CFP: RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net

Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 
http://www.ravon.umontreal.ca/
Call for Submissions

RaVoN, an international refereed electronic journal, encourages Victorianists to submit articles for peer review and eventual publication in the journal.  Since Romanticism on the Net (RoN) expanded into RaVoN in 2007, the journal has published a number of Victorian articles by such critics as Stephen Arata, Alison Booth, Laurel Brake, Adelene Buckland, Carol Christ, Jonathan Farina, Kate Flint, Nicholas Frankel, Regenia Gagnier, Anne Helmreich, Natalie Houston, Christoper M. Keirstead, Laurie Langbauer, Peter Melville Logan, Teresa Mangum, William R. McKelvy, Clare Pettitt, Catherine Robson, Andrew Stauffer, Herbert F. Tucker, Athena Vrettos, Julia M. Wright, and many more.

Please submit articles directly to the Victorian editor, Dino Franco Felluga: felluga@purdue.edu

Submission guidelines can be found here:
http://www.ravon.umontreal.ca/submission.html

The journal normally provides readers’ reports and a publication decision within two months. 

CFP: Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento (6/20/2011; 10/28/2011)

‘Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento’

A one-day conference at the Italian Cultural Institute, London

Friday, October 28, 2011

Keynote Speaker: Professor Lucy Riall (Birbeck, University of London)

To mark the 150^th anniversary of Italian unification, the Italian Cultural Institute in London, in conjunction with the University of Wales, Newport, and the Association for the Study of Modern Italy, will host a one-day conference on the theme of ‘Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento’ on Friday 28 October 2011. The purpose of the conference is to allow for a critical examination of old assumptions and interpretations regarding British and Irish responses to the Risorgimento, and to map out new ways of understanding the impact of the ‘Italian Question’  on UK politics, society, commerce and culture (broadly defined). The conference will also examine the British-Irish influence on mid-century Italian politics, society, commerce and culture. 

Themes that participants may wish to address include:

• The Irish and Italian Questions compared
• Irish nationalism and the Risorgimento
• The Risorgimento in Scotland and/or Wales
• Religion and the Risorgimento
• Class and the Risorgimento
• Gender and the Risorgimento
• The idea of Italy in the British/Irish literary imagination
• The Grand Tour and the Risorgimento
• Romanticism and the Risorgimento
• Trade and the Risorgimento
• Art and the Risorgimento
• Radicalism and the Risorgimento
• Liberalism and the Risorgimento
• Conservative responses to the Risorgimento
• Britain and/or Ireland as seen from Italy
• Italian exiles in Britain and Ireland

The focus of the conference is on the period 1848-1861. However, papers that cover subjects outside of these dates will be considered. Interested parties should send proposals of no more than 300 words to the conference organiser Dr Nick Carter at nick.carter@newport.ac.uk. The deadline for proposal submissions is Monday 20 June 2011.

               

2011 BAVS Conference: Postgraduate and Post-doctoral Bursaries (6/16/2011)

BAVS is pleased to announce the details for BAVS Postgraduate and Post-doctoral Conference Bursaries for the 2011 Conference:


BAVS offers up to 12 bursaries worth £150 each to help post-graduate students or post-doctoral scholars who are either UK-based or members of BAVS to meet the costs of attending the annual conference at the University of Birmingham in 2011. There are usually 2 bursaries for observers who will report on the conference for the BAVS newsletter, and around 10 bursaries for postgraduate or post-doctoral paper presenters whose papers have been accepted for the Conference.

Post-doctoral bursaries are available to those who have recently submitted doctoral theses, but do not hold an academic post. Observer’s bursaries are open to all postgraduate or post-doctoral students including those who are not giving a paper.

Application is via letter, brief CV of no more than 2 pages, and (for paper presenters) the title of your conference paper abstract. Applications are assessed by a panel that includes member(s) of the BAVS Executive Committee and member(s) of the conference organising committee.

If you want to be an observer, your letter of application should say what interests you about the conference and what makes you a suitable observer. If you want to apply as a paper presenter, your letter of application should explain how your paper relates to your research and to the conference theme, and why attendance at the conference will be of benefit to you. The criteria for selection are the relevance of your proposal to the conference theme, the originality of your ideas, the presentation of your argument, and the benefits likely from your attendance at the conference.

Bursary-holders will be expected to pay all registration and other fees for the conference in advance, and will receive their bursary cheques at the conference.

Applicants should send their applications electronically to the 2011 Conference organising committee at:  bavs2011@gmail.com

The deadline for applications is 16th June 2011.

Preference will be given to those who have not previously held a BAVS conference bursary. Applicants will be informed of the outcome of the competition by the end of June 2011.



BAVS: http://www.bavsuk.org/index.htm

2012 Fellowship in Pre-Raphaelite Studies (10/15/2011)

2012 Fellowship in Pre-Raphaelite Studies 
The University of Delaware Library, in Newark, Delaware, and the Delaware Art Museum are pleased to offer a joint Fellowship in Pre-Raphaelite studies. This short-term, one-month Fellowship, awarded annually, is intended for scholars conducting significant research in the lives and works of the Pre-Raphaelites and their friends, associates, and followers.  Research of a wider scope, which considers the Pre-Raphaelite movement and related topics in relation to Victorian art and literature, and cultural or social history, will also be considered. Projects which provide new information or interpretation--dealing with unrecognized figures, women writers and artists, print culture, iconography, illustration, catalogues of artists' works, or studies of specific objects--are particularly encouraged, as are those which take into account transatlantic relations between Britain and the United States.

Receiving the Fellowship
The recipient will be expected to be in residence and to make use of the resources of both the Delaware Art Museum and the University of Delaware Library. The recipient may also take advantage of these institutions' proximity to other collections, such as the Winterthur Museum and Library, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Princeton University Library, and the Bryn Mawr College Library. Each recipient is expected to participate in an informal colloquium on the subject of his or her research during the course of Fellowship residence.

Up to $3,000 is available for the one-month Fellowship. Housing may be provided. Personal transportation is recommended (but not mandatory) in order to fully utilize the resources of both institutions.

The Fellowship is intended for those who hold a Ph.D. or can demonstrate equivalent professional or academic experience. Applications from independent scholars and museum professionals are welcome. By arrangement with the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, scholars may apply to each institution for awards in the same year; every effort will be made to offer consecutive dates.

Important Dates
The deadline to apply for the 2012 Fellowship is October 15, 2011. Notification of the successful applicant will be announced by November 15, 2011. The chosen candidate will then be asked to provide a date for assuming the Fellowship by December 1, 2011.

About the Delaware Art Museum
Founded in 1912, the Delaware Art Museum is home to the largest and most important collection of British Pre-Raphaelite art in the United States.  Assembled largely by the Wilmington industrialist, Samuel Bancroft, Jr., at the turn of the century (with significant subsequent additions), the collection includes paintings and drawings by all the major and minor Pre-Raphaelite artists, as well as decorative arts, prints, photographs, manuscripts, and rare books.  The Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives, with a reference collection of 30,000 volumes, holds Samuel Bancroft’s papers and correspondence, a rich source for the history of collecting and provenance which also contains significant manuscript material by and about the Rossettis.

About the University of Delaware Library
The University of Delaware Library has broadly based and comprehensive collections—books, periodicals, electronic resources, microforms, government publications, databases, maps, manuscripts, media, and access to information via the Internet—which provide a major academic resource for the study of literature and art.  Many printed and manuscript items related to the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates are in the Special Collections Department, including major archives relating to the Victorian artist and writer, George Adolphus Storey, and to the bibliographer and forger, Thomas J. Wise.  The Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, associated with the Special Collections Department, focuses on British literature and art of the period 1850 to 1900, with an emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelites and on the writers and illustrators of the 1890s.  Its rich holdings comprise 7,500 first and other editions (including many signed and association copies), manuscripts, letters, works on paper (including drawings by Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti), and ephemera.

To Apply
To apply, send a completed application form, together with a description of your research proposal (maximum 1 page) and a curriculum vitae or resume (maximum 2 pages) to the address given below. These materials may also be sent via email to:fellowships@delart.org. Letters of support from two scholars or other professionals familiar with you and your work are also required. These must be sent by mail to:

Pre-Raphaelite Fellowship Committee
Delaware Art Museum
2301 Kentmere Parkway
Wilmington, DE 19806

For an application form and more information go to:
www.delart.org/education/fellowships.html

CFP: W.T. Stead: Centenary Conference for a Newspaper Revolutionary, deadline approaching (5/20/2011; 4/16-17/2012)

The call for papers for ‘W.T. Stead: Centenary Conference for a Newspaper Revolutionary’ ends this Friday, 20 May 2011. Stead was the most famous Englishman to die on board the Titanic. This conference will be held at the British Library, 16-17 April 2012 (the centenary of both Stead’s death and the sinking) to discuss his life, his diverse interests, his contributions to the newspaper and periodical press, and the period more broadly.

The full call for papers is here: https://sites.google.com/site/stead2012/cfp

CFP: 2011 Trollope Prize, judges announced (6/1/2011)

The Trollope Prize at the University of Kansas is pleased to announce the judges for the 2011 essay contest.

Andrew H. Miller is Professor of English and Director of the Victorian Studies Program at Indiana University Bloomington, as well as the co-editor of Victorian Studies.  He has been a fellow of both the National Humanities Center and the American Council of Learned Societies.  His work has explored nineteenth-century texts by Dickens, Gaskell, and Thackeray, and his recent publications include The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Cornell University Press, 2008).

Helena Michie is Professor of English and the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor in Humanities at Rice University.  Her work focuses on feminist theory, Victorian literature and culture, and the Victorian novel.  She has been awarded fellowships by both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation.  Her latest monograph is Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Dorice Williams Elliott is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas.  Her work focuses on the Victorian novel, theories of class, and feminist theory.  She has recently received both a fellowship from the Hall Center for the Humanities and a W.T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence.  Her publications include The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England (University of Virginia Press, 2002).  She is currently researching Australian convict literature.

The deadline for entries to both the undergraduate and graduate essay contests is June 1, 2011. Also please note that recent PhD recipients may enter the graduate contest.

Please see our website -- http://trollopeprize.ku.edu -- for more information on the Prize, or e-mail any questions to lkiehna@ku.edu.

Art, Literature, the Press, and Exile: Relationships between the United Kingdom and the Italian Risorgimento (9/9-11/2011)

Registration is now open for Art, Literature, the Press, and Exile: Relationships between the United Kingdom and the Italian Risorgimento, an international conference to be held 9-11 September 2011 at Bagni di Lucca, Italy.

The conference commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy the Fondazione Michel de Montaigne, based in Bagni di Lucca, in collaboration with the University of Pisa and the Historical Institute of Lucca, and will take place in the former Anglican Church (now the Municipal Library) of Bagni di Lucca. It considers the representation of Italy in the work of nineteenth century British writers and examines perceptions and rationalizations of Italian aspirations for unity by British writers, artists, journalists and politicians. This is one of a series of Conferences at Bagni di Lucca which have concentrated upon nineteenth-century British literary figures who lived in Tuscany and particularly those associated with Bagni itself.

Presentations include, but are not limited to

• “'Stirring the waters roughly' Charles Lever, Blackwood’s Magazine and the Risorgimento"
• "Lord Byron fails to finish 'The Prophecy of Dante'"
• "George Eliot’s Romola as an expression of a cultural Risorgimento"
• "British Women Writers and the Risorgimento: Isabella Blagden between salons and political involvement"
• "Friends of Italy: The Risorgimento in Victorian Great Britain"
• "'Italy for the Italians': Jessie White, the Italian Risorgimento and the Formation of Victorian Identity
• "'Buy it, buy it! Fine statue! … very cheap'- Emigration to Great Britain from the Lucca Province in the 19th Century"
• "Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Francesco Dall’Ongaro"
• "Arthur Hugh Clough and the Roman Republic of 1849"
• "Caricatures of leading figures of the Risorgimento as seen by the original Vanity Fair (1869-1878)"
• "Dickens and Gissing in Italy before and after the Unity"

For the full program, visit http://www.fondazionemontaigne.it/files/montaigne__programma_2011.pdf

For registration information, visit http://www.fondazionemontaigne.it/index.html

CFP: Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology (8/15/2011)

Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology

We are seeking contributors for a collection of critical essays on Steampunk. Steampunk remains an elusive topic even among its admirers and practitioners, but at its heart, it re-imagines the Victorian age in the future, and re-works its technology, fashion, and values with a dose of anti-modernism. From sci-fi and fantasy to websites catering to a Steampunk lifestyle, this multi-faceted genre demands greater scholarly analysis.

The editors of this anthology seek contributions in the following suggested subject areas: Steampunk film, technology, fashion, literature, art & design, gender and steampunk, steampunk fan culture, steampunk as culture and lifestyle, and critiques of existing analyses of steampunk.

Submission Guidelines: Send a 1000 word abstract in Microsoft Word by email attachment on or before August 15, 2011; include a brief biography or vita. International submissions are welcomed and encouraged.

Abstracts chosen for inclusion in the anthology will be considered “conditional acceptances” – the editors will secure the submission in the volume, but the editors reserve the right to reject any full essay that does not meet the standards (of style/content, etc) agreed to between the editors and authors. Endnotes are mandatory; illustrations are encouraged and must be secured (along with permissions) by the author and submitted with the final draft.

Editorial Team:

• Dr. Julie Anne Taddeo, History Dept., University of Maryland (Taddeo@mail.umd.edu) 
• Dr. Cynthia Miller, Institute for Liberal Arts, Emerson College (cynthia_miller@emerson.edu)
• Dr. Ken Dvorak, Distance Education, Northern New Mexico College (krdvorak@nnmc.edu)

CFP: Art versus Industry? (6/17/2011; 3/23-24/2012)

Art versus Industry?
Leeds City Museum, 23 and 24 March 2012


This two-day international and transdisciplinary conference aims to re-evaluate the intersections between the visual arts and industry in Britain during the long nineteenth century. The complexity and variety of nineteenth-century industrial culture and responses to it remain under appreciated. The idea that an  ʻindustrial cultureʼ might have existed in nineteenth-century Britain seemed paradoxical in the wake of Raymond Williamsʼ Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958) and Martin Wienerʼs English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit  (1981). Both suggested a seemingly non-negotiable opposition between culture and industry. They privileged the writings of John Ruskin, and later William Morris, which resisted the incursion of mechanised production into the sphere of the fine and applied arts. 


ʻArt versus industry?ʼ invites papers that look beyond Ruskin and Morris to modify these characterisations. Recent studies of nineteenth-century literary culture have identified the 
development of a pro-industrial rhetoric in the early nineteenth century. How was this articulated in the visual arts? Debates over design reform in particular suggest the permeable boundaries between the artist, designer, artisan and operative, matched by a taxonomic conflation of art with design. Meanwhile, the prospect of widening the franchise of  ʻtasteʼ often correlated with the embrace of new industrial technologies, as much as with the repudiation of them.  ʻArt versus industry?ʼ seeks to uncover the complexities of the nineteenth-century ʻindustrial cultureʼ.


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

• Exhibitions and the display of science and art
• Taste formation and circulation
• The role of the periodical press and print culture
• Industrial art collectors and collections
• The education of the artist and artisan
• Material processes and conditions of production; deskilling and reskilling
• The principles and practice of design
• Historiographic approaches to the debate
• Mechanicsʼ Institutions and the ideology of self-improvement
• Centralisation and regional specificity
• The impact of trans-national communication and manufacture upon art or upon concepts of 
• national style
• New reproductive technologies and art

Confirmed speakers include Dr. Tom Gretton (University College London), Dr. Mervyn Romans (independent), Dr. Colin Trodd (University of Manchester) and Professor Lara Kriegel (Indiana University). 


Please email a title, 300 word abstract and CV to Rebecca Wade (r.j.wade@leeds.ac.uk) by 17 
June 2011.

CFP: "Asian Crossings, 1789-1914" Workshop for Conference on Inter-Asian Connections III: Hong Kong (6/24/2011; 6/6-8/2012)

Conference on
Inter-Asian Connections III: Hong Kong
June 6-8, 2012
 
Call For Workshop Papers

Deadline: Friday, June 24, 2011

Workshop Title: Asian Crossings, 1789-1914

Workshop Directors: Ross Forman, National University of Singapore (ellrgf@nus.edu.sg) and Julia Kuehn, The University of Hong Kong (jkuehn@hku.hk)

The long nineteenth century was a period of major social, economic, and cultural shifts in Asia that were often spurred by colonialism, even when not specifically linked to it. Some of the most noteworthy drives and effects of these shifts include: competition between European imperial projects (French, British, Russian, Dutch, Portuguese); the growth of intra-Asian imperialist projects (in Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria and elsewhere); changes to historical trade routes in the Indian Ocean and between China and her neighbors; large-scale labor movements both within the region (from China to Southeast Asia, for instance) and beyond (from India to Mauritius, Southern Africa and the Caribbean or from Japan to Brazil and Peru); and the development of multicultural urban spaces as a product of these and other forces. These larger concerns also had a significant impact on local geographies.  For example, the East India Company’s opium trade with China altered the lives of peasants in Bengal and Bihar and, in many cases, drove them to emigration. Similarly, the foreign presence in Shanghai had a direct impact on the development of the Chinese periodical press.

Our workshop proceeds from the premise that textual artifacts—be they maps, travel narratives, account ledgers, novels, newspapers, or personal papers—offer a privileged means to assess what some of the effects of “Asian Crossings” were and how they manifested themselves. 

We invite participants from the humanities and social sciences to join us in investigating how “Asian Crossings” reshaped the real and imaginative geography of the region. Our aim is to bring together scholars in a range of disciplines—including literary studies, history, geography, South Asian Studies, and East and Southeast Asian Studies—to map some of the ways in which the direct and indirect impact of imperialisms during the long nineteenth century gave rise to contemporary Asian modernities. We also welcome the participation of writers, artists, and filmmakers whose work engages with Asian pasts. We hope to attract scholars not only from different disciplinary backgrounds, but also from different linguistic traditions. In our own field of literature, for instance, it is rare that specialists working on Francophone literature, culture, and history in Asia speak to those working on Anglophone traditions – and equally rare that scholars of literature in English dialogue with scholars of Chinese, Hindi, or Arabic.  Thus an important goal of “Asian Crossings” is not just to explore old geographies, but also to create new conceptual geographies of exchange for scholars working on a variety of Asia-centered topics. 

The initial research questions for the project are as follows:

• How can postcolonial methodologies be revisited so that they take into account relationships other than those between colonizers and colonizeds? How can a better understanding of the multiple exchanges between different Asian locations help us to imagine alternative ways of studying Asia?
• In what ways has the area studies model interfered with our ability to see the interconnectedness of different Asian spaces to each other and to other parts of the world during the long nineteenth century?
• To what degree can imperialism be considered a process common to different Asian societies during the long nineteenth century? To what degree did it create new “crossings” within Asia and beyond?

The workshop is just the beginning of our deliberations. We hope that participants will work with us to produce an edited special issue and/or anthology and will collaborate with us on further inter-institutional and web-based projects on the theme of “Asian Crossings.”   

For additional details and application guidelines, please visit the Conference website:http://www.ssrc.org/programs/pages/interasia-program/inter-asian-connections-iii-workshop-asian-crossings-1789-1914/. 

CFP: Reading Paratext: the Economies of 19th-Century Play Publishing (5/30/2011; 11/17-20/2011)

Working Session CFP “Reading Paratext: the Economies of 19th-Century Play Publishing"
American Society of Theatre Research (ASTR) conference 2011
Montreal, Quebec Canada
November 17 – 20, 2011
Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth Hotel

What does a play’s title page tell us about the business of theatre? How do publisher catalogues reveal economic and cultural change? What can we make of a playbook’s preliminary pages, the Dramatis Personae, production history and the like? This session explores how paratext, the “extra” printed matter around the dramatic text, can open new angles on cultural, material, and social contexts. It borrows the model of historical-structural scrutiny in Gerard Genette’s influential study, Paratexts, for the case of playscripts.

In this Working Session, participants will collaboratively analyze four types of paratext—title page, publisher catalogue, an advertisement for a non-textual product, and a list of characters. The mode we envision is collective methodological experiment, offering preliminary contemplation from new samples rather than conclusions drawn from long-term projects. We seek participants who have incorporated paratext in their research, and who are prepared to offer comments, both prepared and off-the-cuff, about industrial-era intersections of publishing and theatre worlds. Specialization or expertise is not required, though ideally, participants would be familiar to some degree with both subjects—paratext (from print culture, book history, publishing history, or material text angles) and English theatre/performance/media history of the long nineteenth century.

The format is non-traditional, structured as a collective, analytic “show-and-tell” centered on four genres of paratext (a title-page, an ad, a catalogue page, and a dramatis personae list). Months before the conference, having agreed on four specimens, panelists will examine and prepare remarks about them. At the seminar, as the images are projected, participants will present initial “readings” of the samples—a “thick description,” observations, and questions—as the springboard for conversation among panelists and finally with the larger group (attendees).

Please send (1) a c.200-word description of your relevant work—uses of and questions about paratext, expertise/familiarity/interests in nineteenth-century theatre and play publishing; (2) if possible, a file-copy of some paratext used in your research; (3) a brief biography paragraph (affiliation, projects, and publications).

Deadline Monday 5/30.

Contact (enquiries welcome): Kate Wilson (PhD Candidate, Theatre, CUNY) Wilson.katec@gmail.com and Mary Isbell (PhD Candidate, English, University of Connecticut) mary.isbell@gmail.com


ASTR: http://www.astr.org/

CFP: British Studies Essay Contest for Undergraduates at U.S. Colleges and Universities (6/1/2011)

As you read student essays, please keep in mind the North American Conference on British Studies' annual undergrad essay prize. The NACBS awards up to six prizes of $100 each according to the following guidelines:

1. The essay must have been written while the author was a degree-seeking undergraduate at a U.S. college or university.
2. Essays written for courses or as theses must have received an A grade.
3. All nominations must be accompanied by the signature of a faculty sponsor, who must be a member of the NACBS. No individual may nominate more than one essay in any one year.
4. Essays in any field of British Studies are welcome.
5. Essays should be between 10 and 25 pages, excluding citations and references.
6. Please submit a letter of nomination (including the permanent mailing address and email contact information for the student) along with an electronic or three hard copies of the essay by June 1, 2011 to Professor Peter Hoffenberg, Department of History, University of Hawaii, 2530 Dole Street, Sakamaki Hall A203 · Honolulu, HI 96822-2283. Email: peterh@hawaii.edu.
7. For further information please feel free to contact Prof. Hoffenberg at the above address. Thank you

For more information visit http://www.nacbs.org/britstudessayendergrad.html

CFP: Dickens Special Issue of English: the Journal of the English Association (9/1/2011)

2012 is the bicentenary of Dickens's birth. To celebrate, English: the Journal of the English Association is dedicating a special issue to his work and influence.

Topics covered might include:

• Dickens and adaptation
• Dickens and illustration
• Dickens and the Gothic imagination
• Dickens and the city
• Reading Dickens in the twenty-first century

But submissions on any topic connected to his work are encouraged.

Potential contributors should send essays of between 5,000 and 9,000 words to the journal editors via the English website at: www.oxfordjournals.org/page/4221/1

The deadline for submission is 1 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

CFP: M/MLA Special Session "The Rules of the Game: Cultural Play in Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature" (6/3/2011; 11/3-6/2011)

The Rules of the Game: Cultural Play in Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature
M/MLA, November 3-6, 2011

A special session on the relation between play and children's literature in the Nineteenth Century at the Midwest Modern Language Association 2011 conference that focuses on the theme: "Play...No Seriously"

This panel focuses on the intersections of children's play - fantasy, gamesmanship, adventure - and the development of an "adult" identity in children's literature from the long nineteenth century. The panel will explore the cultural implications of play inherent in the texts discussed, and engage with the second half of the conference’s theme: how “No, seriously,” for nineteenth-century children’s literature, is perhaps the most important part of play.

We are particularly interested in papers that explore how the didacticism of nineteenth-century literature, in an age in which children were considered "little adults,"  harnessed the energy and imagination of childhood and transformed it into a training exercise for adulthood. Papers that examine how play in children's literature shaped national identity are particularly welcome.

Deadline for abstracts June 3, 2011

Please submit a 250-word proposal and a brief bio to Professors Elizabeth Anderman (Elizabeth.Anderman@Colorado.edu) and Erika Behrisch Elce (Erika.Behrisch.Elce@rmc.ca).

CFP: “Strange New Today”: Victorians, Crisis and Response - Postgraduate Conference (5/27/2011; 9/17/2011)

“Strange New Today”: Victorians, Crisis and Response

Postgraduates in the University of Exeter’s Centre for Victorian Studies will be holding a one-day conference for postgraduates and early-career researchers on the 17th of September, 2011.  The conference is in collaboration with the Reader Organisation and will take place in the historic setting of the Devon and Exeter Institution, which was founded in 1813 as a private library.

Keynote speakers:
Professor Regenia Gagnier (University of Exeter)
Professor Philip Davis (University of Liverpool)

Plenary: “The Reading Cure”, presented by The Reader Organisation

Call for Papers:
In Past and Present, Thomas Carlyle conceives of modern crisis as a deadly riddle posed by the Sphinx – with a viable future or social collapse contingent upon the answer: “This English Nation, will it get to know the meaning of its strange newToday?”

This conference is intended to elicit papers that respond to the generative effects of the perception of crisis in the Victorian period.  Awareness of crisis stimulated intellectual enquiry in new disciplinary directions: in history and historiography, archaeology and classicism, evolutionary biology, economic and social theory, in literary expressions of cultural critique, and in personal and psychological narratives.  Such intellectual productivity – and the insistence upon circulating the new analyses of crisis within a public realm of discussion – constitutes a response that we might wish to draw upon in our own times of perceived crisis.

The commemorations of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and the returns to Marx for explanations of the current economic crisis exemplify a revival of interest in how thought from the Victorian period lives on in the contemporary world.  This conference is an opportunity to investigate the productive and prolific nature of the Victorians’ response to the idea of cultural and personal crisis – as theorists or as writers whose literary works could help us grasp the meaning of our “strange newToday”.

Please send proposals (of approx. 250 words) for 15 – 20 minute papers to southwestvictorianists@exeter.ac.uk no later than Friday the 27th of May.  Any queries regarding the conference can be directed to the same address.


For more information visit http://strangenewtoday.wordpress.com/

CFP: Production and Consumption in Victorian Literature and Culture (7/1/2011)

Victoria Network CFP:
Production and Consumption in Victorian Literature and Culture

The fifth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Ella Dzelzainis (Newcastle University), is dedicated to a reassessment of nineteenth-century investments in concepts of productivity and consumption. Accelerating industrialisation, the growth of consumer culture, economic debates about the perils of overconsumption as well as emerging cultural discourses about industriousness, work ethic and the uses of free time radically altered the ways in which Victorians thought about practices of production and consumption. Literary authors intervened directly in these economic and social debates while also negotiating analogous developments within a literary marketplace transformed by new forms of writing, distributing and consuming literature. We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words. Possible topics include but are by no means limited to the following:

• Productivist and consumerist ideologies and the politics of social class
• Victorian (global) spaces of production, forms and practices of consumption
• Changing concepts of literary production, authorship and the reading audience
• Biological and physiological models of productivity, attrition and idleness
• New agents in the literary marketplace: publishers, editors, book sellers
• Economic theory and nineteenth-century literature
• Reassessing Marxist perspectives on Victorian literature and culture
• Idleness, spare time and other modes of ‘unproductiveness’
• The effects of industrialisation: mechanization, work routine and ‘human motors’

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. The deadline for submissions to our next issue is 1 July, 2011. Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com

CFP: Beyond Braddon: Forgotten Female Sensationalists (10/31/2011)

Women's Writing Special Issue:

Beyond Braddon: Forgotten Female Sensationalists

The past thirty years have witnessed a transformation in our perception of the mid-Victorian literary field, due in large part to the extensive recovery of sensation fiction and a corresponding recognition of that genre’s importance in the literary debates, trends, and wider cultural practices of the period. As Andrew Maunder has recently suggested, “[i]t is now acknowledged that if sensation fiction is cut out of the picture it is impossible to gain an accurate sense of nineteenth-century literary historiography”.[1] While scholarly work on sensation fiction has expanded greatly in the past few years, this work, until very recently, has focused on a narrow range of authors and works, with Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Ellen Wood retaining the preponderance of critical attention. 

This special issue of Women’s Writing aims to contribute to our current understanding of sensationalism by turning the spotlight on the many forgotten female novelists and dramatists who contributed to the Victorian understanding of literary sensation. By moving beyond the women sensation novelists who have come to represent the genre (especially Braddon and Wood) our objective is to gain a fuller, more nuanced, understanding of the spectrum of writing that collectively worked to construct the concept of ‘sensationalism’ for Victorian readers and critics. We also hope to shed light on the specific concerns of female sensationalists, as the role of the ‘proper’ woman writer frequently conflicted with that of the supposedly immoral sensation author. 

Articles might address whether there existed distinct forms of female sensationalism and whether such categorisations remain useful or limiting to current critics. We welcome essays on authors who have begun to receive renewed attention, such as Rhoda Broughton, Florence Marryat, and Ouida, as well as those who remain largely forgotten. Writers we would particularly like to consider in the issue include, but are by no means limited to:

• Rhoda Broughton
• Annie Edwardes
• Amelia B. Edwards
• Mary Cecil Hay
• Catherine Hill
• Mrs. Mackenzie Daniels
• Florence Marryat
• Mrs. J. C. Newby
• Ouida
• Dora Russell
• Felicia Skene              
• Mrs Gordon Smythies
• Annie Thomas
• Melinda Young

Please submit articles for consideration between 4,000-7000 words to Anne-Marie Beller, Loughborough University (a.m.beller@lboro.ac.uk) and Tara MacDonald, University of Amsterdam (T.C.MacDonald@uva.nl) by 31 October 2011.

Contributors should follow the journal’s house style, details of which are to be found on the Women’s Writing web site http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/09699082.asp. This is the new MLA. Do 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.

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[1] Maunder, Andrew. “General Introduction.” In Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction: 1855–1890, vol. 1: Sensationalism and the Sensation Debate. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004.

CUNY Annual Victorian Conference "Victorian Boyhoods" (5/6/2011)

We invite you to join us at Victorian Boyhoods, a one-day conference sponsored by The Victorian Committee, the PhD Program in English, Dickens Studies Annual, and the Office of the President, which will be held on Friday, May 6, 2011.

The Victorian Committee of the CUNY Graduate Center was founded in 1978, and the first conference took place in 1982. This year’s speakers include

• Karen Bourrier
• Oliver S. Buckton
• Kelly Hager
• Jenny Holt
• Jongwoo Jeremy Kim
• U.C. Knoepflmacher
• Claudia Nelson
• Pamela Thurschwell

For more information, visit http://victorian.commons.gc.cuny.edu/.