CFP: “Strange New Today”: Victorians, Crisis and Response, updated deadline (7/15/2011; 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 interdisciplinary 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 Reader Cure”, hosted by the Reader Organisation of the University of Liverpool

Call for Papers:
In Past and Present (1843), the author and social commentator, Thomas Carlyle, perceived modern crisis as an impossible riddle and posed the question: “This English Nation, will it get to know the meaning of its strange new today?” Nineteenth-century perceptions of crisis were informed and shaped by unprecedented change in the social and economic climate of Victorian England.  Awareness of crisis stimulated intellectual enquiry in new disciplinary directions: in history and geology, archaeology and classicism, evolutionary biology, economic and social theory, in literature and culture, and in personal and psychological narratives.  Professor Philip Davis in The Victorians identifies the realist novel as a ‘holding ground’ for the complex emotional and psychological concerns which emerged from rapid industrial and
social change.  Through literature, and the public nature of the periodical press, authors and thinkers found a new medium of expression – reading and writing became remedial aids in times of difficulty. Such intellectual productivity, coupled with the desire to explore new emotional, social and psychological territories, caused these dramas of discovery to be played out in the very hearts and homes of the public.

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 nineteenth century lives on in the contemporary world.   Victorian literature continues to enrich and comfort the lives of people today as shown by the success of the bibliotherapy outreach work of the Reader Organisation of the University of Liverpool.  The status and future of Victorian Studies has been identified by Professor Regenia Gagnier, in her address ‘Whither Victorian Studies’, to be giving rise to emergent formalisms, and  new collaborative projects with strong interdisciplinary focus and international involvement (Victoriographies 2011).

This conference explores the significance of crisis in how we read and interpret Victorian literature, and what that might mean for the future of Victorian Studies.  How did Victorians perceive the state and future of society, and in what ways did different disciplines seek to respond to these questions?  How might contemporary scholarship, itself experiencing uncertain times, learn from or emulate Victorian responses?  What forms of advice or consolation can Victorian literature offer to the contemporary reader?  How might Victorian Studies – in their wide embracement of interdisciplinary concerns - help us grasp “the meaning of our strange new Today”?

Possible topics might include, but are by no means limited to:

• Crisis and resolve
• Crisis in scientific thought and theory
• Crises in history and the interpretation of history
• Crisis in the understanding of time, space or place
• Crisis in Victorian Studies
• Individual and society
• Literature and change
• Personal, family and psychological crisis
• Public and private selves
• Social or cultural crisis
• The realist novel
• Religious crisis
• The role of the public forum in Victorian literature and culture
• Therapeutic responses
• Victorian literature as aid

Postgraduates and early career researchers are invited to send proposals (of approx. 250 words) for 15 – 20 minute papers to southwestvictorianists@exeter.ac.uk no later than July 15th.  Any queries regarding the conference can be directed to the same address.

This event is held in collaboration with the Reader Organisation – a bibliotherapy outreach initiative that has brought about an international ‘Reading Revolution’. The organisation will contribute to the conference by highlighting the significance of Victorian literature as both informative and remedial for working through social, cultural, and psychological crises.

The Southwest Victorianists team
University of Exeter
Contact: southwestvictorianists@exeter.ac.uk
Conference web page: http://strangenewtoday.wordpress.com/

CFP: History and Humour – 1800 to Present (10/15/2011; 7/6-7/2012)

CfP: History and Humour – 1800 to Present
International Conference at Freiburg University, 6-7 July 2012

One tends to associate history with serious modes of presentation (academic, heroic, tragic) rather than with humorous ones. Yet Clio also smiles and laughs out loud: Comic renderings of historical events and figures have made a significant contribution to ‘popular’ history since around 1800. We find them in all European cultures and in a wide range of texts, images and performances, in styles both coarse and refined. History has been the subject of caricature, satire, the cartoon and comic book, stage and television/film comedy, and the parody history textbook as exemplified in the British classic, 1066 and All That. There are special national
traditions which the conference seeks to explore and compare. But it will also address questions of a more general nature. Theories of humour are diverse but agree in a number of elements: On the intellectual level, laughter seems to be an elementary reaction to incompatible or contradictory frames of reference and interpretation. On the emotional level, laughter releases apprehension and tension, and it discharges feelings of aggression and contempt. It is aroused by the deformed and unfamiliar, it exposes and punishes the unsocial, and it deflates the grand. To what purpose have such elements been employed in the humorous presentation of history? From what contexts do humorous presentations arise? At what audiences are they directed, and how have they been received? We invite participants who would like to explore these and other questions with reference to specific case studies from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. 300-word proposals in English should be sent to the organisers (Barbara Korte, English Department and Elisabeth Cheauré, Slavic Department) by 15 October 2011:

barbara.korte@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de
elisabeth.cheaure@slavistik.uni-freiburg.de

For information on our research group Historische Lebenswelten please see
http://portal.uni-freiburg.de/historische-lebenswelten/

CFP: 2012 NeMLA panel "Approaches to Adventure in the Late 19th Century " (8/1/2011; 3/15-18/2012)

NEMLA:  March 15-18, 2012.  (Rochester, NY) 
Call for papers – Approaches to Adventure in the Late 19th Century
Panel Organizer:  Rebekah Greene/University of Rhode Island (Rebekah_greene@my.uri.edu)


This panel examines the burgeoning interest in adventure during the years 1880-1901. Joseph A. Kestner in his recent Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880-1915 has suggested that adventure texts are filled with ‘codes’ such as ‘rescue, heroism, survival, courage, duty, isolation, voyaging’ for audiences to ‘live up to’ (1). Papers that scrutinize late Victorian literary treatments of these codes, in addition to tropes such as travel, sailing, mountain climbing, and camping are warmly welcomed. What is the cultural or historical significance of this attention to adventure and why should it be celebrated? Why are the codes of adventure important, for both the individual and for the state? How do Victorian authors of adventure texts use their works to problematize empire? Can adventure texts function as pedagogical tools for younger readers, colonial administrators, or emigrants? Do adventure texts function at different levels for colonizing or colonized audiences? How do female authors treat the codes of adventure? And what does this intense engagement with adventure reveal?

Please submit 250-500 word abstracts (as an MS Word attachment, please) to Rebekah Greene, rebekah_greene@my.uri.edu, with NEMLA 2012 as the subject heading by August 1st, 2011.

Information for the convention can be found at http://www.nemla.org/convention/2012/

CFP: NeMLA 2012: "Of Queen's Gardens": Victorian Ecofeminism panel (9/30/2011; 3/15-18/2012)

Call for Papers:  “Of Queen’s Gardens”: Victorian Ecofeminism

This panel invites ecofeminist readings of Victorian literature (novels, poetry, prose), wherein women are frequently given “natural” traits or are associated with the earth.  Ecofeminist interpretations may highlight the damaging consequences of this link, or celebrate women’s potential to reform cultural/environmental attitudes because of it.  In what ways does the woman/nature link function in Victorian literature?  What do these interpretations reveal about Victorian attitudes about gender and the environment, and the treatment of each? 

Please e-mail abstracts of 300-500 words to Margaret Kennedy,
mswright@ic.sunysb.edu.

Deadline:  September 30, 2011
Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

43nd Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
March 15-18, 2012 Rochester, New York – Hyatt Rochester Host
Institution:  St. John Fisher College 

Keynote speaker:  Jennifer Egan, 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner, A Visit from the Goon Squad

340 sessions in all areas of modern language scholarship and teaching are now accepting abstracts: - http://www.nemla.org/convention/2012/cfp.html

The 43rd annual convention will be held March 15-18th in Rochester,New York at the Hyatt Regency Hotel downtown, located minutes away from convenient air, bus, and train transportation options for attendees. St. John Fisher College will serve as the host college, and the diverse array of area institutions are coordinating with conference organizers to sponsor various activities, such as celebrated keynote speakers, local events, and fiction readings.

Building upon the excellence of past NeMLA conferences, the association continues to grow as a vibrant community of scholars, thanks to the wide array of intellectual and cultural opportunities at every venue. Compact yet diverse, Rochester also boasts important historical connections; it is the site of the home, publication operations, and orations of Frederick Douglass, where he edited the North Star, as well as his eponymous periodical, and delivered the speech, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?". Visitors can explore the houses of abolitionist, suffragette, and reformer Susan B. Anthony and the inventor of devices popularizing photography, George Eastman, as well as shopping and eateries; attendees will also be within reach of the beautiful Finger Lakes region, known for its local wineries.

Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however, panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable.

CFP: Popular News Discourse: Anglo-American Newspapers, 1833-1988 (9/1/2011,1/18/2012)

AHRC RESEARCH NETWORK
Exploring the language of the popular in Anglo-American Newspapers 1833-1988
University of Zurich, 18 January 2012

As part of the series of research seminars which will contribute to the Research Network we are inviting interested scholars to submit proposals of 300 words for a seminar to be held at the University of Zurich on 18 January 2012 entitled Popular news discourse: Anglo-American newspapers, 1833-1988. It aims to bring together scholars from linguistics, history, media and journalism studies, social sciences, and English to consider the important of historical pragmatics as a tool for exploring the content and context of Anglo-American newspapers between 1833 and 1988. There is no charge for the event and there will be a number of keynote speakers to be announced at a later date.

The dates 1833-1988 frame the research network project as they are key dates in the development of popular discourse within Anglo-American newspapers. 1833 sees the first development of the Penny Press and 1988 witnesses the peak in circulation of Murdoch’s British-based Sun. This long view will reinforce how important historical context is to the understanding of contemporary newspapers. Although this project will certainly seek to address some of the wider implications of the discourse of newspaper language it will proceed from a thorough textual exploration in the first instance. Proposals are invited which explore the ways in which popular newspapers during this period in either the USA or Britain have attempted to structure the language of their product to match particular aspects of the social experience of their readers. It is envisaged as a genuinely interdisciplinary forum for theoretical, empirical or methodological work at the intersection of pragmatics and historical linguistics which might include the historical and socio-cultural contexts of communication and/or sociolinguistic, discourse analytical or semantic approaches to historical texts. The proposals should be empirically-grounded and say something concrete about how language was structured and restructured in popular newspapers for commercial purposes during this period.

We plan to publish the best of the papers presented on the day in a special edition of the international, peer-reviewed journal Historical Pragmatics.

Please send your proposals or any questions you may have by the 1 September 2011 to the Research Assistant for the project Clare Burke: Clare.Burke@sheffield.ac.uk

Seminar organizers: Professor Martin Conboy, University of Sheffield and Professor Andreas H. Jucker, University of Zurich

For further details of the project please visit the website for the Centre for the Study of Journalism and History at the University of Sheffield: 
http://www.journalism-history.dept.shef.ac.uk/

Details of the seminar can also be found on the University of Zurich web pages at: 
http://www.popned.uzh.ch/

CFP: Disability & the Victorians: Confronting Legacies (7/30-8/1/2012)

Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies:

Disability & the Victorians: Confronting Legacies

30th July-1st August 2012; Leeds Trinity University College
Second Call for Papers

The nineteenth century was the period during which disability was conceptualised, categorised, and defined. The industrial revolution, advances in medicine, the emergence of philanthropy and the growth of asylums all played their part in creating what today's society describes as the medical model of disability.

Disability can be traced through many forms: in material culture and literary genres; scientific, medical and official inquiries; art; architecture; the history of disabled charities; disabled people's experiences; the legacy inherited by disabled people today of the taxonomies and categories of disability - the 'handicapped'; the 'deaf and dumb'; the 'feeble minded'; the blind; the 'imbecile' the 'idiot' and the 'cretin' -- the legacy of the relationship between the body, the visual, the scientific and the literary text; the intersection of disability, theories of evolution, the emergence of the disciplines of statistics, social sciences and anthropology, eugenics and degeneration.

This conference seeks to address conceptualisations of disability in the Victorian period and their legacy(ies); the ways in which we can draw disabled voices and testimonies together to construct 'the long view', the intersection of disability studies and Victorian studies, and the conceptual, disciplinary, and pedagogical issues that arise as a consequence of this research. Proposals for papers, panels, posters and other forms of presentation (e.g. creative writing and performance) are invited that open up new lines of research and inquiry relating to any aspect of Disability in the Victorian period.

Possible themes might include:

• Resistance/conformity: subversion, transgression, agency and constraint.
• The visibility and invisibility of disability: beggars, street sellers, hawkers, freak shows and circuses.
• Victorian institutions: charities, asylums, schools and clubs.
• Normalising practices: definitions, constructions, categories and taxonomies.
• Victorian technologies: assistive and medical.
• The emergence of specialisms: from audiology to psychiatry.
• Disability as a moral force for improvement: theology and spiritual enlightenment/development, literature and the school of pain.
• The formation of Victorian identities: nation, empire, 'race'. Disability and the fear of loss: national efficiency, eugenics and 'degeneration'.
• Medical and cultural histories: medical illustration and advertising, the relationship between the literary, the medical and the scientific text.
• Acts: Victorian social policy and legal frameworks.
• Work: employment, employability, the regulated employment and non-employment of disabled people
• The spaces of disability: art, architecture, environment.
• Pedagogy: teaching about disability and the disabled in the Victorian period.
• Representing disability to non-specialist audiences: heritage interpretations, public histories, dictionaries.

Those with an involvement in disability, either through direct experience, or work, teaching etc., and papers that adopt an interdisciplinary or comparative frame, shifting across the normal boundaries of history, literary studies, the history of medicine, the history and philosophy of science, art history, etc. are especially sought, but studies with a narrower focus seeking to challenge Victorian legacies in this field are also welcome.

Panels will consist of 20-minute presentations grounded in work submitted electronically in advance of the event. These pieces will be made available in advance, on a website dedicated to the event. Work may subsequently be considered for publication.

Please send a short biographical note together with your proposal. Prospective panel organisers should also send the panelists' names, paper titles, and a short biographical note for each panelist and their contact details.

Proposals, or enquiries relating to these, should be sent to Prof Karen Sayer k.sayer@leedstrinity.ac.uk

The deadline for the submission of proposals for individual 20-minute papers or presentations (200-250 words), and proposals for panel sessions (no longer than 500 words), is 31st August, 2011.

Confirmed Speakers include:
Joanne Woiak, Ph.D., Disability Studies Program, University of Washington; Professor Martha Stoddard Holmes, Ph.D., Professor and Chair of Literature and Writing Studies, Cal State University San Marcos, USA, 'Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture'; Professor Vanessa Toulmin, Director of National Fairground Archive, National Fairground Archive (Western Bank Library) University of Sheffield. Mat Fraser, Actor, writer, MC, and Disability Artist, 'Freak to Clique' (invited to attend and perform)

Participants also already include independent researchers in the field, charities including coHearentVision, and those working with heritage providers/within public history, as well as those holding academic posts.

General enquiries to:
Joy Hamblin, Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, Leeds Trinity University College, Brownberrie Lane, Leeds, LS18 5HD j.hamblin@leedstrinity.ac.uk; tel. 0113 2837305

CFP: Imagining Victorian Settler Homes: Antipodal Domestic Fiction (8/1/2011)

We invite original articles for an edited collection on settler homes in nineteenth-century Australian and New Zealand writing. The collection proposes antipodal domestic fiction as a distinct genre that had an important formative function in the development of nineteenth-century literature in English, while it participated in a discourse on settler colonialism that was to engender persistent clichés in the popular imagination, both “back home” in the metropolitan centre and in the new homes overseas.

Nineteenth-century literature and art created some of the most poignant and lasting images of settler homes. On both sides of the Pacific as well as the Atlantic pro-emigration posters, advice manuals for the future settler, cautionary tales, a widely circulated periodical press, as well as popular novels capitalised on a pervasive fascination with colonial expansion, with the frontier, the possibilities of the New World, and the difficulties of setting up home elsewhere. They helped establish images of ideal settler homes, meeting an urgent need for affirmative representations of the new lives that would-be settlers were planning overseas. At the same time, as settler authors frequently wrote with a twofold – colonial and metropolitan – readership in mind, they at once traded on and sought to rework popular representations of the wild, exotic, easily sensationalised “bush.” However, whereas tales of the gold rush, of adventures at the frontier, the bush, or during the New Zealand Wars played into readerly expectations in the metropolitan centre and simultaneously created ideologies of mateship that were to define settler masculinity, emergent genres of domestic settler fiction (predominantly, if not exclusively, by women writers) increasingly attempted to revise clichéd images of the wild bush. Children’s literature, women’s settler memoirs, and magazines specifically targeting the colonial girl, as well as domestic novels constructed and revised changing expectations of settler homes. Simultaneously, they helped create and circulate nineteenth-century literature on an unprecedentedly global scale.

While the collection’s main focus is domestic fiction about Britain’s geographical “antipodes,” comparative approaches to transpacific and transatlantic settler genres or to contrasting representations in metropolitan and colonial settler writing are also welcome.

Please submit abstracts of ca. 500 words, accompanied by a brief biographical note, to tswagner@ntu.edu.sg

The deadline for abstracts is 1 August 2011.

Completed essays will be due on 1 February 2012.

Tamara S. Wagner
Associate Professor
English Literature
http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/tswagner/tamarawagner.htm

CFP: Victorians. A Journal of Culture and Literature, special edition on Thackeray (6/30/2011)

Victorians. A Journal of Culture and Literature (formerly Victorian Newsletter) #120, Fall 2011 will be a special edition featuring new work on William Thackeray, in honor of the bicentennial of his birth. Submission deadline: June 30, 2011. Notification deadline: August 30, 2011.

Manuscript submissions: electronic e-mail attachment (Microsoft Word docs), in MLA documentation format.

Please address submissions and/or questions to: deborah.logan@wku.edu or victorian.newsletter@wku.edu.

Victorians. A Journal of Culture and Literature is sponsored for the Victorian Group of the Modern Language Association by Western Kentucky University and is published twice annually.

The Popular Imagination and the Dawn of Modernism (9/15-17/2011)

The Popular Imagination and the Dawn of Modernism, Middlebrow Writing 1890-1930

International Conference, School of Advanced Studies/Inst. of English Studies, London
15-17 September 2011


Registration and the programme are now available on the conference website. Please note that due to a torrent of spectacularly good abstracts, the conference has been extended by half a day, so it will now run from Wednesday morning to Saturday lunchtime. The organizers are also happy to announce that the conference will be hosting the launch of a new collection of the poetry of Hope Mirrlees, sponsored by Carcanet Books.

Keynote Speakers: Ann Ardis (University of Delaware, USA), Adina Ciugureanu (Ovidius University Constanta, Romania)

CFP: Learning From Lister: Antisepsis, Safer Surgery, and Global Health (9/16/2011; 3/22-24/2012)

Learning From Lister: Antisepsis, Safer Surgery, and Global Health
A multidisciplinary, multidimensional conference
22nd - 24th March 2012
King's College London
The Royal Society
The Royal College of Surgeons of England

Submissions are invited for a three-day conference commemorating the life, work and legacy of Joseph Lister, Professor of Clinical Surgery at King's College London from 1877 - 1893, to be held on the centenary of his death. Papers are requested for 15- or 20-minute parallel sessions which could take the form of talks, workshops or seminars, to be followed by 10 minutes of discussion, covering (but not limited to) topics such as:

• Discipleship
• 19th- and 20th-C surgical craft
• Advances in surgical science
• Nursing pedagogy and practice
• Health care innovation
• 'Translation' of principle into health care practices
• Lister's legacy and global health
• Controversy in surgical sciences
• Identification and control of hospital infections
• Hospital safety
• Sepsis / antisepsis / asepsis
• Dirt / cleanliness

Abstracts should be no more than 400 words, and proposals should state which of the conference's four major strands they would be situated under (History; Surgical Practice; Infectious Disease; Health Policy) and sent to ben.chisnall@kcl.ac.uk. The deadline for receipt of abstracts is Friday 16th September 2011. For a full programme, please visit the Lister website at www.kcl.ac.uk/lister.

As well as historians, we welcome and encourage papers from scientific, clinical, and health service and policy backgrounds, which could cover modern-day bacteriology, asepsis, surgical techniques, and safety issues in healthcare. These papers should make reference to Lister's legacy, and should be concerned with tracing the roots of this legacy into present-day practice. More information on abstract submissions is available at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/cultural/lister2012/programme/abstractsubmissions.aspx .

The conference will provide an opportunity for historians, surgeons, nurses, infectious disease experts, health services researchers and those interested in the development of hospital health policy, translational practices, and hospital safety to discuss their respective approaches to understanding Lister's contribution to improved surgical and health care practice both within its historical context and in the present day.

The conference is being organised by the Centre for the Humanities and Health<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/groups/chh> at King's College London<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/index.aspx>, the Royal Society<http://royalsociety.org/>, and the Royal College of Surgeons of England<http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/>. Events will take place across these three venues.

Rudikoff first book prize (7/20/2011)

The Northeast Victorian Studies Association is accepting nominations for the Sonya Rudikoff Award for the best first monograph on the Victorian period published in 2010. The Sonya Rudikoff Award was established by the Robert Gutman family in honor of Mr. Gutman's late wife. Ms. Rudikoff was an active member of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association and a recognized scholar.

Any text nominated for this award must be the author's first academic monograph. The subject should address Victorian literature and/or culture. Our focus is on Victorian Great Britain and the Empire, although we will consider texts that are transatlantic or long nineteenth-century in focus. We will not consider texts that are strictly American Victorian. Books must have been published during 2010. The award winner will receive a cash prize. The winning author and publisher will be announced at the April 2012 conference of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association at Columbia University.

Please have the publisher submit seven copies of the text by July 20, 2011 to

Professor Anne Humpherys
Ph.D. Program in English
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10016-4309

More information may be found at: http://www.nvsa.org/rudikoff.htm

Any questions should be directed to Jason Rudy at jrrudy@umd.edu

CFP: "Victorian Energy Crises" NeMLA Panel (9/30/2011; 3/15-18/2012)

Call for Papers: Panel on “VICTORIAN ENERGY CRISES”

Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)—March 15-18, 2012—Rochester, New York, Hyatt Rochester http://www.nemla.org/convention/2012/cfp.html


This panel will consider the ways energy, broadly conceived, was theorized, understood, and represented in Victorian literature, science, and material culture.


Throughout the Victorian era some very different conceptions of energy came to increasingly overlap, while others remained differentiated by the material objects with which they were associated or by their gendered, classed, and raced bodily sources. The Gospel of Work, for example, moralized labor as ennobling and masculinizing, while medical discourses constructed female lassitude as a pathology of gender. In other venues, the steam-power of factories and railways was theoretically correlated with the laboring body, and as a result mechanical engines became linked in the popular imagination to new conceptions of the body as a machine, expending labor and consuming nutrition like a “human motor.” The new science of thermodynamics, which produced the era’s most powerful images of energy decay, predicted the “heat death” of the solar system in 30 million years, the calendar H. G. Wells follows when depicting a depleted sun in The Time Machine.


This panel hopes to explore connections between the different knowledges which emerged in the Victorian era to theorize and understand energy, as well as the various cultural forms through which Victorians represented energy at work. Possibilities include the body; affect; machine cultures, engineering, and the physical sciences; ecology and natural resources; medicine, nutrition, and physiology.


Please send 300-400 word proposals by September 30, 2011 to Jessica Kuskey, Syracuse University jekuskey@syr.edu


Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)


Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however, panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable.  http://www.nemla.org/convention/2012/cfp.html

The 43rd annual convention will be held March 15-18th in Rochester, New York at the Hyatt Regency Hotel downtown, located minutes away from convenient air, bus, and train transportation options for attendees. St. John Fisher College will serve as the host college, and the diverse array of area institutions are coordinating with conference organizers to sponsor various activities, such as celebrated keynote speakers, local events, and fiction readings.

CFP: "Excavating the Art of Advertising," a 2011 UAAC-AAUC Conference Session (5/24/2011; 10/27-29/2011)

Call for Papers for a Session at the 2011 UAAC- AAUC  Conference

(Universities Art Association of Canada)
Carleton University / Université de Carleton
Ottawa, ON
October 27-29

Excavating the Art of Advertising / Aller au fond de l'art de la publicité

This panel will explore the art of advertising in the period before World War II. Over the course of the long nineteenth century, advertising developed into a large-scale industry that recognized the power of the image. Such advertisements were alternately described as an art of the people or as one of the horrors of modern life. With this panel, I aim to excavate the practices and discourses of advertising in order to reconsider its place in the visual culture of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. I seek to uncover collaborations and continuities between art and advertising, while also examining the tensions and ruptures that were pervasive. Proposals on any aspect of art and advertising will be considered.

Session Chair
Andrea Korda, Ph.D. 
andrea.korda@uleth.ca

Deadline: May 24th, 2011
Please send your abstract to Andrea at andrea.korda@uleth.ca

Unexpected Agents Symposium, registration open (6/24/2011)

Registration is now open for 'Unexpected Agents: Considering agency beyond the boundaries of the human (1800 — the Present)' at the University of Birmingham on June 24th.

The event is a one-day postgraduate symposium hosted by the English Department which will aim to consider how we might explore and account for agency from unexpected sources. Papers and discussions at this symposium will place the non-human, the object, the supposedly ‘lifeless’ at the centre, with a view to casting new light on and rethinking definitions of human agency and identity from an unconventional, askance perspective.  Our plenary speaker is Dr Sarah Kember of Goldsmiths, University of London.

The symposium cost is £15 for University of Birmingham students, and £30 for students from other universities.

For online registration please visit http://bit.ly/unexpectedagents

For more information, see http://www.english.bham.ac.uk/unexpected or contact us at unexpectedagents@gmail.com.

Updated CFP: Victorians Institute Conference "Charles Dickens: Past, Present, and Future" (6/20/2011; 10/21-22/2011)

UPDATED Call for Papers: 

VICTORIANS INSTITUTE CONFERENCE
"Charles Dickens: Past, Present, and Future"
Myrtle Beach, SC (Ocean Creek Resort)

October 21-22, 2011

To help usher in the global celebration of his bicentenary in 2012, the 41st annual conference of the Victorians Institute will focus rather broadly on the life and work of Charles Dickens. We welcome papers that examine Dickens's writings and their relevance to us today. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary essays exploring the literary life and legacy of Dickens in relation to science, economics, psychology, sociology, philosophy, law, history, aesthetics, and theater and film adaptation. This year's keynote speaker is Audrey Jaffe, Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph (The Ohio State
University Press, 2010); Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Cornell University Press, 2000); and Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience (University of California Press, 1991).

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Dickens's Journalism
• Dickens and the Literary Marketplace
• Dickens and Mass Culture
• Dickensian Friendships
• Dickensian Scandals
• The Dickens Circle
• Catherine Dickens
• Dickens and Science
• Dickens and Emotion
• Reading Dickens
• Dickensian Afterlives
• Spiritualism and Spirituality in Dickens
• Dickens's Moral Philosophy
• Dickens and the Posthuman
• Dickens and Travel
• Theatrical Dickens
• Dickens in America
• Dickens and Empire
• The Dickens Industry

Please send proposals of no more than 500 words and a brief one-paragraph bio by June 20, 2011 to: Dr. Maria K. Bachman, Department of English, P.O. Box 261954, Coastal Carolina University, Conway, South Carolina 29528-6054. Email: mbachman@coastal.edu


Victorians Institute & Journal: http://www.vcu.edu/vij/

CFP: Aesthetic Lives, update and deadline extension (6/30/2011; 9/23-24/2011)

International conference: Aesthetic Lives (www.esthetismes.org)
Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, FRANCE

23-24 September 2011

Guest speakers: Dennis Denisoff (Ryerson University, Toronto) and Ana Parejo Vadillo (Birkbeck College, University of London)

Deadline Extension: Please email your proposal by June 30, 2011 to catherine.delyfer@univ-montp3.fr AND bncoste@free.fr

Updated CFP:
‘[C]reating themselves out of themselves, and moulding themselves to what they were, and willed to be’

In 1873, citing Hegel’s vision of the Greeks, Walter Pater wrote in The Renaissance: ‘They are great and free, and have grown up on the soil of their own individuality, creating themselves out of themselves, and moulding themselves to what they were, and willed to be.’ This Paterian celebration of autonomy and self-fashioning was read with delight, cultivated, and variously implemented by the members of the Aesthetic Movement. Not only did Aestheticism create new objects, but it enabled singular lifestyles to be born. In the last third of the nineteenth century, the facts of existence ceased to be perceived as heteronomous. Life itself was gradually envisioned as a work in progress for an individual at once more aware of his/her freedom as subject and more conscious of changing societal constraints. New lifestyles flourished and novel representations of life emerged. From the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (which immediately preceded the Aesthetic Movement) to James Whistler, Oscar Wilde, William Morris, ‘Ouida’, ‘Michael Field’, or Edward Carpenter, many were those who devoted themselves to practicing and writing about literature and art while evolving a lifestyle which early twentieth-century critics would later identify with the 'men [and women] of the nineties.'

Fashioning one’s own life became both conceivable and technically and politically possible as individuals gradually ceased to acquiesce in given social configurations of power and value and started interrogating the status quo. Such questioning was often the source of original individual choices and collective interventions such as the creation of clubs, guilds, presses or journals. Within given social, economic and political structures/strictures, of which writers and artists were highly conscious, ‘Aesthetic’ living became an important embodiment of subjective experience and individual experiment.

After our first 2009 trans-disciplinary international conference entitled ‘British Aestheticisms’, our 2011 conference on ‘Aesthetic Lives’ hopes to focus on issues of Aesthetic subjectivity, on the lived experience of Aesthetic individuality or difference, and on original trajectories in the context of Aesthetic practices. How did writers and artists turn their existence into an artwork? What does it mean to found a club, an artistic community, a new journal when one is (or claims to be) an Aesthete? What were the cultural, social, economic or political constraints which hindered or enabled Aesthetic projects, aspirations and itineraries?

Importantly, the notion of ‘Aesthetic life’ is not meant in the limited biographical sense, but should be taken in the broad sense of a personal negotiation and a carving of one’s chosen itinerary or ethical choices in the context of Aestheticism. What kind of ethics can arise from Aesthetic choices? What are its daily manifestations, practically speaking? What were the obstacles or aporiae encountered by those who followed Pater’s ideas about self-fashioning and life as a work of art? How were these subjective choices received? And how do they anticipate the choices made by the figures of Modernism?

We welcome papers (in French or in English) studying individual artists and writers, specific formal or informal groups, and various arts of Aesthetic living. Descriptive and hagiographic approaches are to be strictly avoided.

Registration fee: 55 euros (includes coffee/tea and 2 lunches). A selection of papers will be published. Please email your proposal by June 30, 2011 to catherine.delyfer@univ-montp3.fr 

AND bncoste@free.fr

Victorian-focused Wikipedia event at the British Library (6/4/2011)

The British Library's English & Drama department is hosting a Wikipedia editing event on Saturday, June 4th. The purpose of the event is to improve Wikipedia's coverage of some of the important literary individuals and collections represented at the British Library.

It just so happens that the majority of the subjects highlighted for improvement hail from the Victorian period, including the Library's Dexter Collection of Dickensiana, the Lady Eccles Oscar Wilde Collection and the Barry Ono Collection of Penny Dreadfuls. We are also hoping to improve the encyclopaedia's entries for individuals such as Thomas Hardy, Bram Stoker and Lewis Carroll. Full details of the event can be found at

http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editathon,_British_Library

The day will be greatly enhanced by the attendance of some Victorian experts and enthusiasts so, if you're interested, please feel free to register (no Wikipedia-editing experience necessary). We will be showing some interesting items from the Library's collections, and refreshments will be provided ... a win-win situation!

Tim Pye
Curator, Printed Literary Sources
British Library
tim.pye@bl.uk