CFP: “We Are Not Amused”: Victorian Comedy and Humour (11/1/2012; 6/1-4/2013)

CFP for the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario's ACCUTE (Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English) member-organized panel:
“We Are Not Amused”: Victorian Comedy and Humour

Abstracts due: Nov 1, 2012
Conference date and location: June 1-4, University of Victoria, BC

Comedy is under-explored in Victorian literary criticism, but it is pervasive in the texts of the era, from brief moments—Dickens’ caricatures and Thackeray’s asides—to more extended treatments, in Lear’s nonsense verse and Jerome K. Jerome’s widely popular Three Men in a Boat.

This panel invites papers that explore comedy, humour and laughter in Victorian literature and cultural productions. What functions did comedy serve in Victorian texts? When is its humour riotous and anarchic, and when does it reinforce norms? How comfortably did comedy sit alongside the period’s idealization of moral and artistic solemnity? What effect does laughing at, or laughing with, texts and characters have upon our understanding of them? Why are the comic features of a scene or moment important?

Papers may consider such topics as:

• Parody, burlesque, farce and satire
• Ditties, jokes, word-play, wit and puns
• Black humour and the grotesque
• Clowning, the circus, and comic performance
• “Serious cheerfulness” and the mixing of wit and gravity
• Savoy Operas and the music hall
• Eminent Victorians and depictions of Victorian earnestness          
• Failed humour or humourlessness
• Caricatures and stereotypes
• Comedy as social critique or subversive force
• Sentimental humour
• The science and philosophy of Victorian laughter

ACCUTE requires the following of all proposed papers: 

• a 700-word proposal or completed paper (of approximately 8-10 double-spaced pages, not to exceed 20 minutes in presentation). Please note that because of our policy of blind vetting, ACCUTE cannot accept proposals or papers that include identifying marks. These include information in headers, references to your work or to your collaborations with others, your rank or institutional affiliation, or any other information that might identify you to a vettor.
• a completed Proposal Submissions Information Sheet, available from the ACCUTE website: http://www.accute.ca/generalcall.html
• a 100-word abstract of the proposed presentation
• a 50-word bio-bibliographical note on yourself

Email address for submissions: VSAOatACCUTE@gmail.com

Seminar: Sacred Traditions and the Arts (10/11/2012)

Thursday 11 October, 18.00 – 19.30 (Research Forum South Room)

The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN

Speaker (1): Dr Michaela Giebelhausen (University of Essex)
Invisible Cathedral: Reconsidering the Sacred in Today’s Art Museum

Speaker (2): Professor Frances Spalding CBE (Newcastle University)
Helen Sutherland, Patron and Collector: Art and Sacrament in the Fells

The seminar on Sacred Traditions and the Arts is a joint venture between the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s and The Courtauld Institute of Art. It seeks to place researchers in dialogue who are working on any aspect of the sacred and visual culture. It is open to all scholars and students who have an interest in exploring the intersections of religion and art regardless of period, geography or tradition.

On 11th October, Dr Michaela Giebelhausen will present a paper titled Invisible Cathedral: Reconsidering the Sacred in Today’s Art Museum. Professor Frances Spalding will speak on Helen Sutherland, Patron and Collector: Art and Sacrament in the Fells. These papers both explore the boundaries of sacred experience and sacrament in relation to institutional and personal contexts. Art collecting, display strategies, and the importance of space and place will be foregrounded in relation to modern Europe.

There will be ample time for discussion and questions following the papers. The event will be concluded by an informal reception.

Open to all, free admission

This seminar is jointly organised by Professor Ben Quash (King’s College London) and Dr Ayla Lepine (The Courtauld Institute of Art).
 

The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN

tel +44 207 848 2785  

http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/index.shtml

Reminder: Gaskell Project 2015: Place, Progress, and Personhood (10/31/2012)

Gaskell Project 2015: Place, Progress, and Personhood

An Edited Collection

(Abstract Deadline: 31 October 2012)

Emily Morris

Sarina Gruver Moore

Lesa Scholl    

Contact email: gaskellproject2015@gmail.com

In anticipation of the 150th anniversary of Gaskell’s death, we are seeking abstracts for an edited volume on the subject of Place, Progress, and Personhood in the Works of Elizabeth Gaskell. The nineteenth century saw dramatic changes in the landscape of Britain as industry and technology reshaped the geographical space. The advent of the railway and the increasing predominance of manufactory machinery reoriented the nation’s physical and social countenance. But alongside the excitement of progress and industry, there was also a sense of fear and loss manifested through an idealisation of the country home, the pastoral retreat, and the agricultural South. This collection of interdisciplinary essays will present a variety of geographical, industrial, archeological, psychological, and spatial perspectives not only on Gaskell’s work, but also on Gaskell’s place within the narrative of British letters and national identity.

Gaskell’s importance, both as a literary figure and as a cultural touchstone, continues to rise. In the popular imagination, new BBC adaptations of her novels have perhaps given her the greatest celebrity she has had since her own lifetime. In addition, the recent Heritage Lottery Fund award of £1.85 million for the restoration and preservation of the Gaskells’ house in Manchester, Plymouth Grove, indicates her renewed national influence.

This collection is very consciously an international and egalitarian collaboration, and we invite scholars of any level or discipline to submit an abstract.

Topics might include (but are not limited to):

• Geography  / materiality of place
• Digital transformations of texts/mapping
• Concepts of home and not home
• Foreign places, travel, and national identity
• Rural vs. urban landscapes
• Ecology / environmentalism
• Imagined places
• Place and gender, the gendering of spaces
• Space theory and Victorian spaces
• Correspondence
• Landmarks of progress, modernity, and personal identity
• Gaskell’s place in the popular imagination/literary tourism
• Architectural spaces and everyday life
• Ideas of belonging

Please submit an abstract of 300-500 words and a brief CV to  gaskellproject2015@gmail.com by 31 October 2012. Authors will be notified by 5 January 2013 whether or not their abstract has been accepted. The deadline for the full-length article, if accepted, is 15 April 2013. Articles should be between 4,000 and 6,000 words in length, accompanied by an abstract of around 200 words.

Preliminary inquiries are welcome: kindly address them to gaskellproject2015@gmail.com.

Emily Morris

Department of English

St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan

Canada

Sarina Gruver Moore

Department of English

Calvin College

Grand Rapids, Michigan

USA

Lesa Scholl

Dean of Academic Studies

Emmanuel College, University of Queensland

Australia

Seeking proposals for editions of Victorian novels

Valancourt Books (http://www.valancourtbooks.com) is presently soliciting proposals for editions of Victorian and Edwardian era novels for our Valancourt Classics series.  More information on our press is available on our website.  We specialize primarily in neglected popular fiction and particularly seek things like penny dreadfuls, sensation novels, weird/supernatural, mystery and detective, and gay-interest fiction.  

Please note, at present we are looking only for editions that will be not only of academic and scholarly interest, but which also might have the potential for sales to trade audiences via Amazon and other booksellers.  Feel free to contact the editor with any ideas or questions:

James D. Jenkins

Publisher & Editor

Valancourt Books

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

Reminder: Venice Professionalization Workshop (10/31/2012; 5/27-31, 6/3, 6/7/2013)

This workshop is intended for graduate students and recently minted PhDs and will address such issues as grant-writing; postdoctoral fellowships; the writing of proposals; job letters and the market; the interview process and job talks; teaching portfolios; how to turn a seminar paper into a published article; the digital humanities, pros and cons; the differences among Canadian, American, British, and also Australian markets; and negotiating contracts. The workshop will occur on San Servolo every morning, May 27-31, June 3, and June 7.  A number of scholars have expressed their willingness to participate, provided they can arrange their schedule and funding, including Andrew Miller, Carolyn Williams, Alison Byerley, Barbara Leckie, Pamela Gilbert, and Kate Flint.  There will not be a firm list of visitors until the new year.

The workshop will cost US$800.  That will include the program fee, rental of the classroom, and lodging for the period May 25 to June 2, plus an additional night on June 7, so 10 extra nights in Venice.  This means that participants would have 10 extra nights in Venice for less than they could arrange any other way, thanks to the help of Venice Int'l U, so the workshop is a bonus of sorts (two and a half hours every morning, leaving the afternoons to visit Venice each day).  The only cheaper lodging option is the Venice hostel but it only allows you to stay for a maximum of 3 nights.  The next cheapest is Domus Ciliota at €70/night (the price, however, goes up in June). It's already sold out for those dates (if it were available, it would be over $1000 for 10 nights, with the June rate increase). The housing will be in in dorm rooms on San Servolo from May 25 to June 7, not counting the nights of the NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA Supernumerary Conference itself; the NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA Supernumerary Conference runs from June 3-6.

You can find more information about the NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA Supernumerary Conference, “The Global and the Local,” here: http://glocalvictorians.wordpress.com/

You can find information about the island here: http://www.sanservolo.provincia.venezia.it

In most cases, there will be three students together in one room, with a bathroom in the unit.  San Servolo is just a 10-minute vaporetto ride away from Piazza San Marco, the tourist heart of Venice.  

Note that the conference will run the first-come-first-served seminar format NAVSA ran successfully at Vanderbilt last year and again this year in Wisconsin: http://english.wisc.edu/navsa/?page_id=137

This means that, even if an individual does not get accepted in response to the general call, s/he will have the ability to join the conference and have his/her paper listed in the conference program.  Hopefully, that will be enough to secure funding from home institutions.

The deadline to apply for the professionalization workshop that will occur the week before the conference is Oct. 31. If you are interested in this workshop, please contact Dino Franco Felluga at: felluga@purdue.edu

Last Call: NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA Supernumerary Conference “The Global and the Local” (10/4/2012; 6/3-6/2013)

The conference is a supernumerary conference for NAVSA, BAVS, and AVSA.  The dates will be June 3-6, 2013 and the deadline for proposals is October 4, just a few days after the NAVSA '12 Wisconsin conference.  NAVSA's regular conference will occur in 2013 at the Huntington, the Getty, and Pasadena from October 23-27.  You can find more information about the Venice conference at the following web site: http://glocalvictorians.wordpress.com/

The deadline, once again, is October 4.  

The conference will occur on the beautiful island of San Servolo, just a 10-minute vaporetto ride from Piazza San Marco, the tourist heart of Venice.  There will be the option to stay on the island of San Servolo, in dorm room housing (with bathroom in room) for the fee of €53.33 (US$69) per night per person (an unbeatable rate for Venice!).  The rooms are spare but clean and a number of the rooms will be doubles, triples, and quadruples, so you would likely be sharing a room in this scenario.  

Lynda Nead (Birkbeck, UK) and Lydia Wevers (Victorian U, Wellington, New Zeland) have been confirmed as plenary speakers.  An opening State of the Field panel will have position papers by Regenia Gagnier (U Exeter, UK), Jock Macleod (Griffith U, Australia), and Kate Flint (USC, USA).  The conference will include a special night time tour of Basilica San Marco and a series of material culture seminars spread around the city. 

CFP: NAVSA 2013 Evidence (3/1/2013; 10/23-27/2013)

The North American Victorian Studies Association Conference for 2013, in Pasadena, California, October 23rd-27th, invites papers on the theme of evidence.  Evidence is central to all our work: we use texts, images, objects, the built environment to support our arguments. We also interpret, select, arrange, and juxtapose such evidentiary material.  The Victorians strenuously looked for evidence to support their assumptions, beliefs, and investigation. Our program will include optional workshops at the Getty Research Institute and material culture sessions at the Huntington. Conference attendees will be able to enter the Huntington and its wonderful gardens free of charge.

Proposals for individual papers or panels should be submitted electronically by March 1, 2013. Proposals for individual papers should be no more than 500 words; panel proposals should include 500-word abstracts for each paper and a 250-word panel description. Applicants should submit a one-page cv. 

Conference threads might include:

• What is evidence? How do different disciplines identify and use evidence? How does the use of evidence draw boundaries and bridges between disciplines? How does interdisciplinary work deal with evidence?
• How has the use of evidence changed (new evidence and new ways to use old evidence)?
• Evidence and the humanities: interpretation, analysis, scientific and historical method, supporting arguments
• Digitization and the changing nature of the archive, museum and library
• Teaching and evidence: sources, assessment, pedagogies
• Lost evidence: wars and other research inconveniences
• Imagined evidence and historical fictions
• Science: method, demonstration, essentialism/Social Darwinism
• Religion: belief, faith and intuition
• Personal evidence: autobiographies, letters and diaries
• Visual evidence: photography, painting, theater, film and other displays
• The building, the city and the village: architecture, urban planning and historic preservation
• Archaelogy, fossils, bone, tracks, spoor
• The body as evidence
• Material culture: clothes, pottery, and other everyday objects
• Crime and Justice: police, detectives, witnesses and the press
• Politics: parliamentary inquiries, select committees
• Ghosts and revenants: evidence of the supernatural and of the afterlife
• The press: scandal and public opinion
• Evidence and the colonial project

Details: http://dornsife.usc.edu/conferences/navsa/call-for-papers

CFP: 71st MPSA Political Science Conference, (10/5/2012; 4/11-14/2013)

The 71st MPSA Conference will be held from Thursday, April 11, 2013 through Sunday, April 14, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois. Submit proposals online through the MPSA website. Submissions can be made in the form of proposals to present a paper or poster, proposals for a complete panel or roundtable, proposals to serve as a chair or discussant, and proposals for working groups. Learn more. There are more research papers presented here than any other political science conference, and many involve other disciplines, including Literature. You do not need to be a member to submit a proposal or present a paper, but you do need to have an account: http://tinyurl.com/9f9w5m9

Founded in 1939, the MPSA is located at 101 W. Kirkwood Avenue, Suite 207, Bloomington, IN.   http://tinyurl.com/9f9w5m9  

Last Call: "Victorian New Media" (9/30/2012; 3/21-24/2013)

44th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

March 21-24, 2013

Boston, Massachusetts

Host Institution:  Tufts University

http://www.nemla.org/convention/2013/cfp.html

How were 19th-century innovations in communication and information technologies experienced as ‘new media’? How were 19th-century new media represented in literature and culture? What were the effects on literary and cultural production? How can methodologies from new media studies be applied to examinations of Victorian technology and culture? Examinations of Victorian new media may include any form of print, screen, sound, or telecommunications. Send 300-400 word abstracts and a brief bio to Jessica Kuskey jkuskey@oberlin.edu

Deadline:  September 30, 2012

Please include with your abstract:

Name and Affiliation

Email address

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

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

Revised CFP: Conan Doyle special issue of the OScholars (12/1/2012)

Articles of between 3000 and 4000 words are sought for a special issue of the OScholars to be edited by Professor Sarah E. Maier. Submissions will be accepted by on the basis of an abstract of approximately 250 words; completed submissions will then be double-blind peer reviewed.

Subjects may include but are not limited to:

• Conan Doyle and his contemporaries
• The literary legacy of Conan Doyle
• The influence of Maupassant on Conan Doyle
• The 'Sherlockian' or 'Holmesian' phenomenon
• London as metonym in the work of Conan Doyle
• Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot
• Conan Doyle and masculinity
• Conan Doyle's depiction of women
• Conan Doyle and imperialism
• Pastiche, parodies and plagiarism
• Conan Doyle across the Century
• Conan Doyle and Adaptation
• Rewriting and Revisioning Doyle

Contributors are encouraged to look beyond the Holmes canon. Abstracts should be sent to Sarah E. Maier at smaier@unb.ca to arrive not later than 1 December 2012.

Registration open: one-day conference on religion and literature in the long nineteenth century (10/26/2012)

The Department of English at Wheaton College (IL) invites interested scholars to join us on October 26th for a one-day conference on religion and literature in the long nineteenth century in Britain.

Our panelists include Lori Branch of the University of Iowa, author of Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth, Colin Jager of Rutgers University, author of The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era, and Janet Larson of Rutgers University-Newark, author of Dickens and the Broken Scripture. Mark Knight of the University of Toronto, co-author of Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature, will serve as our keynote. For the complete list of participants, please see the program below.

There is no charge for attendance, and visitors will be welcome. Scholars planning to attend are asked to contact the conference organizer, Richard Gibson richard.gibson@wheaton.edu, to ensure that proper space is provided. Directions will be sent by email.

Program: 

8:50-9:00: Welcome and Introductions

9:00-10:40: Panel 1, The Romantic Period
Colin Jager, Rutgers University, “Coleridge and the Invention of Religion”
Jasper Cragwall, Loyola University, “Some Reflections on the History of Enthusiasm in the Long Eighteenth Century"
Natasha Duquette, Biola University, “Psalmic Sublimity in Joanna Baillie and Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck”
Jeffrey Galbraith, Wheaton College, “‘My Chains Fell Off’: Charles Wesley and the Politics of Hymn Writing”

11:00-12:15: Panel 2, Victorian Period, I
Janet Larson, Rutgers University-Newark, “Reading Nightingale Writing Egypt”
Joshua King, Baylor University, “Frederick Denison Maurice’s Protestant Britain: National Spiritual Community in a Sectarian Print Culture”
Karen Dieleman, Trinity Christian College, “A Politics of Just Memory: Reading the Church Fathers in the Nineteenth Century”

12:15-2:00: Lunch

2:00-3:15: Panel 3, Victorian Period, II
Lori Branch, University of Iowa, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Remains of Religion in Modernity”
Christine Colón, Wheaton College, “Searching for ‘rare exceptions’: Anne Bronte and the Role of Orphan in the Tenant of Wildfell Hall”
Richard Gibson, Wheaton College, “Erasure and Emplotment: The Narrativity of Forgiveness in the Victorian Period”

3:30-4:15: Roundtable on Religion and Literature and the Long Nineteenth Century

7:30-9:00 Keynote: Mark Knight, University of Toronto, “Vanity Fair and the Burden of Evangelical Reading”

CFP: Cultural Cross-currents between Russia and Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century (3/1/2013;7/19, 9/20-21/2013)

Cultural Cross-currents between Russia and Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century
A Conference hosted by Tomsk State University and Birmingham City University

Amid this life based on coercion, one and the same thought constantly emerged among different nations, namely, that in every individual a spiritual element is manifested that gives life to all that exists, and that this spiritual element strives to unite with everything of a like nature to itself, and attains this aim through love. - From A Letter to a Hindu by Leo Tolstoy

From Tolstoy’s reading of Trollope and Ruskin, to the world-wide influence of Pushkin, the Western outlook of Turgenev and the influence of Dostoyevsky on James Joyce, Russian and English literatures influenced one another in the nineteenth century. This conference aims to explore these cultural and literary cross-currents, and welcomes papers on aspects of literature and history which explore this influence.

Two conferences will take place: one at Tomsk State University on Friday/Saturday 20-21 September 2013 and one at Birmingham City University on Friday 19th July 2013. Participants are welcome to attend either or both of these events. The conferences are organised by Dr Irina Gnyusova (Russia) and Dr Serena Trowbridge (UK).

We invite 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers, to be submitted to culturalcrosscurrents@gmail.com by 1st March 2013. Papers may consider a range of topics, including but not limited to:

• The influence of Russian literature on English writers
• The influence of English literature on Russian writers
• Cultural links between Britain and Russia in the nineteenth century
• Literary, social, political or artistic movements
• Anglo-Russian relations, from personal friendships to national relationships.

All papers will be considered for an edited collection of essays on the subject, to be published in English and Russian. The final essays will need to be around 6,000 words, and more information will be circulated after the conferences have both taken place. When submitting your abstract, please let us know which conference you wish to attend.

More information can be found on the conference website: http://culturalcrosscurrentsconference.wordpress.com

New resource available online: The Palace Journal

Queen Mary, University of London Archives have recently completed a project to digitise The Palace Journals, the weekly newspaper of the People’s Palace, which was published between 1887 and 1893. The Journals are available to view online: http://www.library.qmul.ac.uk/archives/digital/palace_journal

The People’s Palace was a philanthropic endeavour to provide culture and education to the people of East London.  It opened 125 years ago in 1887 and included facilities such as an entertainment hall, called ‘The Queen’s Hall’, a winter garden, swimming pool, library, tennis courts and gardens. The Palace Journals provide a unique contemporary account of the early years of the People's Palace and it's role in the East London community during the late Victorian period.

The Palace Journals include features about the People’s Palace, such as: news of clubs and societies, including the Debating Society, the Cycling Club and the Ramblers; and programmes for events, such as concerts, dog shows, flower shows, and lectures. Also included are articles on many different topics such as, ‘The Blunders of Elementary Education’, ‘Sensational Thrillers’, and ‘Strange Pets’.  Many issues feature serialised stories by authors including Walter Besant and Edgar Allan Poe.

In addition, the Journals include advertisements, for products including Harness’ Electropathic Belts. These electric belts were claimed to ‘promote the circulation, assist digestion, and promptly renew exhausted nerve force’ whilst ‘the mind is maintained in a buoyant, cheerful state, and every faculty is stimulated to the highest condition of intellectual strength’!

A complete catalogue of the People’s Palace collection is also now available via the archives catalogue http://archives-catalogue.library.qmul.ac.uk/CalmView/TreeBrowse.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&field=RefNo&key=QMC%2FPP The archives of the People’s Palace include correspondence relating to the establishment of the institution, programmes for events such as concerts, minute books of societies, photographs, medals awarded to students, press cuttings and ephemera, dating from 1885 to the 1950's. 

A selection of images from the People’s Palace collection is available in the Archives Galleries: http://www.library.qmul.ac.uk/archives/archives_galleries For further information about the Archives see the website www.library.qmul.ac.uk/archives or emailarchives@qmul.ac.uk

Registration Open: Victorians Institute “Victorian Mixed Media” (10/19-20/2012)

Victorians Institute: “Victorian Mixed Media”

Virginia Commonwealth University

October 19-20, 2012

The conference website, with program, is available at http://www.vcu.edu/vij/2012/index.html

Highlights include:

• Curators' tours of British Arts and Crafts and Sporting Art collections at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
• "Collecting Browning,” a reception with a talk by Mark Samuels Lasner at VCU Cabell Library to open the exhibit "Robert Browning, 1812-1889: A Bicentenary Exhibition from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection"
• Browning Bicentennial talk by Herbert F. Tucker: "Unsettled Scores: Structure and Play in Browning's Music Poems"
• Victorian Theatrical Society of the University of Virginia performing “Red Riding Hood” from Florence Bell’s Fairy Tale Plays and How to Act Them (1896).

Plenary Address by W. J. T. Mitchell: "Seeing Madness: Insanity, Media, and Visual Culture"

Recital by Kenneth Wood: "Unchained Melody: Giving Voice to Victorian Art Song"

For more information contact David Latané, dlatane@vcu.edu

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

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

—Robert Browning

CFP: Northeast Victorian Studies Association 2013

1874

Boston University: April 5-7, 2013

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

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

* * *

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

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

Other texts and events from 1874 worth considering:

Texts

M. E. Braddon’s Lost for Love

William Benjamin Carpenter’s Principles of Mental Physiology

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

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

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

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

F. W. Farrar’s Life of Christ

John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens, final volume

Francis Galton’s English Men of Science

W. S. Gilbert’s Charity

John Richard Green’s Short History of the English People

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

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

Henry Maudsley’s Responsibility in Mental Disease

George Meredith’s Beauchamp’s Career serialized

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

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

Henry Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics

James Sully’s Sensation and Intuition

Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Bothwell: A Tragedy

James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night

Anthony Trollope’s Lady Anna and Phineas Redux

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

Mrs. Henry Wood’s Johnny Ludlow

Events

London School of Medicine for Women founded

Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge founded

Fiji Islands annexed by Britain

Ghana established as a British colony

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

David Livingstone’s body returned to England

Victoria Embankment opened

Astley Deep Pit disaster

Public Worship Regulation Act

Factory Act of 1874

1874 Transit of Venus

Wilkie Collins’s readings in America

Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease founded

First Impressionist exhibition, Paris

*     *     *

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

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

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

               

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

 

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

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

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

‘Nobler imaginings and mightier struggles’: 

Octavia Hill and the remaking of British society

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

Sutton House, London, 27 and 28 September 2012

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

Conference rate £50 (£40 unwaged/student)

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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

Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

March 21-24, 2013

Boston, Massachusetts

Host Institution: Tufts University

www.nemla.org

CFP #1: Engendering the Victorian Female Poet

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

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

CFP #2: Nineteenth-century Eco-Poetics

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

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

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

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

Participants:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

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

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

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

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