Reminder: Liberty and Limits 1789-1920 (8/1/2013; 12/5-6/2013)

Liberty and Limits 1789-1920

MGSM, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

December 5-6, 2013
Deadline: August 1, 2013

Keynote Speakers: Professor Nancy Armstrong (Duke University), Professor David Punter (Bristol University), Professor Deirdre Colman (University of Melbourne).

The long nineteenth century was inaugurated by the French Revolution and closed in the aftermath of  the First World War.  In Britain the intervening period was marked by a dialectic compounded of sub-revolutionary change and processes of containment. In all cultural fields new modes of knowledge, theories, and aesthetic forms emerged. The Romantics and Victorians inherited the discursive energies of the eighteenth century in terms of the ways in which literary and other forms of writing were lauded or vilified as intervention, catalyst, palliative or purge. The energy of this period was enacted as much through writing and reading as through empire building and military/mercantile expansion. We invite papers that engage with all aspects of cultural change – including evolution, excess, experimentation, nostalgia, suppression, dissent. Themes addressed can include, but are not confined to, the following:

• Material print culture and new modes of dissemination of information
• Literary revolutions
• Life writing and the private as public performance
• The modern city
• The fin de siècle and the emergence of Modernism
• Gender/sexual identity
• Class mobility/instability
• Industrialisation
• Anglophone writing and readership
• Self-help and social mobility
• Romantic and Victorian poetics
• Crime and detection
• Policing
• Juvenilia
• The rise of children’s literature
• Education and literacy
• Evolutionary theory and social Darwinism
• The marketplace and the birth of the consumer
• Science and technology
• Celebrity authorship as cultural phenomenon
• The changing nature of readership
• The politics of Empire
• Photography/ images
• Afterlife: Steampunk and neo-Victorian narratives, the long nineteenth century in 
• film adaptations

Please send 300 word abstracts and proposals for themed panels as word documents or PDF with subject heading “Liberty and Limits Conference Abstract” to: libertyandlimits@mq.edu.au The deadline for receipt of proposals is  August 1, 2013.

Organisers:

Dr Lee O’Brien

Dr Geoff Payne

Dr Ryan Twomey

For full information here is the link to our conference:

http://libertyandlimits.com/

CFP: Liberty and Limits 1789-1920 (8/1/2013; 12/5-6/2013)

Liberty and Limits 1789-1920

MGSM, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

December 5-6, 2013

Keynote Speakers: Professor Nancy Armstrong (Duke University), Professor David Punter (Bristol University), Professor Deirdre Colman (University of Melbourne).

The long nineteenth century was inaugurated by the French Revolution and closed in the aftermath of  the First World War.  In Britain the intervening period was marked by a dialectic compounded of sub-revolutionary change and processes of containment. In all cultural fields new modes of knowledge, theories, and aesthetic forms emerged. The Romantics and Victorians inherited the discursive energies of the eighteenth century in terms of the ways in which literary and other forms of writing were lauded or vilified as intervention, catalyst, palliative or purge. The energy of this period was enacted as much through writing and reading as through empire building and military/mercantile expansion. We invite papers that engage with all aspects of cultural change – including evolution, excess, experimentation, nostalgia, suppression, dissent. Themes addressed can include, but are not confined to, the following:

• Material print culture and new modes of dissemination of information
• Literary revolutions
• Life writing and the private as public performance
• The modern city
• The fin de siècle and the emergence of Modernism
• Gender/sexual identity
• Class mobility/instability
• Industrialisation
• Anglophone writing and readership
• Self-help and social mobility
• Romantic and Victorian poetics
• Crime and detection
• Policing
• Juvenilia
• The rise of children’s literature
• Education and literacy
• Evolutionary theory and social Darwinism
• The marketplace and the birth of the consumer
• Science and technology
• Celebrity authorship as cultural phenomenon
• The changing nature of readership
• The politics of Empire
• Photography/ images
• Afterlife: Steampunk and neo-Victorian narratives, the long nineteenth century in 
• film adaptations

Please send 300 word abstracts and proposals for themed panels as word documents or PDF with subject heading “Liberty and Limits Conference Abstract” to: libertyandlimits@mq.edu.au The deadline for receipt of proposals is  August 1, 2013.

Organisers:

Dr Lee O’Brien

Dr Geoff Payne

Dr Ryan Twomey

For full information here is the link to our conference:

http://libertyandlimits.com/

CFP: Australian Panel at 2013 NACBS Meeting (3/25/2013; 11/8-10/2013)

Panel Proposal: Australia
2013 North American Conference on British Studies meeting
Portland, Oregon, November 8-10, 2013

Peter H. Hoffenberg is seeking proposals for a panel on Australia. He will probably propose a paper on the Australian colonies of N S W and Victoria and exhibitions, let's say, mid- to later-19^th—century shows and ideas about those shows.

The deadline is March 25, so please Peter H. Hoffenberg (peterh@hawaii.edu) within the week of March 17. 

Last Call: AAL Conference 2013 "Modern Soundscapes" (3/1/2013; 7/10-13/2013)

Modern Soundscapes

Annual Conference of the Australasian Association of Literature held in conjunction with the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia

University of New South Wales

July 10-13, 2013

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Steven Connor (Cambridge) and Garrett Stewart (Iowa)

Conference website - http://www.aal.asn.au/conference/2013/

What is a modern soundscape?

This conference aims to address this question by drawing together researchers engaged with the history and theory of sound and noise from the fields of literature, film, and media studies, as well as architecture, music and the visual arts to consider the multiple soundscapes that have shaped and continue to shape the history of modernity. Jonathan Sterne contends that dating from around 1725 ‘sound itself’ becomes ‘an object and a domain of thought and practice, where it had previously been conceptualized in terms of particular idealized instances like voice or music’. This historical claim challenges the assumption that modern culture is essentially a visual culture, substituting the ear for the eye, and creating a space for a new sonic history of modernity to be written, theorized and contested.   Thinking through sound has long been a literary preoccupation. Reflecting on the potential of the “auditory imagination” T.S.Eliot wrote, it “is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and civilized entality.”  Thinking through the resonant opening created by poetic form Eliot imagines potential creative fusions that cut across space, time, culture and forms. Taking inspiration from Eliot’s expansive vision, we invite papers that engage with sound as a catalyst for thought, critical and creative practice, and historical reconsiderations of modern soundscapes from the eighteenth century to the present.

Possible themes/issues may include:

• Voices, Listening, Hearing
• Sound Technologies
• Music and Modern Space
• Literary soundscapes
• Sound & Cultural/National Difference
• Sonic Environments
• Noise/Sound & Everyday Life
• Noise & Silence
• The politics of noise (rioting, dissent, suppression)
• Noise & the Media
• Print Culture/ the History of the Book
• Architectural Space & Acoustics
• Psychology & Noise
• Aesthetics & Noise
• Film Sound
• Noise & the Avant-Garde
• Noise & Modernism
• Victorian & Eighteenth Century Soundscapes

Please submit titles and abstracts for proposed papers by Friday March 1st, 2013 via the submission form on the conference website.

Conference organisers

Helen Groth, Julian Murphet, Penny Hone, Joseph Cummins

CFP: RLS 2013 "Stevenson, Time and History" (2/15/2013; 7/8-10/2013)

RLS 2013: Stevenson, Time and History

8-10 July 2013

University of New South Wales

Sydney, Australia

Keynote Speaker: Professor Adrian Poole, University of Cambridge

Topics for discussion include: 

• History and historiography
• The historical novel
• Theories of evolution
• The ideas of progress
• Generation and degeneration
• Narrative temporalities
• Genealogy and ancestry
• Stages of life: childhood, youth, age
• Memory and nostalgia
• Change

Proposals for papers (250 words) should be emailed to Roslyn Jolly (r.jolly@unsw.edu.au) or Chris Danta (c.danta@unsw.edu.au). Deadline extended to 15 February 2013.

Colonial Girlhood Conference, University of Melbourne (6/13-14/2012)

Victorianists, especially those located in Australia and New Zealand, might be interested in attending the upcoming "Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls" conference at the University of Melbourne from 13-14 June.

Parallel conference sessions will include speakers from disciplines including English, history, cultural studies, art history, cinema and education. The program includes participants from across Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, South Africa, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, and the United States.

The conference includes keynote speeches by Professor Angela Woollacott (Australian National University) and Associate Professor Cecily Devereux (University of Alberta) and the launch of the online exhibition "Home & Away: Girls of the British Empire" (hosted by the Girl Museum).

The draft conference program and registration information are available at our conference website: http://www.avsa.unimelb.edu.au/colonialgirls.html

CFP: Special Issue of Women’s Writing on Nineteenth-Century Australian and New Zealand Girls’ Culture (9/1/2012)

Colonial girls’ culture is receiving growing critical attention, prompting us to rethink its significance for women’s writing. The journal Women’s Writing invites original papers for a special issue dedicated to the colonial girl and her literature in nineteenth-century Australia.

What was it like to be a girl at “the antipodes” in the nineteenth century? How was the colonial girl constructed, both “back home” and throughout the British Empire, and how did she view and represent herself? Was there a distinctly “antipodal,” Australian, or New Zealand girls’ culture and in what ways did it parallel, overlap with, influence, and in turn, become influenced by constructions of girlhood in other parts of the Empire? How did antipodal girls’ culture harness and redefine imperialist ideologies and their malleable relationship to domesticity? In what ways did their literary representation not only mould imperialist representations, but help to shape nineteenth-century literature in English in general, including children’s and especially popular girls’ fiction, which was emerging as a distinct genre in the course of the century? These are some of the questions that individual articles will be addressing. The colonial girl’s changing depiction in Victorian culture at the same time raises larger issues about the representation of the antipodes in British and colonial texts. A new look at colonial girlhood constructively draws into question the still dominating discourses on male mateship, for example. In addition, it helps us to reassess the wide range of genres that constituted nineteenth-century Australian and New Zealand literature and read them in tandem with similar cultural formations.

This special issue aims to create a forum for a more encompassing approach to nineteenth-century Australian literature, inviting comparative work on British and colonial texts, while providing new detailed insight into Australian girls’ literature.

Topics may include but are not limited to:
Colonial girlhood and its literary representation
The construction of colonial girls’ culture
Australian girls’ magazines and periodicals
“The antipodes” in both British and colonial girls’ publications
Colonial children’s literature and writing for girls
Individual authors and their works
Comparative approaches

Please submit papers for consideration between 4000-7000 words to Tamara S. Wagner at tswagner_at_ntu.edu.sg, by 1 September 2012.

Contributors should follow the journal’s house style details of which are to be found on the Women’s Writing website http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/09699082.asp. This is the new MLA. Please note that instead of footnotes, we use endnotes with NO bibliography. All bibliographical information is included in the endnotes. For example, we require place of publication, publisher and date of publication in brackets after a book is cited for the first time.

Please also include an abstract, a brief biographical blurb (approximately 100 words), and a key of 6 words suitable for indexing and abstracting services.

CFP: Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls (9/15/2011; 6/13-15/2012)

Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls Conference
13-15 June 2012, The University of Melbourne, Australia

Settler colonies and colonies of occupation, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Ireland, South Africa, and the Caribbean, held out the possibility for girls to experience freedom from, and the potential to reconfigure, British norms of femininity.  ‘Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls’ seeks to draw together international scholars for a multi-disciplinary examination of howcolonial girlhood was constructed, and redefined, in both British and colonial texts and cultures. Since girlhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries extends from childhood to the age of marriage, it represents a complex category encompassing various life stages and kinds of femininity, as well as differences based on class and race.

Colonial girls occupy an ambivalent and sometimes contested position in British and settler societies, They are sometimes seen as a destabilizing force that challenges conventional expectations of girls or as a disruption that can, and must, be contained. The emergent writings of British-born settlers about and for girls, which were usually published in England, contribute a further degree of complexity to the developing picture of the colonial girl. These texts both perpetuate and occasionally challenge British imperial and gender ideologies, reflecting loyalties torn between “home” and new dominions.

Across national boundaries, the malleability of colonial girlhoods is evident. In British print culture, Indian girls were often represented as victims of an unenlightened culture that offered poor educational opportunities, and Irish girls were frequently ‘hot-headed’ and untamed. In each national context, the workings of colonialism produced different models of idealised girlhood, from which Indigenous girlhoods were often marginalised.

Crucially, the Empire itself was in a state of dramatic flux across what is often called Britain’s “imperial century”. The Empire grew substantially in size and in population in the nineteenth century and its expansion was integral to eventual movements toward independence for white settler societies. Imaginings of Empire and girlhood are both subject to radical change across the century, and reading the intersections and synergies in these transformations will prove mutually illuminating

Scholars from Art History, English, Cultural Studies, History, Indigenous Studies, Education and cognate fields are invited to submit proposals that engage with any aspect of the intersection of British colonialism and girlhood in the period 1815-1930. Papers may be inspired by, but are certainly not limited to, the following themes: 

• colonial girls as representative of British imperial ideals
• tensions between imperial and national/colonial identities
• the circulation of feminine ideals between colonies
• print culture and the development of gendered colonial ideals
• Indigenous girlhoods
• coming of age in the colonies
• colonial life as a threat to girlhood
• girlhoods and evolving nationalisms
• British representations of colonial femininity
• class and labour in the colonies
• the imagined role of colonial girls in the British Empire

 Please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief biographical statement to Dr Michelle Smith: msmith@unimelb.edu.au and Dr. Kristine Moruzi: moruzi@ualberta.ca by 15 September 2011.

CFP: Global Dickens (9/30/2011; 4/15/2012)

“Global Dickens”

Griffith University, Brisbane, April 15, 2012

Keynote Speaker: Regenia Gagnier (Exeter)

In conjunction with the Australasian Victorian Studies Association conference (“Victorian Vocabularies" April 11^th-14^th 2012), “Global Dickens” is a day-long conference that will explore how Dickens has been received, adapted, imitated, or syncretised outside Britain. What forms of intersexuality have been generated with indigenous cultural forms? What is the role of Dickens’s Britain in the imaginary of other cultures?

We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers that consider any aspect of this theme. Please submit a 150-250 word abstract no later than September 30th, 2011 to d.ellison@griffith.edu.au Any queries regarding the conference can be directed to the same address.

Postgraduate Travel Scholarships available

CFP:“Victorian Vocabularies” Australasian Victorian Studies Association Conference (9/30/2011; 4/11-14/2012)

“Victorian Vocabularies”

Australasian Victorian Studies Association (AVSA) Conference 

Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

11^th-14^th April 2012

Keynote speakers include: Helen Groth (University of New South Wales), Andrew H. Miller (Indiana) and Cathy Waters (Kent)

Victorians needed names for new things, novel practices, and emergent techniques. Cumulatively, these formed vocabularies, some by deliberation and design, others aggregating over time. The era abounds in private and specialised languages, modish slangs, and technical terms used in craft, industry, medicine, law, the arts, and sciences. These vocabularies circulated through small networks or made the leap to the public realm where they could be considered in new lights and put to unfamiliar uses. We invite you to think about Victorian vocabularies across British, colonial, and global contexts. Papers might address vocabulary-making, transmission, and re-purposing. They might consider the vocabulary as pedagogic tool or as potent metaphor. Possible topics include:

-Specialist and technical vocabularies

-Narratives of vocabulary-making

-Educational vocabularies

-Political vocabularies

-Vocabularies of the body

-Emotional vocabularies

-Commercial and legal vocabularies

-Vocabularies and globalisation

-Representations of vocabularies

-Colonial and military vocabularies

-Vocabularies and mass culture

-Visual culture and vocabularies

-Animal vocabularies

-Sexual vocabularies

-Neo-Victorian vocabularies

-Religious vocabularies

Please send paper proposals (of approx 150-250 words) for 20 minute papers to d.ellison@griffith.edu.au no later than September 30^th 2011. Any queries regarding the conference can be directed to the same address.

Postgraduate Travel Scholarships available

http://www.avsa.unimelb.edu.au/AVSA%20News.htm