North American Victorian Studies Association Conference 2014
London, Ontario, Canada
November 13-15, 2014
Deadline: March 1, 2014
“Victorian Classes and Classifications”
Victorian Britain belonged to the classifying age. Imperial
expansion and new techniques of observation and production confronted Britons
with an expanding universe of natural and man-made phenomena. In
response, scientists, writers, artists, and educators sought to articulate some
underlying sense of order through ever more complex systems of organization,
arrangement, and tabulation. Natural philosophers vastly extended and revised
the taxonomies of Linnaeus. Medical professionals developed new diagnostic
tools and coined a broad range of new pathologies and diseases. Criminologists
gathered biometric data that allowed them to constitute and apprehend criminal
types. Literary critics debated the rise of new classes of literature, from the
penny dreadful and sensation fiction to the naturalist novel. Librarians set
out the protocols for indexing the classes and sub-classes of literature that
resulted from the vast outpouring of printed matter. Teachers began to organize
their classrooms into distinct groupings of students by age and ability. But
with these efforts came, too, a new concern and fascination for that which
exceeded classification, the anomalous, the mutation, the hybrid, the
monstrous, and class struggle emerged as a theory of history and as a basis for
political organization.
The organizers of the North American Victorian Studies
Association’s 2014 conference welcome papers studying any aspect of the
Victorians’ self-organization, organization of culture, and organization of the
natural world.
Conference threads might include:
- Varieties, species, genera, and types of living organism and
inanimate object
- Literary genres, parts, classifications, and forms of
publication
- Social class and its material embodiment in modes of travel,
commodity culture, fashion, and the built environment
- Pedagogy and the classroom
- The sciences and pseudo-sciences of human classification:
racial science, criminology, and sexology.
- Character types and body types
- Breeding, rank, and class
- Museums, exhibitions, shops, libraries, schools, and other
sorting institutions
- Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and the organization of
knowledge
- Varieties of religious experience and affiliation
- Cultural forms that exceed classification: the gothic, the
grotesque, the monstrous, the absurd, the nonsensical.
Proposals for individual papers or panels should be
submitted electronically by March 1, 2014. 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.
For further information on the conference or to submit a
proposal for a paper or a panel, please visit www.navsa2014.com.
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