claimed, the NOTW always had something of the ‘saucy seaside postcard’ about it, and as such, it may have had a unique place within British news culture.

Throughout media coverage of the paper’s demise in 2011, there were surprisingly few discussions that took a historical view or sought to understand the title within the framework of media history. This day conference seeks to redress that, while considering a range of issues related specifically to the title, since the mid-19th century.

We seek papers that take a historically informed view of any relevant topic, including the following:

• The closing of the NOTW
• ‘Sensation’ journalism
• Sunday papers, in the 19th, 20th or 21st century
• Illustration/graphics in NOTW
• Investigative journalism
• The history of ‘hacking’
• Circulation and mass readership
• Proprietors, press barons and corporate power
• Globalization and media structures
• Celebrities, now and then
• Newspapers and the law (libel etc?)

Other topics are welcome.

The conference is organized by Laurel Brake (Birkbeck) and Mark W. Turner (King’s College London), in conjunction with the journals Media History and Victorian Periodicals Review.

Please send proposals (not more than 250 words) for papers to Mark W. Turner by 15 November 2011: mark.2.turner@kcl.ac.uk

Reminder: Curran Fellowship (10/15/2011)

Curran Fellowship, second call for proposals, deadline October 15

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) is pleased to announce the competition for the fourth 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 2012 must be submitted in electronic form and sent to curranfellowship@rs4vp.org by October 15, 2011. 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, 2012. 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.

The full 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: Essay Collection "Symptoms of Disorder: Reading Madness in British Literature 1744-1845" (12/1/2011; 7/1/2012)

Symptoms of Disorder: Reading Madness in British Literature 1744-1845

The editors are currently seeking proposals for a collection of essays investigating the subject of madness in British literature between 1744 and 1845.

These are landmark dates for the historical, philosophical and medical history of mental deviance. They imply a passage from an indefinite system of institutionalization and treatment of the insane (1744 Vagrancy Act, section 20) to a more sophisticated and attentive one (1845 Lunatic Asylums Act). The century as a whole is dotted with a stream of momentous events (most James Hadfield’s attempt on the life of George III and the consequent trial), which reveal a progressive transformation in the medical, legal and social response to mental disease. Our aim is, therefore, to encourage a rethinking of such a response, which inevitably implies a reassessment of the very notion of madness.

We invite submissions that explore different representations of ‘insanity’ in the fictional writing between 1744 and 1845. More precisely, the volume intends to analyse how mental derangement affects both poetry and prose in terms of themes, imagery and style (syntax, word choice, figures of speech…). Focus should be on the intersections between literature and contemporary epistemological discourse on insanity. We are especially interested in how literary texts appropriate or, perhaps, even ‘symptomatically’ anticipate some of the major issues discussed in the historical, legal, philosophical and medical fields.

We welcome discussions on the works of authors who are conventionally recognised as outstanding figures of their time, as well as of authors who are less familiar to the general reader.

A choice of authors may include but is not limited to:

• Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768)
• Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
• William Cowper (1731-1800)
• Henry Mackenzie (1745-1831)
• Robert Ferguson (1750-1774)
• Frances Burney (1752-1840)
• George Crabbe (1754-1832)
• William Godwin (1756-1836)
• William Blake (1757-1827)
• William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
• Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1885)
• John Clare (1793-1864)
• John Perceval (1803-1876)

Please send 500-word titled abstracts, with a brief (no more than 200 words) author biography, by December 1st, 2011, to the editors Ilaria Natali and Annalisa Volpone (editorsrm@gmail.com). Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be expected to produce completed essays (6000-7000 words) by
July 1st, 2012. 

Reminder: INCS 2012 "Picturing the Nineteenth Century" (10/17/2011; 3/22-25/2012)

Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies:

2012 Conference

University of Kentucky - Lexington, KY

March 22-25, 2012

A quick reminder that the deadline for submitting a proposal for the INCS 2012 conference, “Picturing the Nineteenth Century,” is October 17. You can find out more about the conference and submit your 250 word proposal at the website: http://incs.as.uky.edu/. 

CFP: Interdisciplinary Conference on Oscar Wilde (1/15/2011; 6/1-2/2012)

Who Owns the Legacy of Oscar Wilde?

An Interdisciplinary Conference
History and Culture Program
Caspersen School of Graduate Studies
Drew University, Madison, New Jersey
1-2 June 2012

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

This conference will present and debate diverse perspectives on Wilde and his work, from many disciplines and all points on the ideological compass.  Abstracts of panels or individual papers (one page/250 words maximum per paper) should be submitted by 15 January 2012 to the Program Committee Chair, Prof. Edward Baring (ebaring@drew.edu).  We welcome submissions from graduate students as well as faculty.

Direct all other queries to the Conference Co-chairs, Prof. Christine Kinealy (ckinealy@drew.edu) and Prof. Jonathan Rose (jrose@drew.edu).

Reminder: NeMLA 2012 panel on Victorian Ecofeminism (9/30/2011; 3/15-18/2012)

“Of Queen’s Gardens”: Victorian Ecofeminism

This panel invites ecofeminist readings of Victorian literature (novels, poetry, prose), wherein women are frequently given “natural” traits or are associated with the earth.  Ecofeminist interpretations may highlight the damaging consequences of this link, or celebrate women’s potential to reform cultural/environmental attitudes because of it.  In what ways does the woman/nature link function in Victorian literature?  What do these interpretations reveal about Victorian attitudes about gender and the environment, and the treatment of each?

Please e-mail abstracts of 300-500 words to Margaret Kennedy, mskennedy@ic.sunysb.edu.

Deadline:  September 30, 2011

Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)


http://www.nemla.org/convention/2012/index.html

CFP: 20th Anniversary British Women Writers Conference "Landmarks" (1/15/2012; 6/7-10/2012)

20th Anniversary British Women Writers Conference "Landmarks"

June 7-10, 2012

Boulder, Colorado 

In 2012, the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers Conference (BWWC) will commemorate its 20^th anniversary by focusing on the theme of “Landmarks.”  Rich in both physical and metaphorical significance, landmarks form loci by which we organize history and chart the development of individuals, nations, and cultures. We therefore invite papers that explore how women writers and their texts engage with an ever-changing geography that is both material and abstract. These conference papers could address the people, places, events, and texts that have made their marks on history, and/or the processes and implications of marking, mapping, reading, preserving, overwriting, or erasing. Likewise, we wish to investigate land as space and place, acts and effects of landing or arriving, marks of land upon people and cultures, geographical and imaginative landscapes, liminal no-(wo)man’s-lands, and the state of being landed (or not) with property.

Please send a 500-word abstract to bwwc2012@colorado.edu by January 15, 2012.  Panel proposals are also welcome. Papers should address the conference theme and apply it to 18th-century, Romantic, or Victorian texts.

Possible topics include:

• Landmark Events and Ideas: Historical moments; defining milestones;  turning points; crises or victories; anniversaries; stages; experiments; memories or visions; aesthetic debates; scientific discoveries; technologies
• Landmark Works: Publication and reception; authorship or readership; emerging genres; histories or chronicles; canon formation; travel writing
• Geographical Land Marks: Historical or tourist sites; borders and national boundaries; high points and burials; property and ownership; memorials, monuments, museums; ruins and traces
• Making Marks: Print culture; media; diaries and personal writings; glosses, annotations, and marginalia; building, development, or enclosure; landscaping and gardening; architecture; fashion and costume design; cosmetics and tattoos; creating space and place; epitaphs, cemeteries, tombs
• Reading, Interpreting, or Imagining Lands/Marks: Physiognomy or phrenology; psychics; reading practices; sciences of navigation; distance and time; fictional worlds
• Mapping/Preserving Marks: Maps and cartography; emblems; classification systems; libraries, museums, collections
• Marks of Land on People: Farming and agriculture; gentility and nobility; industry; food and foodways; defining the local, national, imperial, native, or foreign
• Contested Marks and Marks of Difference: Stealing/transplanting landmarks; marks of faith or creed; religious practices; the supernatural; commerce, currency, credit; ownership; identity politics or marginalization

http://www.bwwc2012.com/

CFP: Sentiment and Sensation in Victorian Periodicals (2/1/2012; 9/14-15/2012)

Sentiment and Sensation in Victorian Periodicals

Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Annual Conference
September 14-15, 2012

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) will hold its annual conference at the University of Texas at Austin, September 14-15, 2012. While papers addressing any aspect of Victorian periodicals will be considered, RSVP particularly welcomes proposals for papers on the discourse of sentiment and sensation in the newspaper and periodical press that variously promoted or targeted readerships, established journalistic networks or brands, and shaped, responded to, and/or addressed cultural and ideological concerns.

Suggested themes include but are not limited to:

• The serialization of sensation fiction
• Sentimental or sensational illustration
• Major scandals, legal cases, crimes, or controversies
• Affect, cognition, and readerly sensations
• Sentimental poetry or fiction in periodicals
• The rhetoric of sentiment/sentimentality
• Sport or theatrical sensations
• Gender and periodical genres
• Entrepreneurialism and fame
• Sensational formatting and headlines
• The feeling of print or the materiality of periodicals
• Physiology and psychology in the press

Please e-mail two-page (maximum) proposals for individual presentations or panels of three to rs4vp.2012@gmail.com.  Please include a one-page C.V. with relevant publications, teaching, and/or coursework. The deadline for submission of proposals is Feb. 1, 2012. Final papers should take 15 minutes (20 minutes maximum) to present.

The program will also include a plenary speech named in honor of Michael Wolff, a presentation by the winner of the 2012 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize, and workshops devoted to digital resources and to methods of teaching periodicals.

RSVP will announce travel grants for a few graduate students presenting papers closer to the time of registration. Graduate students interested in applying for travel grants should include a cover letter explaining how their conference proposal fits into their long-term research plans
as well as any other special considerations. Recipients will be notified in the spring of 2012.

For information about local arrangements, check the RSVP conference website, http://rsvp2012.org, or contact Conference Chair Kathryn Ledbetter, Ledbetter@txstate.edu.

CFP: a collection on H. Rider Haggard (10/31/2011)

Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925) was a novelist, country gentleman, social commentator, onetime colonial administrator and failed ostrich farmer whose prodigious output comprises a significant but under-examined contribution to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. While his two most famous works, King Solomon’s Mines (1886) and She (1887) have attracted a steady stream of articles in recent years, most notably from the fields of postcolonial and gender studies, a significant proportion of his oeuvre remains almost entirely unstudied, despite their considerable popular success in his lifetime. Following an initial call for papers we have assembled a strong line-up of essays including contributions on Haggard and science; historical romance; carnivorousness; Haggard’s Aztec writing; Haggard’s gorilla novels; authorship and textuality; Haggard and Modernism and a study of a  previously unpublished Haggard short story. 

We are now seeking to extend and enhance the collection with a small number of additional essays. Radical reappraisals of Haggard’s most noted texts are welcome, but we are particularly interested in articles that investigate less well-known works or that intend to explore Haggard’s diverse range of interests and under-estimated influence on and engagement with other, more celebrated authors. We aim for publication in late 2012.

Topics and approaches may include, but are not limited to:

• Spiritualism and the occult
• Egyptology
• Ecocritical readings
• Romance
• Cultural cross dressing
• Haggard, Freud and psychoanalysis
• Botany/ horticulture
• Haggard and his contemporaries
• Animal Studies
• Queer readings
• Literary topographies
• Fantasy
• Gender, space and the body
• Degeneration and urbanisation
• The fin-de-siècle
• Zionism/ anti-Semitism
• Anthropology/ ethnography
• The Best-seller
• The Nordic
• South African experiences
• Children’s Literature

Please send abstracts not exceeding 500 words along with a brief biographical profile to John Miller at jmiller1@unbc.ca by 31^st October.  Chapters will be 6,000 words in length and will be commissioned by 15^th November for delivery by 1^st March. Any queries are welcome. 

Position Opening: Professor of Victorian Literature and Science (11/11/2011)

The Department of English Language & Literature of the University of South Carolina (http://www.cas.sc.edu/engl/) invites applications for a tenured full Professor position in Victorian Literature and Science. Applicants should have a clear and strong record of scholarly achievement, a commitment to teaching excellence at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and a distinguished record of service to their institutions and the profession.

This position is supported through a university hiring initiative and recognizes the Department of English’s commitment to excellence through interdisciplinary scholarship. We welcome applications from candidates working in any area of Victorian literature and science. Scholars in this field who are now advanced Associates are encouraged to apply.

Applicants should send cv, letter of interest, and contact information for at least three people familiar with the candidate’s work and willing to provide a letter of reference to:

William E. Rivers, Chair

Department of English,

University of South Carolina

Columbia, SC 29208.

For full consideration, application materials must be received no later than November 11, 2011.

  

The University of South Carolina is ranked by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as an institution of "very high research activity;" it supports over 27,000 students with 350 degree programs and a nationally-ranked library system with exceptionally strong holdings in nineteenth-century British and American literature and science. Located in the state capital, Columbia (conveniently close to both the mountains and the coast), the university is often considered to be one of the most beautiful campuses in an urban setting. With a population of over 650,000 in the greater metropolitan area, Columbia is a dynamic city in the midst of major renewal projects, many driven by joint ventures between the community and the university.

The University of South Carolina is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer. Minorities and women are especially encouraged to apply. The University of South Carolina does not discriminate in educational or employment opportunities or decisions for qualified persons on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, or veteran status.

Reminder: Victorian Energy Crises (9/30/2011; 3/15-18/2012)

Panel on “Victorian Energy Crises”
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)—March 15-18, 2012—Rochester, New York, Hyatt Rochester http://www.nemla.org/convention/2012/cfp.html

This panel will consider the ways energy, broadly conceived, was theorized, understood, and represented in Victorian literature, science, and material culture.

Throughout the Victorian era some very different conceptions of energy came to increasingly overlap, while others remained differentiated by the material objects with which they were associated or by their gendered, classed, and raced bodily sources. The Gospel of Work, for example, moralized labor as ennobling and masculinizing, while medical discourses constructed female lassitude as a pathology of gender. In other venues, the steam-power of factories and railways was theoretically correlated with the laboring body, and as a result mechanical engines became linked in the popular imagination to new conceptions of the body as a machine, expending labor and consuming nutrition like a “human motor.” The new science of thermodynamics, which produced the era’s most powerful images of energy decay, predicted the “heat death” of the solar system in 30 million years, the calendar H. G. Wells follows when depicting a depleted sun in The Time Machine.

This panel hopes to explore connections between the different knowledges which emerged in the Victorian era to theorize and understand energy, as well as the various cultural forms through which Victorians represented energy at work. Possibilities include the body; affect; machine cultures, engineering, and the physical sciences; ecology and natural resources; medicine, nutrition, and physiology.

Please send 300-400 word proposals by September 30, 2011 to Jessica Kuskey, Syracuse University jekuskey@syr.edu.

Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address

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

Reminder: Fixing Foods in Literary Modernity (9/30/2011; 3/15-18/2012)

Fixing Foods in Literary Modernity
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

http://www.nemla.org/convention/2012/cfp.html
March 15-18, 2012--Rochester, New York

For better and for worse, modernity has surely left its mark on the food we daily eat.  Two hundred years ago in 1812, Bryan Donkin purchased from a London broker the patent for canning food items inside tin containers. Within the next decade canned goods were widespread in Britain and France (Robertson 123). One hundred and fifty years ago in the spring of 1862, Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard’s experiments with heating liquids eventually led to pasteurized drinks—first wine and beer and then, later, milk (Greene, Guzel-Seydim, and Seydim 88).

This panel explores how literature has addressed the last two hundred years of rapidly modernizing food—a path involving hybridization, preservation, pasteurization, synthesizing, and genetic manipulation.  If Brillat-Savarin’s aphorism is still telling today (“Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are”), what does literature tell us about the modern alimentary subject consuming and or pondering the foods altered by modernity?  Always already integrated into our lives on multiple levels, food could not be modernized without other far reaching implications.  When discussing food marked by modernity, what larger social or cultural preoccupations does literature engage?  How do different authors, historical periods, literary movements, or genres posit the “the mark of modernity” on food? How might literary explorations of modernity and food inform our own contemporary food concerns?

Please send 300-500 word abstracts and a brief bio to Michael D. Becker, mdbecker@my.uri.edu with “NeMLA 2012” as the subject.  Please include your name, affiliation, email address, and A/V requirements ($10 fee with registration).
Deadline:  September 30, 2011

Cited:
Greene, Annel K., Zeynep B. Guzel-Seydim, and Atif Can Seydim. “The Safety of Ready-to-Eat Diary Products.” Ready-to-Eat Foods: Microbial Concerns and Control Measures. Ed. Andy Hwang and Lihan Huang. Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis, 2010. 81-123. Print.

Roberts, Gordon L.  Food Packaging: Principles and Practice.  Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis, 2006. Print.

Reminder: Approaches to Adventure in the Late 19th Century (9/30/2011; 3/15-18//2012)

Approaches to Adventure in the Late 19th Century
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

http://www.nemla.org/convention/2012/cfp.html
March 15-18, 2012--Rochester, New York

This panel examines the burgeoning interest in adventure during the years 1880-1901. Joseph A. Kestner in his recent Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880-1915 has suggested that adventure texts are filled with “codes” such as “rescue, heroism, survival, courage, duty, isolation, voyaging” for audiences to “live up to” (1).  Papers that scrutinize late Victorian literary treatments of these codes, in addition to tropes such as travel, sailing, mountain climbing, and camping are warmly welcomed.  What is the cultural or historical significance of this attention to adventure and why should it be celebrated? Why are the codes of adventure important, for both the individual and for the state?  How do Victorian authors of adventure texts use their works to problematize empire?  Can adventure texts function as pedagogical tools for younger readers, colonial administrators, or emigrants?  Do adventure texts function at different levels for colonizing or colonized audiences? How do female authors treat the codes of adventure?  And what does this intense engagement with adventure reveal?  

Please submit 250-500 word abstracts (as an MS Word attachment, please) to Rebekah Greene, Rebekah_greene@my.uri.edu, with NEMLA 2012 as the subject heading.

Deadline: September 30, 2011
Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

Reminder - edited collection: Urban Monstrosities (10/1/2011; 4/1/2012)

Call for Articles: Edited Collection "Urban Monstrosities"
Joseph Lamperez and J. Alexandra McGhee, University of Rochester

The contemporary city bears the trace of at least two seismic developments: the Enlightenment rationalization of urban space, marked by the twinned banishment of death to the urban periphery and the creation of a regime of spatial surveillance; and the emergence of the modern city as simulacrum, its widened boulevards and glossy surfaces allowing for the continual flow of commodities and capital. How do contemporary authors of speculative fiction figure and respond to these and other major urban transformations in their own work? We are seeking articles that explore the city as a space of monstrous potential, and which examine how the uncanny cityscape has (d)evolved since the Industrial Revolution. SF and weird fiction, for example, often depict the city as a living organism that is alternately transformative and malicious. How do these and other literary and artistic modes figure urban space as a site of bizarre experiences and subjectivities? What entity can be read in, and attempts to speak through, the oneiric facades of the architectural fantasia? What are the ramifications of a sentient city? How useful are Blake's “dark Satanic Mills," Dickens's "Animate London," and Eliot's "unreal" cities as models for reading contemporary instances of urban monstrosity?

This collection attempts to posit the neglected but important link between the nineteenth and early twentieth century city as an unreal spectacle of overwhelming crowds, urban wilderness, and new social formations, and contemporary representations of the city as an incipient organism or fantastic bestiary, its space a site of chthonic splendor and ruinous allure. What new readings become possible when sophisticated modern fantasists like China Mieville and Jeff VanderMeer are placed in a tradition of urban representation stretching back to Wordsworth and Blake, Baudelaire and Poe? How can Mayhew's explorations or Benjamin's body of work on the flâneur and the urban phantasmagoria offer new ways of theorizing the global renaissance of street art, or the burgeoning documentation and aestheticization of derelict architectural structures known as "ruin porn"? Are areas of potential insurrection within the city—Bhabha’s “third space,” the urban carnivalesque—inimical to, or in league with urban monstrosity?

Please send a 500-word abstract, tentative title and brief (1-2 pp) CV to Joseph Lamperez  atjosephlamperez@gmail.com and J. Alexandra McGhee at alimcghee@gmail.com by October 1, 2011. Completed articles will be due April 1, 2012, and should be between 3500-5000 words. For queries please contact Joseph Lamperez and J. Alexandra McGhee at the email addresses above.