New Blog Location: http://www.navsa.org (5/2014)

Hello all,

We are excited to announce that the main NAVSA website has been updated and will now incorporate our blogs. From now on all blog posts for Of Victorian Interest and NAVSA Member Publications will appear on http://www.navsa.org. Requesting blog posts will stay the same; you should all continue to e-mail Dino Franco Felluga with your updates, cfps, publications, etc. The Twitter feed and updates will also remain the same. 

Best!

CFP: MVSA '15 "Sense and the Senses" (10/31/2014; 5/1-3/2015)

MVSA 2015

University of Iowa

May 1-3, 2015

Deadline: October 31, 2014

The Midwest Victorian Studies Association seeks papers for topics related to the conference theme of “Sense and the Senses.” The committee encourages papers on any aspect of this topic in art, music, history, science, philosophy, theater or literature: senses and the invisible; sounds and soundscapes; listening/depictions of listening; the relationship between the body and mind; the five senses; the representation of sense or reason; rationality and embodiment; the relationship(s) among sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste; the conflict or accord between reason and the senses; the scientific, psychological, philosophical, or empirical study of the senses; the role of the senses in the creation of ideas or knowledge; the relationship between sense and emotion; empiricism and the imaginary; the disarray or unreliability of the senses; synaesthesia; mesmerism, hypnotism, and extrasensory perception; sensory textures of spaces and lived experiences; sensory extensions/alterations catalyzed by technologies.

MVSA’s 2015 Jane Stedman Plenary Speaker will be Linda M. Shires (David and Ruth Gottesman Professor of English, Yeshiva University). Her talk is entitled "Coming to our Senses: Colors in the 19th Century.” She is the author of Perspectives: Modes of Viewing and Knowing in 19th-Century England (2009), co-author with Steven Cohan of Telling Stories, A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction (1988; 2002), and editor of Rewriting the Victorians (1992; 2012) and From Romantic to Victorian: Essays by U.C. Knoepflmacher (forthcoming).

For the second year, MVSA will feature three seminars open to graduate students, faculty and independent scholars led by senior scholars on topics related to the conference theme. Seminar participants pre-circulate 5-to-7 page papers. More information will be available in the seminar CFP on the MVSA website soon.

Special events include a dramatic performance and a demonstration of Highland dancing in the Iowa Old Capitol Senate Chamber. A publication of selected essays from the conference is planned.

The Midwest Victorian Studies Association is an interdisciplinary organization welcoming scholars from all disciplines who share an interest in nineteenth-century British history, literature, and culture. Send a 300-word abstract and 1-page vita (as Word documents) by October 31, 2014, to conferencesubmissions@midwestvictorian.org. Even if you do not submit a paper, please plan to attend!

For more information, please visit www.midwestvictorian.org.

Reminder: VPFA "Edwin Drood: Solutions and Resolutions" (5/31/2014; 9/20/2014)

The Victorian Popular Fiction Association

Senate House, London, 

September 20, 2014
Deadline:  May 31, 2014

“The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Solutions and Resolutions”
Charles Dickens’s last novel, unfinished as it is, has become a call to  arms to a legion of fans, academics and authors to solve the mystery and complete the uncompleted. In the early years after Dickens’s death, passionate discussions of Drood formed the vast bulk of criticism of his works, while later scholars have looked back upon this formative period  with a mixture of bemusement and embarrassment. In 2014 The Drood Inquiry will investigate and celebrate the many weird and wonderful responses to Dickens’s story, exploring the ways in which these solutions reflect upon the authors’ attitudes to Dickens and his legacy, and how Dickens’s story and characters exist both within the boundaries of the original text and without in the numerous spin-offs that have arisen.

This one-day conference commemorating the launch of The Drood Inquiry will play upon some of those themes as well as allowing the opportunity to consider Edwin Drood afresh, not purely as a puzzle to be solved but as a work of literature to be analysed and celebrated in its own right. The committee welcomes proposals for 20 minute papers which will explore the themes of the book or the insights its subsequent treatment can provide on Dickens’s reputation, as well of course as any discussion of theories on how the story ends!

Topics could include, but are not restricted to:

• Characters, themes and topography of Edwin Drood
• The legacy and afterlife of Dickens and Drood
• Dickens in 1870
• Incomplete stories of the nineteenth century
• Victorian fan-fiction and neo-Victorianism
• Early detective fiction and the mystery genre
• Clues and red herrings
• Adaptations of Drood for stage and screen
• Dickens and the fanatics
• Ownership and authorship
• The role of the ending in plot and structure

Proposals (up to 500 words) and a brief biographical note should be sent by May 31, 2014 to peter.orford@buckingham.ac.uk. For further details and updates you can follow us on Twitter @Drood_Inquiry or visit http://cloisterhamtales.wordpress.com/.

Essay Contest: The Trollope Prize (6/1/2014)

Graduate and Undergraduate Essay Contest

The Trollope Prize

University of Kansas

Deadline: June 1, 2014

The Trollope Prize at the University of Kansas is pleased to announce that we are accepting submissions for the 2014 contest. It will be judged by: Elsie B. Michie (Louisiana State University), Tamara S. Wagner (Nanyang Technological University in Singapore), and this year’s internal judge, Ann Wierda Rowland (University of Kansas).

The Prize is pleased to be continuing its partnership with The Fortnightly Review, which will publish both the winning graduate and undergraduate essays from the 2014 contest. Additionally, theReview will award a modest honorarium to both the graduate and undergraduate winners.

The deadline for entries to both the undergraduate and graduate essay contests is June 1, 2014. Also please note that recent PhD recipients may enter the graduate contest. More detailed information on the criteria for entering the contest is available on the Trollope Prize website.

Please see our website -- http://trollopeprize.ku.edu -- for more information on the Prize and links to our social media pages. Questions may be addressed to trollopeprize@ku.edu.

Call for Participants: Our Mutual Friend Tweets (5/1/2014; 5/14-11/15)

Call for Participants: Our Mutual Friend Tweets

Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies

Start: May 1, 2014

Duration: May 2014-November 2015

On May 1, 2014, Birkbeck's Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies will begin a project to read Dickens’s final completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, in its original monthly installments. The reading project will run from May 2014 to November 2015, matching the 150th anniversary of the novel's original serialized publication (May 1864 - November 1865).

The organizers are also running a creative project alongside the main reading group, in which participants will take on the role of one of the characters in the novel, and run a Twitter account as this character.

The organizers are looking for volunteers to participate in this project. You'll be assigned a character's Twitter account, and, each month, you'll need to read the installment and tweet what you have been doing that month, in character. However, the extent of your involvement is up to you: alongside the main plot-tweets, you can share links or interact with the other participants, provided everything is done in character!

At the end of the project, we hope to collect together the tweets using Storify, allowing us to reconstruct Dickens's story through these digital interactions.

To take part, or for more information, please email Emma Curry (Birkbeck College) on e.curry@bbk.ac.uk. Please state if you have a preference for which character you would like to play - they will be allotted on a first-come, first-served basis.

For more information on the monthly reading project, see http://dickensourmutualfriend.wordpress.com/

CFP: MLA '14 Women in Literature (5/9/2014; 1/8-11/2015)

MLA 2014, Section: Women in Literature

Vancouver, Canada

January 8-11, 2015

Deadline: May 9, 2014

Topic: Gendered Spaces; Gendered Places: Women’s Lives in the City

“Places are not merely discrete, rooted phenomena; they are ever evolving outcomes of social relationships that span and link regional, national, and even global geographies” (Altha J. Cravey and Michael Petit, “A Critical Pedagogy of Place: Learning Through the Body” 108).

In Space, Place and Gender, Doreen Massey rejects the idea that space is fixed and apolitical. Drawing in part on Marxist feminists, she posits instead that “space is constituted through social relations and material social practices” (254). Not only is space constructed through the social for Massey, but the converse is also true: “the social is spatially constructed too, and that makes a difference…in its broadest formulation, society is necessarily constructed spatially, and that fact—the spatial organization of society—makes a difference to how it works” (254). In other words, the spaces we inhabit produce the societies in which we live—all the while the societies in which we live socially construct the spaces we inhabit. This establishes the kind of web of intra-action between humans and others that can be traced through the recent theoretical work of Donna Haraway and new materialist feminists like Karen Barad and Stacy Alaimo. It also holds major implications for thinking about how spaces and places are active in women’s lives and women’s literature.

Using the concept of spaces and places as active participants in the lives of humans, and in accordance with the conference’s theme of “The Lives of Cities,” this panel seeks papers that explore the issues of space and place in women’s literary texts. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to: gendered spaces and/or places, queer spaces, metaphorical spaces, urban autobiography and/or memoir, representations of gender within the space/place of a narrative, globalization and gender, historical representations of urban spaces in women’s literature, issues of performance and performativity in relation to urban space, and place-based approaches to teaching women’s literature.

Please submit 250-word abstracts and a brief 100-word bio to Meg Gregory at magrego@ilstu.edu by May 9, 2014.  Chair: Meg Gregory, Illinois State University

Reminder: RSVP Rosemary VanArsdel Prize (5/1/2014)

The 2014 Rosemary VanArsdel Prize

Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Deadline: May 1, 2014

The VanArsdel Prize is awarded annually to the best graduate student essay investigating Victorian periodicals and newspapers. The prize was established in 1990 to honor Rosemary VanArsdel, a founding member of RSVP whose groundbreaking research continues to shape the field of nineteenth-century periodical studies.

Graduate students are invited to submit essays for the 2014 VanArsdel Prize for the best graduate student essay on, about, or extensively using Victorian periodicals. The winner will receive $300 and publication in Victorian Periodicals Review. Submissions should be 15-25 pages, excluding notes and bibliography. Manuscripts should not have appeared in print. Send e-mail submissions to VPR Editor Alexis Easley (maeasley @ stthomas.edu) by May 1, 2014. Submissions should be formatted as Word files in Chicago style with identifying information removed. In an accompanying e-mail, applicants should include a description of their current status in graduate school.

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

Essay Prize: NAVSA Gray Prize (5/20/2014)

Donald Gray Prize

NAVSA

Deadline: May 20, 2014

NAVSA's annual Donald Gray Prize for best essay published in the field of Victorian Studies is named after Donald J. Gray, Culbertson Professor Emeritus in the English Department of Indiana University. Professor Gray received his PhD at Ohio State University, where he completed his dissertation under the direction of Richard Altick, and began teaching at Indiana University in 1956. At Indiana, Professor Gray received the university's Distinguished Teaching Award, its Distinguished Service Award, and the President's Medal of Excellence; in 1997, he received the MLA award for professional service. He was a dissertation director of legendary responsiveness, acuity and stamina, having directed over 75 dissertations. Professor Gray is the editor of the Norton Pride and Prejudice and Alice in Wonderland; with George Tennyson he edited Victorian Poetry and Prose for Macmillan. He also served as editor of the journal College English and, beginning in 1957, as the Book Review Editor of Victorian Studies, helping the founding editors steer the journal through its early years. From 1990-2000 he served as principal editor of the journal. He retired in 1998. The Gray Prize honors his remarkable achievements as editor and graduate-student teacher.

NAVSA is now seeking nominations for the Donald Gray Prize for best essay published in the field of Victorian Studies. The prize carries with it an award of $500 and will be awarded to essays that appeared in print or online in journals from the previous calendar year. Essays may be on any topic related to the study of Victorian Britain. Note that the actual date of appearance trumps the date given on the issue itself since it's common for journals to lag behind official issue dates. (The prize is limited to journal essays; those published in essay collections are not eligible.) The winner will also receive complementary registration at the NAVSA conference at which his or her award will be announced. Anyone, regardless of NAVSA membership status, is free to nominate an essay that appeared in print between January 1, 2013 and December 31, 2013. Nominations will also be solicited from the Advisory Board of NAVSA and the prize committee judges; self-nominated essays are equally welcome. Authors may be from any country and of any institutional standing.

To nominate an essay, please submit by Tuesday, 20 May 2014: (1) a brief cover sheet with complete address and email information for both the essay's nominator and its author, and (2) a digital copy of the essay (in .pdf, .doc or .docx) to the Executive Secretary of NAVSA, Deborah Denenholz Morse, at the following e-mail address: ddmors@wm.edu

The winning essay will be selected according to three criteria: 1) Potential significance for Victorian studies; 2) Quality and depth of scholarly research and interpretation; 3) Clarity and effectiveness of presentation. The judges will choose one essay for the award, with one honorary runner-up also selected, when appropriate, and will provide a short paragraph for use in announcing the award. If the judges are deadlocked, the decision is thrown to the NAVSA Executive Council.

CFP: Anxious Forms (5/15/2014; 8/22/2014)

Anxious Forms: Bodies in Crisis in Victorian Literature and Culture

The University of Glasgow

August 22, 2014 

Deadline: May 15, 2014

Anxious Forms is a one-day interdisciplinary conference which seeks to engage with the Victorian era as a period of anxiety manifested in physical form, be it the human body, national, ideological, and scientific bodies, or literary and artistic forms. Recent criticism of the long nineteenth century has viewed the period as one of crisis: a collection of critical moments which are framed as decisive, paradigmatic shifts. Criticism frequently considers the physical manifestations of anxieties surrounding industrial progress, imperial expansion, and scientific and medical advancements, as well as shifting concepts of gender, religion, race, class, and sexuality.

However, some scholars have started to question the basis of such a reading, asking to what extent this is a contemporary application of the concept of 'anxiety'. This conference intends to open up this debate and stimulate discussion across disciplines. 

Confirmed speakers include Dr Nicholas Daly (University College Dublin), Dr Christine Ferguson (University of Glasgow) and Dr Megan Coyer (University of Glasgow). Through this conference we wish to highlight the University of Glasgow as a major centre for multidisciplinary Victorian research and intend this to be the first annual nineteenth-century conference hosted by the University, with an accompanying published collection of papers.

Topics for papers might include, but are not limited to:

• Bodies of publication
• Narrative Forms
• Identity crises
• Objectified, pornographic or voyeuristic bodies
• Bodies of commodification and consumption
• Spiritual, supernatural and spectral bodies
• Bodies politic, national and foreign bodies
• Environmental, geological and archaeological bodies
• Medicine and the medical humanities
• Biological, mechanical and prosthetic bodies
• Forms of cartography and travel writing
• Art, illustration, film and photography
• Collected and classified bodies
• Neo-Victorianism
• Bodies of knowledge

We welcome proposals from postgraduate and early career researchers, as well as from more established academics. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words for 20-minute conference papers, together with an academic CV, to arts-anxiousforms2014@glasgow.ac.uk by May 15, 2014. Successful applicants will be notified by the end of the following week.

The conference is free to attend for both speakers and non-speakers; please contact us (Abigail Boucher and Alexandra Foulds at arts-anxiousforms2014@glasgow.ac.uk) to register.

CFP: PAMLA 2014 "Literature and the Other Arts" (5/15/2014; 10/31-11/2/2014)

PAMLA 2014: Literature and the Other Arts

Riverside, CA

October 31-November 2, 2014

Deadline: May 15, 2014

Proposals for papers are invited on any subject relating to the session theme of literature and the other arts. PAMLA 2014’s special conference theme is “Familiar Spirits,” so papers that consider the familiar, familial, and the commonplace in relation to the paranormal, strange, and uncanny, or reference spiritualism, spirits, hauntings, manifestations, conjuring, or magic will be particularly appropriate, but proposals on any topic related to literature and the other arts are equally welcome.

Please submit your proposal via the PAMLA website (http://www.pamla.org/2014). For questions about the session, please contact Judy DeTar at jsdetar@sbcglobal.net.

The 2014 PAMLA conference will be held Friday, October 31st through Sunday, November 2nd at the Riverside Convention Center in Riverside, California. More information is available at the PAMLA website, http://www.pamla.org/2014. Conference guidelines and procedures and the answers many frequently asked questions can be found at http://www.pamla.org/2014/guidelines-and-procedures.

CFP: MMLA '14 "The City and the Aesthetic" (5/31/2014; 11/13-16/14)

CFP for English II: English Literature 1800-1900
MMLA 2014

Detroit, MI

November 13-16, 2014

Deadline: May 31, 2014

Please consider submitting an abstract to the nineteenth-century section of the Midwest Modern Language Association's annual conference.

"The City and the Aesthetic"

From William Wordsworth’s “Upon Westminster Bridge” to William Morris’s horror at modern cityscapes, from the craze for Aesthetic housewares to debates over working-class access to art museums, the nineteenth-century city presented both aesthetic problems and aesthetic opportunities. How did urbanization transform both the aesthetic experiences that were available and the categories through which these experiences were understood? Implicit in this question is a recognition that the city may provide an especially fertile ground for exploring negative aesthetic reactions like distaste or disgust, which remain comparatively under-theorized.

Papers that approach “The City and the Aesthetic” through the lens of perception, affect, or pleasure are welcome, as are papers that connect aesthetics to politics, consumption, or class.

Send abstracts to Julia Bninski (jlbninski@gmail.com) by May 31. Abstracts should be approximately 250-500 words. Please provide the following information: your name, institutional affiliation, email address, and paper title. For more information visit http://www.luc.edu/mmla/index.html

Registration: The Turbulent Mind (5/16-17/2014)

The Turbulent Mind: Madness, Moods and Melancholy in the Art of the Nineteenth Century

Ghent, Museum of Fine Arts,

In collaboration with the Research Platform XIX and the European Society for Nineteenth-Century Art

May 16-17, 2014

With the support of the Research Foundation - Flanders, Flemish Art Collection, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, Dutch Postgraduate School for Art History (OSK), Ghent University - Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

On May 7, 1824, Eugène Delacroix wrote in his diary: “I do not care for reasonable painting at all. I can see that my turbulent mind needs agitation, needs to free itself, to try a hundred different things before reaching the goal whose tyrannous call everywhere torments me. (...) If I am not quivering like a snake in the hands of Pythoness, I am cold; I must recognize it and submit to it; and to do so is happiness.”

In these lines, Delacroix evoked the age-old theme of the mad artist, tormented but divinely inspired, balancing on the verge of insanity and genius. The attraction of this idea to Delacroix was hardly an isolated phenomenon. The rise of romanticism saw an exploding interest in the irrational and its potential to liberate the arts, and even the world at large, and this interest resonated throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. 

On the occasion of the Théodore Géricault exhibition in the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, the museum joins forces with the Research Platform XIX and the European Society for Nineteenth-Century Art to organise a two-day conference to explore the theme of madness and art in the nineteenth century, a time when artists first deliberately turned for inspiration to the mentally deviant and fully developed the idea of art as an expression of the emotional self. The conference brings together international specialists in the field and deals with both the myth of the artistic temperament and representations of madness, moods or melancholy.

Organising committee: Jan Dirk Baetens (Radboud University, Nijmegen), Koen Brosens (KU Leuven), Rachel Esner (University of Amsterdam), Bruno Fornari (Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent), Jenny Reynaerts (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), Johan De Smet (Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent), Marjan Sterckx (Ghent University) and Cathérine Verleysen (Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent)

Scientific committee: Werner Adriaenssens (Royal Museum of Art and History, Brussels), Maite van Dijk (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam), Mayken Jonkman (RKD, The Hague), Herwig Todts (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp), Francisca Vandepitte (Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels), Filip Vermeylen (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) and Catherine de Zegher (Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent

More information:

Jan Dirk Baetens, Radboud University Nijmegen: j.baetens@let.ru.nl

Cathérine Verleysen, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent: catherine.verleysen@gent.be

Admission: € 40 (students € 25) 

Includes coffee breaks and lunch on 16 and 17 May

Max. registrations: 100

Registration: Email to catherine.verleysen@gent.be (mentioning your institutional affiliation), and transfer of the registration fee to: 

AGB Kunsten en Design – Botermarkt 1 – B-9000 Ghent – Belgium

IBAN BE11 0910 1974 1448

BIC GKCCBEBB

Mentioning name of participant and ‘The Turbulent Mind’ 

Confirmation of registration takes place only after receipt of the conference fee.

Languages: English / Français

http://www.mskgent.be

http://www.werkgroep-xix.blogspot.be

http://esnaonline.wordpress.com

Registration Open: Remarkable Reynolds: Dickens's Radical Rival (7/26/2014)

Westminster City Archives and

The University of Roehampton Present:

Remarkable Reynolds: Dickens's Radical Rival

University of Roehampton

London, UK

July 26, 2014

“a name with which no lady’s, and no gentleman’s, should be associated…”- Charles Dickens

A FREE bicentenary event exploring the life & work of George W M Reynolds

Saturday 26 July 2014
11.00am – 4.00 pm
City of Westminster Archives Centre
Tea and coffee available from 10.30
Exhibition of Reynolds-related material

Keynote Speakers:
Anne Humpherys
Louis James
Readings by Michael Slater from Bleak House and The Mysteries of London

Places are FREE but limited.
To reserve your place, REGISTER at:
Westminster City Archives, 10 St Ann’s St, London SW1P 2DE
tel.: 020 7641 5180
archives@westminster.gov.uk

Email Mary L. Shannon at the University of Roehampton with any questions: Mary.Shannon@Roehampton.ac.uk

For more information: http://remarkablereynolds.wordpress.com/2014/03/28/westminster-archives-centre-and-the-university-of-roehampton-presents/

http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/english-and-creative-writing/

http://www.westminster.gov.uk/archives

CFP: '14 ICR "Romantic Reflections" (4/21/2014; 9/25-28/2014)

“Romantic Reflections”

2014 International Conference on Romanticism

Minneapolis, Minnesota

September 25-28, 2014

Deadline: April 21, 2014

The 2014 meeting of the International Conference on Romanticism will be held in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the heart of downtown on the banks of the Mississippi river September 25th-28th. In keeping with the spirit of the ICR, the conference organizers wish to focus on the cross-disciplinary and international aspects of Romanticism. The theme will be Romantic Reflections, which should be interpreted in its broadest context. Possible topics could include but should not be limited to:

• Reflections in the arts
• Reflections in the sciences
• Romantic reflections
• Sociological reflections
• Cross-national echoes
• Colonial reflections
• Reflections in nature
• Gothic appropriations
• Intertextual echoes
• Boundary and border crossings
• Romantic collaborations
• Interdisciplinary Romanticism
• Aesthetic reflections
• Romantic appropriations of archetypes and myths
• Environmental reflections
• Romantic Others
• Class reflections
• Gender reflections
• War and Peace
• Critical reflections
• Philosophical reflections
• Traveling reflections
• Economic echoes

Abstract for complete panels and individual papers are welcome. Please send 250 word abstracts to icr2014@stthomas.edu. The deadline for submissions is April 21, 2014.

Forum: Birkbeck Summer Programme (Summer 2014)

Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies
Summer Term 2014 Programme

Friday 9 May 2014, 6.00–8.00pm
Pamela Gilbert (Florida): 'Body Objects and History: The Skin of the Marquis'


BIRKBECK ARTS WEEK EVENTS (19-24 May 2014)
Monday 19 May 2014, 7.30–9.00pm
"Clouds: Objects, Metaphor, Phenomena"
Panel Discussion with Vladimir Jankovic (Manchester), Richard Hamblyn (Birkbeck), and Esther Leslie (Birkbeck)

Wednesday 21 May 2014, 6.00–9.00pm
"From Text to Screen and Back: Adaptation Across Media"
Workshop with Richard Taws (UCL), Silke Arnold-de Simine (Birkbeck), and Ann Lewis (Birkbeck)

Thursday 22 May 2014, 7.40–9.00 pm
Sarah Thomas (Birkbeck): "Curating 'Empire' at Tate: Dissonance and British Art"
To be held in Room G01, 43 Gordon Square

JUNE/JULY EVENTS
Wednesday 4 June 2014, 6.00–8.00pm
Mary Hunter (McGill): "Ladies in Waiting: Time and Gynecology in Toulouse-Lautrec's Rue des Moulins (1894)"

Monday 16 June 2014, 6.00–8.00pm
Nicholas Gaskill (Rutgers): "Interior Designs: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Progressive Art of Pure Colour"

Tuesday 1 July 2014, 6.00-8.00pm
Rachel Teukolsky (Vanderbilt): "Cartomania: Sensation, Celebrity, and the Democratized Portrait"

Tuesday 8 July 2014, 6.00-8.00pm
Sue Zemka (Colorado State, Boulder): "Prosthetic Hands and Phantom Limbs"

Unless otherwise noted, all sessions take place in the Keynes Library (Room 114, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD). The sessions are free and all are welcome, but since the venue has limited space it will be first come, first seated.

For more information, see: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/research_cncs/our-events/birkbeck-forum-for-nineteenth-century-studies-summer-term-2014

For more information on Arts Week 2014, a list of other events, and to book free tickets, see: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/about-us/events/arts-week

Please email c19@bbk.ac.uk to join our mailing list or to obtain further information about the series.

Extended Deadline: The Prosaic Imaginary: Novels and the Everyday, 1750-2000 (4/11/2014; 7/1-4/2014)

The Prosaic Imaginary: Novels and the Everyday, 1750-2000

University of Sydney

July 1-4 2014

FINAL Deadline: April 11, 2014

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: 

Professor Maud Ellmann, Randy L. & Melvin R. Berlin Professor of the Development of the Novel in English, Chicago

Assist. Professor Julie Park, Vassar

Professor John Plotz, Brandeis

The conference will open up the nuances of the term ‘prosaic’ by exploring the privileged relationship between the novel genre and multiple and complex categories of the ‘everyday’. Building on John Plotz’s notion of the novel as exemplary ‘portable property’, the conference will address the relationship between novel-reading as everyday activity and the novel’s prosaic subject matter, whether this is conceived as material object, cultural practice, or speech act.

Suggested topics:  

• The novel and things
• The novel and film/and TV
• Readerships of the novel
• The novel and gender
• The novel and childhood
• Queer novels
• Psychologies of the novel
• Novel genres
• The odd or uncategorisable
• The secular imagination
• Book history and the novel
• The novel and the digital everyday
• Characters as quasi-persons
• Novel worlds
• The novel and the institutionalisation of affect
• The novel as political action
• Temporalities of the novel
• The novel and the forms of property
• The scale of the novel

Proposals for 20 minute papers or for 3 paper panel sessions should be sent to Vanessa Smith (Vanessa.smith@sydney.edu.au) by April 11, 2014. Postgraduate submissions welcomed.

For more information visit: http://novelnetwork.org/

CPF: “Longevity Networks” Special Issue Victoriographies (6/30/2014; Fall 2015)

CFP: “Longevity Networks” Special Issue

Victoriographies, A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790-1914

Fall 2015: “Longevity Networks.”

Deadline: June 30, 2014

Essays are sought for a special number of Victoriographies inspired by the concept of textual longevity. There is a great deal of energy in media studies, new materialism, and print culture around questions of textual longevity. We understand longevity to mean the iterability of text, broadly conceived: reprinting, versions, editions, revisions, translation, interpretation, appropriation, the readymade, intermediality, homage, modernization, spoof, and parody.

Scholars in textual studies challenge us to consider the variability of the text over time, historical eras, national borders, print format, and genre. At the same time, Caroline Levine’s suggestion of "birth-time" in a recent issue of Victorian Studies (Summer 2013) begs the related question whether there is also a "death-time" for texts. She argues that we should turn to form, and specifically to networks, to understand literary history in ways that nation-focused approaches overlook. Texts moving through time and space develop relational networks, which raises a number of productive questions: If we consider networks of textual circulation as organic forms (networks as organisms), what might such readings yield? What might readings of the "birth-time" or "death-time" (or lack thereof) for a text teach us about how we define a text? About nationalist claims and canonization? About authorial and textual identity? About generic distinctions and ways of reading? Or about crafting a more expansive, interpenetrative literary history that extends beyond a critical reliance on place of origin or periodization?

We seek contributions to this special issue that generate a discussion on the iterable textual body as an object that simultaneously resists decay and requires human intervention to assist its regeneration, as that which is at once inanimate and living, embodied and disembodied, singular and networked. We invite articles invested in Victorian literature and in interrogating, recharting, reinscribing, and retracing the long nineteenth century.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Genre and periodization
• National identification, borders, boundaries
• Publication formats, print culture, the literary market place
• Recycled narratives, interpretations, versions, fan fiction
• Artifacts, archives, special collections, the museum, digitised treasures
• Chronotopes, memory, preservation, and nostalgia; deep time readings
• Literary aesthetics of death and afterlives
• Translations, intermediality, circulation, appropriation
• Media studies, history of the book
• Matter and meaning-making; materialist poetics
• Literary assemblages, paratextual matter
• Possibilities/limitations of new materialism in literary studies
• History of science and technology, the posthuman
• Neo-Victorian, steampunk

Please submit essays of 5,000-7,000 words (inclusive of end notes), a 250-word abstract, a brief biographical sketch, and 5-6 keywords (preferably not words used in the title) for online searches to Guest Editor Amy Kahrmann Huseby (University of Wisconsin-Madison) at huseby@wisc.edu by June 30, 2014.

Please do not submit a manuscript that is under consideration elsewhere.

Public Lecture: Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies (5/19/2014)

Annual Public Lecture

Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies

Leeds Trinity University, West Yorkshire

May 19, 2014 

Everyone is warmly invited to attend the annual Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies public lecture, which will be on Monday 19 May 2014 at 7pm in the Auditorium at Leeds Trinity University, West Yorkshire.  It will be delivered by our fourth visiting professor, Regenia Gagnier (Professor of English at the University of Exeter) on the topic “The Global Circulation of Victorian Actants and Ideas: in the Niche of Nature, Culture and Technology”. The lecture will be preceded by a wine reception at 6pm in the Conference Suite to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies.

Professor Gagnier is a distinguished scholar in the field of Victorian Studies and an outstanding critical thinker, whose work has contributed substantially to our understanding of the modern human condition. She has published numerous books on Victorian literature and culture, including Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, 1986), Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832-1920 (Oxford, 1991), The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago, 2000) and Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: on the Relationship of Part to Whole 1859-1920 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

For further information and to book on to this free event, visit:https://lcvspubliclecture.eventbrite.co.uk or emaillcvs@leedstrinity.ac.uk