CFP: NCGS Special Issue "Gender and the Law in Nineteenth-Century England" (5/15/2012)

Nineteenth-Century 

Gender Studies

http://www.ncgsjournal.com/

Special Issue "Gender and the Law in Nineteenth-Century England" (Summer 2012)

The nineteenth century was a period rife with watershed moments in the history of law and gender in England. It is also a period marked by contradictions: legislation that granted women greater rights under the law took place in fits and starts, and was never unaccompanied by cultural and social backlash. The period began, in 1801, with a national census that revealed women outnumbered men by 400,000, and ended with the repeal of the discriminatory Contagious Diseases Acts (1866) and the passage of the First Married Woman's Property Act (1870).  Debates about the relationship between women and the law, and their attendant questions (e.g. Were women legal persons? Could they be?), permeated the legislation, court cases, newspapers, serials, and novels of the day. The roles, and legal power, of English men were also in flux during the period. The rise of industrialism, as well as the middle class, challenged the masculinity of the landed and leisured male aristocrat. Laws that granted women greater rights in marriage, divorce, and ownership of earnings and property served to challenge the centrality of the male patriarch in traditional family structures. In turn, masculinity became increasingly defined by both state-sponsored and independent imperial ventures in the colonies. And by the end of the nineteenth century, a new version of manhood came into being. The rise of the aesthetes, as represented by the publicity surrounding Oscar Wilde, and the criticism of the aesthetes, as symbolized by his rather public trial, serve as the most infamous example of events that brought to light growing anxieties about masculinity, sexuality, and the law.

This special issue of NCGS invites scholars from across the arts and humanities to contribute their work on the intersections between law, gender, femininity, masculinity, and sexuality. Topics that might be addressed include:

• Queen Victoria
• Marriage, Motherhood, and/or Families (including the Child Custody Act, the Matrimonial Causes Act, and the Married Woman's Property Act)
• Governesses and their relationship to legal families
• Property and inheritance
• Authorship and the International Copyright Act
• Education (including the establishment of Queen’s College, London; Bedford College; and Girton College)
• The “odd” women (singletons)
• Women and reform movements (including the Voting Act and the Equal Franchise Act)
• Labor laws (including the Ashley’s Mines Act and the Factory Acts)
• Health Care and the Contagious Diseases Act
• Criminal Justice (including Prostitution, Sodomy Trials, and Prisons)
• Imperialism, colonialism, and gender
• Masculinities
• Performance

Please send complete papers (of between 5,000 and 8,000 words) electronically for consideration to the guest editors of the special issue (Prof. Katherine Gilbert and Prof. Julia Chavez) at the following email addresses: kgilbert@drury.edu and JChavez@stmartin.edu

Deadline for submissions: May 15, 2012

Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies is a peer-reviewed, online journal committed to publishing insightful and innovative scholarship on gender studies and nineteenth-century British literature, art and culture. The journal is a collaborative effort that brings together scholars from a variety of universities to create a unique voice in the field. We endorse a broad definition of gender studies and welcome submissions that consider gender and sexuality in conjunction with race, class, place and nationality. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies publishes two regular issues a year, in addition to a specially-themed summer issue, and accepts submissions year-round.

Reminder: Politics, Performance and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (3/16/2012; 4/19-20/2012)

Politics, Performance and Popular Culture in 
Nineteenth-Century England: A Research Symposium
University of Birmingham, Edgbaston Campus, 19-20 April 2012

As part of Birmingham/Lancaster's AHRC project on the Cultural History of Pantomime, we are hosting a research symposium on the theme of Politics, Performance and Popular Culture.

Panels of speakers have been arranged, but we welcome contributions to a roundtable panel in which speakers will talk briefly about how their research addresses key questions on the interrelationships between 'performance' (howsoever defined), politics, and popular culture. We would be especially interested in short position-papers which reflects on: performance 'space' (church, hustings, streets, courtroom, etc); use of theatrical metaphor; the performative language of politics; reference to politics in performances, the politics of performance (censorship, adaptation, etc); and politics as performance (protest, campaigning, etc). There will be plenty of opportunities to discuss research in question sessions and over extended refreshment breaks.

If you would like to share your research as a speaker, please get in touch by no later than Friday 16th March. Alternatively, please get in touch if you'd like to attend. Further information, including list of confirmed speakers, topics, and details of local accommodation can be found here: https://sites.google.com/site/victorianpantomime/2011-symposium_politics-and-performance

Costs: £35 (£20 p/g)

For further information, please contact Peter Yeandle (p.yeandle@lancaster.ac.uk).

William Morris Society CFP MLA 2013: "Morris on the East Coast" (3/15/2012; 1/3-6/2013)

The William Morris Society in the United States invite proposals for a session at the Modern Language Association annual convention (to be held in Boston, 3-6 January 2013) on the subject "Morris on the East Coast."  Topics might encompass literary, political, and personal connections as well as art, design, bookmaking, and architecture.

A one-page prospectus and brief c. v. should be sent to florence-boos@uiowa.edu by 15 March 2012.

William Morris Society website www.morrissociety.org

Reminder: Print and Beyond: Publishing Rossetti, Morris and the Aesthetes (3/15/2012; 1/3-6/2013)

The William Morris Society in the United States invite proposals for a special session at the Modern Language Association annual convention (to be held in Boston, 3-6 January 2013), on the topic "Print and Beyond: Publishing Rossetti, Morris and the Aesthetes." The session is co-sponsored by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing and the William Morris Society in the United States.

A one-page prospectus and brief c. v. should be sent to florence-boos@uiowa.edu and gbarnhisel@uduq.edu by 15 March 2012.

William Morris Society website www.morrissociety.org

Additional CFP: Reassessing the Dramatic Monologue: Browning, Before, Beyond (4/15/2012; 6/28-30/2012)

Additional Call For Papers:
Reassessing the Dramatic Monologue: Browning, Before, Beyond.
Royal Holloway, University of London, 28-30 June 2012

Organisers: Dr Vicky Greenaway, Dr Britta Martens, Dr Simon Avery

The Browning Society in collaboration with Royal Holloway, University of London, the University of Westminster, and the University of the West of England, is holding a three-day conference on the history and development of the dramatic monologue on 28-30 June 2012. The event is supported by the British Association of Victorian Studies and the Modern Humanities Research Association, and the keynote speakers will be Professor Isobel Armstrong, Professor Daniel Karlin, Professor Tricia Lootens and Professor Cornelia Pearsall. A dramatization of a selection of Robert Browning’s monologues by Primavera Productions is part of the conference programme.

The first call for papers has generated considerable interest in the conference and particularly from speakers on an array of nineteenth-century writers and topics. The organisers are now looking to augment this with an additional call for papers on the dramatic monologue in the 20th and 21st centuries, although further papers on the Victorian dramatic monologue are also welcome.

20 minutes papers are invited on any topic relating to the dramatic monologue, including:

• the work of particular poets (for example, Charlotte Mew, T.S. Eliot, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy);
• new approaches to defining the dramatic monologue and its significance;
• the relationship between the dramatic monologue and other genres such as drama or performance poetry;
• the dramatic monologue and concerns with gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, etc.;
• relations between the dramatic monologue and psychology;
• possible future developments of the form.

Please send 300-word abstracts to Simon Avery at s.avery@westminster.ac.uk by 15 April 2012.

Last Call: Bernard Shaw and Debt Sealings (3/1/2012; 11/8-11/2012)

Bernard Shaw and Debt Sealings:
A Proposed Session on Bernard Shaw at the 2012 Midwest Modern Language Association Convention
November 8-11, 2012. Cincinnati, Ohio.

The proposed session seeks papers on Shaw's writings that dovetail with the conference theme of "Debt." Possible topics could include:

• representations of borrowers and lenders, borrowing and lending, in Shaw's plays
• debts Shaw and/or his plays owe to other thinkers, writers, and/or political figures
• Shavian debts accrued by contemporary plays, playwrights, and/or theorists

Please send 300-500 word abstracts via electronic attachment to Christopher Wixson at cmwixson@eiu.edu by March 1st, 2012.

Selected presenters will be informed by May 1st, 2012 and must register for the conference by July 1, 2012.

More information on the MMLA and the 2012 conference can be found at: ww.luc.edu/mmla

CFP: Transporting Bodies and Minds: 18th- and 19th-Century Travel (5/1/2012; 9/15/2012)

Throughout  the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, travelers of all kinds  documented their experiences in private letters and diaries, official  correspondence, life writing, spiritual and religious narratives, and  ethnographic accounts. Furthermore, these experiences were often  transformed into works of art, with real and imagined moments of contact  serving as the inspiration for painting, music, poetry, prose fiction,  photography, and other creative ventures. These aesthetic productions transformed the foreign into the national, the known into the unknown,  appearing to expand access to other cultures—a model of cultural  transportation that recent criticism is troubling.

Scholarship  drawing on theories of post-colonialism, gender, material and visual  culture, cognitive studies, posthumanism, and other critical paradigms  has challenged our understanding of the impact—not just aesthetic, but  also commercial, martial, and religious—of travel in the eighteenth and  nineteenth centuries. This work has made strides in elucidating a more  dynamic picture of the way travel and cultural encounter could transform  (or fail to transform) prior understandings of both time and space.  Moreover, it has allowed for a more capacious appreciation of how  influence happens, extending beyond more uni-directional, Eurocentric  approaches.

Continuing  this work, the University of Michigan’s Eighteenth-Century Studies  Group and Nineteenth-Century Forum will co-host an interdisciplinary  graduate student conference on these topics, to take place in Ann Arbor  on September 15, 2012. We are pleased to announce that Kate Flint,  Provost Professor of English and Art History (University of Southern  California), will be our keynote speaker.

Graduate  students are encouraged to submit papers that explore the implications  of travel, tourism, boundary crossing, exploration, and other related  topics—from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. Submissions of  either individual papers or full panels are welcome. Please send  abstracts of no more than 300 words to Karen McConnell  (mcconnka@umich.edu) by May 1, 2012.

Suggested paper topics include (but are not limited to):

• mass tourism
• emigration/immigration
• travel and commercial enterprise
• travel and photography
• documenting travel/travel as documentation
• Roma, Sinti, and other itinerant communities
• time-travel
• smuggling
• travel and war
• imaginative or mental journeys
• travel and empire
• exploration, conquest, contact
• depictions in the visual arts (e.g., the natural world, native/foreign peoples, aesthetic judgment)
• travel’s effect on genre
• contagion/infection
• consequences for epistemology (e.g., scientific, spiritual, ethnographic) 

Last Call: NAVSA 2012 "Victorian Networks" (3/1/2012; 9/27-30/2012)

This year’s conference follows the theme, “Victorian Networks,” and will feature keynotes by Amanda Anderson, Adam Phillips, and a visual networks panel with Caroline Arscott, Tim Barringer, Julie Codell, and Mary Roberts.   Seminars will be run by Kate Flint, Jules Law, Tanya Agathocleous, Elizabeth Helsinger, Linda K. Hughes and Mark Turner, Jason Rudy, Kate Thomas, and Jill Galvan.  

You can find more information, including the CFP, here: http://english.wisc.edu/navsa/

Call for Applicants: Postdoctoral Research Fellowships for a project on the Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture (4/2/2012)

http://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/-13252/

Applications are invited for 6 post-doctoral fellows to work on the European Research Council funded interdisciplinary, collaborative project entitled The Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture, to be located in the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities.

Applications are encouraged with regard to any relevant field including history, art history, classics, literary studies, Jewish studies, history of archaeology, history of education, cultural history, history of scholarship, theology, history of biblical interpretation, philosophy, history of science, Egyptology, Assyriology. Applicants may propose to work on any relevant aspect of the five major themes of the project: the bible in and as history; the bible in and as fiction; the bible and its institutions; the material bible; archaeology and the bible.

As well as completing the proposed research project, fellows will be expected to help develop, organize and contribute to further collaborative and interdisciplinary research on the themes of the project; help develop, organize and participate in the group's weekly reading group, termly seminars and colloquia, and yearly conferences; and help select, invite and organize the visits of termly visiting professors.

Applicants are strongly encouraged to read the further particulars, available on http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/page/1093/bible-antiquity.htm, where you will also find details of the project and how to apply. Applicants must hold a PhD in a relevant field by the application deadline of 2 April 2012.

Limit of tenure: Appointment is for five years, from 1 September 2012, and is non-renewable.

Quote Reference: VM13252,Closing Date: 2 April 2012

Interview Date(s): 23 and 24 May 2012

Crossing the Highland Line in the 19th Century (6/8-10/2012)

Association for Scottish Literary Studies Annual Conference 2012
Crossing the Highland Line in the 19th Century: cross-currents in Scottish writing
8-10 June 2012, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Isle of Skye

The nineteenth century saw the romanticisation of the Highlander, the rise of tartanry and the emergence of the modern Scottish tourist industry. It also witnessed the worst excesses of the Clearances and the beginnings of an exodus from the Highlands to the industrial cities and to the colonies. This conference will examine the literary culture of Scotland - Highland and Lowland - during this transformational period, and will explore its interactions and intersections.

Programme

Friday 8 June
18:30—Optional buffet
20:15—Opening of conference (Boyd Robertson and Ian Brown)
20:30—Contacts and tensions between Highlands and Lowlands (Allan MacInnes)
21:15—"The Highland Drover": the plays of Archibald Maclaren (Ian Brown and Gioia Angeletti)
22:00—Bar open

Saturday 9 June
9:15—What can Walter Scott offer us today? (Christopher Whyte)
9:45—The poetry of Ailean Dall (Ronald Black)
10:15—Tea & coffee
10:45—James Hogg and the Highlands (Suzanne Gilbert)
11:15—The great folk collectors (D. W. Stewart)
11:45—Break
12:00—The Edinburgh journals and the Highlands (David Manderson)
12:30—Gaelic periodicals (Sheila Kidd)
13:00—Lunch
14:00—Robert Louis Stevenson: the Lowland Highlander (Christopher MacLachlan)
14:30—The unknown William Livingstone: four songs (Christopher Whyte)
15:00—Tea & coffee
15:30—Art, the Highlands and the Celtic Revival (Murdo Macdonald)
16:15—Conclusion of papers
19:00—Conference Dinner
21:00—Ceilidh: featuring Margaret Bennett

Sunday 10 June
10:00—Màiri Mhòr and the land struggle (Mark Wringe)
10:30—"That fairyland of poesy": the Highlands in 19th century novels by women (Pam Perkins)
11:00—Tea & coffee
11:30—Neil MacLeod, bard of Skye and Edinburgh (Meg Bateman)
12:00—From Celtic Revival to Scottish Literary Renaissance (Douglas Gifford)
13:00—Optional buffet lunch

Rate for ASLS members/students/unwaged: £40 per head
Full rate: £50 per head
(coffees/teas and Saturday lunch included)

Accommodation (including breakfast) at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig is available at preferential rates:
Single room: £32 per night
Double room: £56 per night

Further information, including a booking form and travel details, can be found online at http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/scotlit/asls/AnnConf.html

CFP: Neo-Victorian Studies General Issue 2012/13

Neo-Victorian Studies is currently soliciting scholarly and creative work for its 2012/13 general issue.  The editors welcome articles from established and early career scholars and creative artists on any topic related to the exploration of nineteenth-century legacies from twentieth/twenty-first-century perspectives.  We encourage papers that push the understanding or cultural memory of the ‘Victorian’ beyond its usual temporal and geographical boundaries, investigating the politics of memorialisation, appropriation, adaptation and revision within inter-disciplinary frameworks and across multimedia. We seek work that expands current theoretical concepts of neo-Victorianism and actively interrogates the conditions under which the nineteenth century re-appears in and continues to inform our globalised present. We welcome work on issues as diverse as historical trauma; nationalism and legacies of empire; the politics of nostalgia; ‘the repressive hypothesis’; cultural and economic neo-colonialism/reverse colonisation; aesthetic and political ideologies; the ‘neo-Victorian’ as hybrid genre, mode, or trace; and the 'after-lives' of Victorian figures, texts and artworks. We invite projects that explore the different genres, cultures and spaces of re-doing the nineteenth century or that examine the neo-Victorian as style, performance and practice.

In addition to

• scholarly theoretical/critical articles of 6000-8000 words (plus bibliography)
• creative pieces (any genre of creative writing or creative arts)

 NVS also invites:

• polemical pieces
• interviews
• notices of work in progress
• reviews of relevant critical/creative publications in the field
• critical/creative responses to previous contributions

Please direct enquiries and send electronic submissions via email with Word Document attachment to the General & Founding Editor, Marie-Luise Kohlke at neovictorianstudies@swansea.ac.uk. Please consult our submission guidelines, prior to submission.

Call for Applications: PhD studentship on Hardy and Education (3/9/2012)

Great Western Research and National Trust 

fully-funded Doctoral Studentship
Thomas Hardy and Education Ref: 945 

(application deadline 9th March 2012; studentship to begin October 2012)

The primary aim of this doctoral studentship is to ask how the study of Hardy can be taken beyond the academic research community. Focusing particularly on young audiences, but also on other learning groups, the project is interdisciplinary and in part practice-based, drawing on the research methods of English studies, history and education. It will involve some practical work in schools as well as with the National Trust and Dorset County Museum learning groups and the student will be required to develop and disseminate relevant, original research in the field. The student will also be expected to undertake up to six hours per week voluntary work from March to October each year at one of the Hardy properties in Dorset (birth place cottage or Max Gate) and will work with other parties in order to ensure the wider understanding both of Hardy and his work and of his importance to the cultural life of the South West region as well as more broadly.

The University of Exeter (Centre for South West Writing and Centre for Victorian Studies, College of Humanities, in consultation with Exeter Graduate School of Education), in conjunction with the National Trust and in collaboration with the University of St Andrews and the Hardy Country Steering Group (among which current partners include Dorset County Museum (DCM), Dorset County Council, Dorset Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) and the Thomas Hardy Society) has been awarded funding from Great Western Research (GWR) for this three-year doctoral research studentship on Thomas Hardy and Education.

For further details please see: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/studying/funding/award/?id=945

NCSA 2012: Spiritual Matters/Matters of the Spirit (3/22-24/2012)

Please join us for the 33rd Annual Conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association: Spiritual Matters/Matters of the Spirit (March 22-24, 2012) in Asheville, North Carolina.

From Romanticism's spiritual resurgence to the interrogations of Darwinism and science, the nineteenth century was immersed in conversation about the place of spirituality and religion in society, politics, and the arts. This year's NCSA conference will feature papers addressing all aspects of belief, religion, and spirituality in the long nineteenth century, from 1789 to 1914.

Our keynote speaker this year is Alexandra Owen, Professor of History and Gender Studies at Northwestern University. The title of her presentation is “Spirit, Matter: Modern Ghosts and the Haunting Effect in the Shadow of the Long Nineteenth Century.” The program also features "An Evening with the Ghosts" (a reenactment of a Victorian séance conducted by Eric Hall) and an excursion to the Biltmore Estate. The complete conference program, as well as information about travel, accommodations, and registration can be found on the conference website: http://www.nineteenthcenturystudiesassociation.org/2012-conference.html.

We look forward to seeing you there!

CFP: MLA 2013 Special Session "Neo-Victorianism and Marginal Voices" (3/15/2012; 1/3-6/2013)

This proposed special session panel seeks papers that explore the parameters of neo-Victorian literature from a variety of historical, formal, or theoretical approaches.  Questions addressed might include (but are certainly not limited to) the following:

• What is neo-Victorian literature?  What are the genre’s boundaries?   What are its defining characteristics?  Are there exemplary texts?
• What is “new” about neo-Victorian literature?  Form?  Subject positioning?  Narrative technique?  The alignment of readers’ sympathies?  Something else?
• How has it developed as a genre?  From where does it come, and where might we expect it to go?
• How does neo-Victorian literature provide a site for marginal voices to address issues of identity, subjectivity, politics, race, class, etc.?  How does it work in establishing alternative histories?
• What do these texts aim to do?  Do they (or must they) have political agendas?  In what way do they question ideologies or ideas of history or given knowledge in other epistemological categories like science or sexuality?  Do they always represent an alternative to the dominant cultural narrative?
• What relationships does this literature depict between the metropolitan center and the colonial margins?  Must it be set in one or the other?  As a genre, does it represent a particular subject position?  Must it address the colonial experience?
• Is neo-Victorian literature best understood as a subset of postcolonial literature, or is it a distinct genre?
• What time period forms the boundaries of neo-Victorian literature?  When can it be written, and when must it be set?
• Where should neo-Victorian literature be taught?  In courses on Victorian literature or the Victorian novel?  Postcolonial courses?  Twentieth-century Anglophone courses?  Elsewhere?  And what might be the point of teaching these texts?
• What do neo-Victorian texts tell us about the Victorians?  What do they tell us about ourselves in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?

Papers that contextualize neo-Victorian texts, the issues they raise, or their creators or consumers are welcome.

Please send 250-word abstracts to Cameron Bushnell (cbushne@clemson.edu) and Elizabeth McClure (emcclure@umd.edu) no later than March 15, 2012.

CFP: Special NACBS Jubilee Panel

The North American Conference on British Studies program committee is interested in arranging a special session on the Jubilee for the 2012 Montreal meeting. This would be a great opportunity for comparisons to Victoria's Golden and Diamond Jubilees and the social/cultural history of jubilee years (for ex., 1977 or 1935), and a discussion about the celebrity culture of monarchy. Ifinterested, please contact Julie Taddeo at taddeo@mail.umd.edu to discuss a possible panel.

NACBS 2012: http://www.nacbs.org/conference.html

Registration Open: RSVP 2012 conference (9/14-15/2012)

Registration is now open for the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals conference, “Sentiment and Sensation in Victorian Periodicals,” September 14-15, 2012, at the AT&T Conference Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Papers will address any aspect of Victorian periodicals, particularly those 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. For information about local arrangements and registration is available at the RSVP 2012 website, www.rsvp2012.org or by contacting Kathryn Ledbetter, KLedbetter@txstate.edu

CFP: Project Narrative Summer Institute (3/1/2012; 6/11-22/2012)

The Project Narrative Summer Institute (PNSI) is a two-week program on the Columbus campus of the Ohio State University for faculty members and advanced graduate students who want to explore the usefulness of narrative theory to their research and teaching. Led by two Project Narrative core faculty members, the seminar meets in the mornings to discuss narrative and narrative-theoretical readings, and participants work in the afternoons on projects  they bring to the Institute. A project may be an article, book chapter, presentation, or syllabus. PNSI members form a vibrant and collegial community for sharing ideas about scholarship, writing, and pedagogy.  

The 2012 PNSI will be led by Project Narrative core faculty members Frederick Aldama and Sean O'Sullivan. In addition to theoretical readings, texts will be drawn from many narrative genres with an emphasis on comics, film, and television.

Tuition for PNSI is $1200. Participants also cover the cost of their own travel and housing. We encourage participants to seek institutional funding for this professional development opportunity. We can offer information for participants who want to share housing, house-sit, or stay in local bed-and-breakfasts.

Applicants should send a current c.v. and a one-page description of the project they plan to undertake at PNSI to Robyn Warhol via email (warhol.1@osu.edu) no later than March 1, 2012.

For more information on PNSI, including rationale, list of texts, and a detailed schedule, please following this link. 

Please distribute this email to all those potentially interested in attending.

Reminder: Neo-Victorian Studies special issue 2012 "The Other Dickens: Neo-Victorian Appropriation and Adaptation" (2/29/2012)

As part of the bicentenary celebrations of Dickens's birth, the editors of a special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies on 'The Other Dickens: Neo-Victorian Appropriation and Adaptation' invite contributors to consider the 'other' Dickens - those aspects of Dickens's life and work that have been the subject of recent revision, reappraisal, and transformation in contemporary culture. The special issue will aim to critically assess our persisting fascination with this canonical Victorian figure and, more generally, the 'Dickensian' cultural legacy of the Victorian age in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We would especially welcome papers and creative pieces which address the continued influence of Dickens on neo-Victorian studies, in literature, in bio-fiction, as well as in film and television adaptations of his novels.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Dickens and adaptation/re-writings
• Dickens and the legacies of Empire
• International/trans-cultural Dickens in the age of globalisation
• Dickens and contemporary politics (social reforms, the 'Big Society', philanthropy)
• Dickens and twenty-first-century material/commodity culture and consumerism
• Dickens and revisions of gender in the private and public spheres
• Dickens and neo-Victorian nostalgia
• Gothicised Dickens/Dickens's ghosts
• Dickens and Dickens's women in bio-fiction
• Dickens and (self-)performance/performing the past

Please send a 500 word proposal for a 6,000-8,000 word chapter to the guest editors Elodie Rousselot (Elodie.Rousselot@port.ac.uk) and Charlotte Boyce (charlotte.boyce@port.ac.uk) by 29 February 2012, adding a short biographical note. Completed articles and/or creative pieces will be due by 15 July 2012 and should be sent as a Word.doc attachment via email to the guest editors, with a copy to neovictorianstudies@swansea.ac.uk. Please consult the NVS website http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/ for further submission guidelines. 

CFP: Midwest Conference on British Studies (4/1/2012; 10/12-14/2012)

The Midwest Conference on British Studies is proud to announce that its fifty-ninth annual meeting will be hosted by the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, October 12-14th, 2012.  

The keynote speaker will be John Gillis, Professor Emeritus, Rutgers University. The plenary address will be given by Ian Gentles, Professor of History, Tynedale University College and Seminary.

The MWCBS seeks papers from scholars in all fields of British Studies, broadly defined to include those who study England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Britain's Empire and the Commonwealth. We welcome scholars from the broad spectrum of disciplines, including but not limited to history, literature, political science, gender studies and art history. Proposals for complete sessions are preferred, although proposals for individual papers will be considered. We welcome roundtables (of four participants plus chair) and panels (of three participants plus chair/commentator) that:

•  offer cross-disciplinary perspectives on topics in British Studies
•  situate the arts, letters, and sciences in a British cultural context
•  examine representations of British and imperial/Commonwealth national identities
•  consider Anglo-American relations, past and present
•  examine new trends in British Studies
•  assess a major work or body of work by a scholar
• explore new developments in digital humanities and/or research methodologies

After a very positive response to last year’s first teaching roundtable, we would particularly like to receive proposals for teaching roundtables that discuss collaborative or innovative learning techniques in the British Studies classroom.

The MWCBS welcomes papers presented by advanced graduate students and will award the Walter L. Arnstein Prize for the best graduate student paper(s) given at the conference.

Proposals must:

Include a 200-word abstract for each paper and a brief, 1-page c.v. for each participant, including chairs and commentators.

For full panels, include a brief 200-word preview of the panel as a whole.

Please place the panel proposal, the accompanying paper proposals and vitas in one file and send it as a single attachment. Also identify within the email the contact person for the panel.

All proposals should be submitted online by April 1, 2012, to the Program Committee Chair, Lia Paradis at lia.paradis@sru.edu.

Program Committee: Phil Harling, University of Kentucky; Robin Hermann, University of Louisiana at Lafayette; Isaac Land, Indiana State University; Jennifer McNabb, Western Illinois University; Lia Paradis, Chair, Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania; Lisa Sigel, Depaul University.

Visit the MWCBS website at http://mwcbs.edublogs.org/

CFP: NAVSA 2012 panel "Between Science and Sensation: Psychic Networks in the Mid-Victorian Period" (2/27/2012; 9/27-30/2012)

Between Science and Sensation:
Psychic Networks in the Mid-Victorian Period
NAVSA 2012 panel

We invite paper proposals on a variety of topics related to the theme of psychic connections between 1835-1875 for a special topic panel at NAVSA 2012 (at the University of Wisconsin). For this panel we are interpreting the term "psychic" broadly to include all forms of spiritual communications and connections—including mesmerism/hypnotism, prognostication, telepathy, etc. In particular, we welcome perspectives that examine the intersections between psychic networks and science. For example, potential papers could explore how scientific theories attempted to explain and contain psychic phenomena, or how the tension between science and the supernatural becomes sensationalized in popular narratives. The other proposed papers for the panel include a reading which examines Darwinian science and psychic inheritance in Wilkie Collins's Armadale and an examination of hypnotic poisoning in Charles Warren Adams's The Notting Hill Mystery.

Paper topics for this panel could address but are not limited to:

• Scientific attempts to "prove" the existence of the supernatural (such as ghosts, fairies, etc.)
• Mesmerism
• Telepathy/telekenesis
• Spirit photography
• Natural Theology or other attempts to unite evolutionary theory with a spiritual belief system
• Deja vu
• Psychology
• British interest in non-Western religions
• Intersections between Christianity and science
• Literary affect
• Literature as science writing
• Modes of belief
• Studies of fear

Please send 500 word abstracts and a one-page CV in pdf format to szellars@indiana.edu by 27 February. Final acceptance contingent upon NAVSA approval.