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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.
