Registration Deadline Extended for the BAVS 2011 Conference (8/24/2011)

BAVS 2011 Conference: Composition and Decomposition

1-3 September 2011, University of Birmingham

To account for holiday times and Bank Holidays, registration for the BAVS 2011 Conference has been extended to Wednesday 24th August. The Conference website is here:
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edacs/departments/drama/events/bavs.aspx

There you'll find the Conference programme and Delegate Information (downloadable) with details of arrival arrangements, accommodation, travel, WiFi. We expect to be able to post Conference abstracts of all papers within the next few days. All this information will also be in your Conference packs.

For those delegates arriving on Wednesday, we are arranging an informal meeting on Wednesday evening – drinks and a meal (pay as you go) – at the Selly Soak, 556 Bristol Road, in Selly Oak, at 7pm on Wednesday 31st August.

A Google map of Conference locations (including the Selly Soak) is here:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=212294809852835789335.0004aa36166af9aef5daf&msa=0&ll=52.450308,-1.929646&spn=0.013234,0.036306

You can register via our online shop here:
https://www.bhamonlineshop.co.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&prodid=333&deptid=17&catid=3

Categories of registration:
Standard registration (at full or PG rate) with accommodation includes all meals from morning tea/coffee on Thursday to afternoon tea/coffee onSaturday, including the Friday night reception in the Muirhead Tower, plus accommodation (en suite, with breakfast) on Thursday and Friday nights. This registration includes the Conference dinner on Friday night.

Standard registration (at full or PG rate) without accommodation includes all meals from morning tea/coffee on Thursday to afternoon tea/coffee onSaturday, including the Friday night reception in the Muirhead Tower, but not campus accommodation. This registration includes the Conference dinner on Friday night.

Day registration at full or PG rate include morning & afternoon tea/coffee and lunch on the day/s of registration, including the Friday night reception in the Muirhead Tower, but NOT accommodation or evening meals. This registration does NOT include the Conference dinner on Friday night.

For delegates opting for the Day rate for Thursday and/or Friday, evening meals can be purchased separately by the registration deadline:
Dinner: Thursday night £15
Conference dinner: Friday night £35

All delegates must be financial members of BAVS. Registration for the 2011 BAVS Conference does not include membership of BAVS. To arrange membership subscription, please click on this link: http://www.bavsuk.org/membership.htm

We look forward to greeting delegates on Thursday, 1st September. The first event is a welcome for postgraduate students at 11:00, followed by Professor Tucker's opening keynote at 12 noon.

Reminder: Dickens and the Visual Imagination (9/30/2011; 7/9-10/2012)

Dickens and the Visual Imagination
An international two-day conference to celebrate the bicentenary of Charles Dickens in 2012

9-10 July 2012

This conference, hosted by the Paul Mellon Centre in London and the University of Surrey in Guildford, will explore the interfaces between art history and textual scholarship through the work of Charles Dickens.

Plenary speaker: Professor Kate Flint (Rutgers University). Other speakers to be confirmed.

Dickens is renowned for the richness of his visual imagination and his publications encouraged readers to interpret his words with and through their accompanying illustrations. Not only was Dickens deeply engaged with ideas of the visual in his writing, but his work has also provoked responses from artists across multiple disciplines within the Victorian period and beyond. The conference seeks to build on recent interdisciplinary work (such as that of Kate Flint and Isobel Armstrong) that illuminates nineteenth-century understandings of visual culture. By focusing the conference through a writer whose work is embedded in the visual imagination, Dickens will provide a test case for examining and theorizing the connection between text and image across two hundred years of cultural history.

We invite proposals for panels and individual papers from scholars across disciplines. Topics might include, but are not limited to:
 

• Dickens and illustration
• The visual arts in Dickens’s work
• Responses to Dickens in the visual arts
• Dickens and performance
• Dickens in the press
• Dickens and new media
• Sciences of vision
• Dickens and commodification
• Dickens and aesthetics
• Observation and spying
• Perspective
• Blindness and the difficulties of representation

Please submit proposals (of up to 250 words) by Friday 30 September 2011 to: g.tate@surrey.ac.uk

The conference programme will also feature a reception at the Watts Gallery in nearby Compton, Surrey, to coincide with the gallery's exhibition Dickens and Art.

For further information see on the conference and exhibition see:http://www.surrey.ac.uk/english/research/dickens2012/

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.

Reminder - NCSA 2012 CFP: Spiritual Matters/Matters of the Spirit (9/30/2011; 3/22-24/2012)

Call for Papers

Spiritual Matters/Matters of the Spirit 

33^rd ANNUAL CONFERENCE

 OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY STUDIES ASSOCIATION

Asheville, North Carolina March 22-24, 2012

From Romanticism's spiritual resurgence to the interrogations of Darwinism and science, the nineteenth century was immersed in conversation about the place of spirituality and religion in society, politics, and the arts. Paper and panel proposals are welcome on all aspects of belief, religion, and spirituality in the long nineteenth century, from 1789 to 1914.


Papers might address: retreats, communes, and utopias; visionaries and prophets; spiritual awakenings; esprit de corps and group spirit; revivals and reforms; religious doctrines and dogmas; proselytes, converts, and newcomers; spiritualism and the Feminist Movement; cults, cabals, and conspiracies; free spirits, lunatics, and addicts; revered commodities and capital; spiritual growth and enlightenment; perspectives on religious belief; acts of faith and interfaith; Theosophy and mysticism; shamans, mediums, and psychics; non-European spiritual traditions; representations of emotions and the unconscious; altered states; secular spirituality; spirituality of agnostics and atheists; aesthetic spirituality; theology and spirituality; ethnicity and spirituality; fears and phobias of spirituality and religion; spiritual conflicts and combats; sacred texts, pictures, music and shrines; spiritual tours and monuments; sacrilegious and blasphemous acts; matters of atonement and redemption; reactions against spirituality or religion. Other interpretations of the conference theme are welcome.


Please e-mail abstracts (250 words) for 20-minute papers that provide the author's name and paper title in the heading, as well as a one-page c.v., to Phylis Floyd AND Michael Duffy by September 30, 2011. Presenters will be notified in November, 2011.

Phylis Floyd, Program Co-Chair

Michigan State University

floyd@msu.edu

Michael Duffy, Program Co-Chair

East Carolina University

duffym@ecu.edu

CFP: Imagining Victorian Settler Homes: Antipodal Domestic Fiction, extended deadline (9/1/2011)

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 has been extended to 1 September 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

Registration Open: William Makepeace Thackeray: A Bicentenary Symposium (10/6/2011)

Registration is now open for William Makepeace Thackeray: A Bicentenary Symposium to be held at the Houghton Library, Harvard University on October 6, 2011.

Held in conjunction with the exhibition “The Adventures of Thackeray in His Way Through the World,” on display at Houghton Library from July 18 – October 15, the one-day symposium will feature three speakers, a curator’s tour of the exhibition, and a closing reception.

Registration is free and open to all. For more information, and to register, visit the symposium website:

http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/events/thackeray_symposium.cfm

Questions? Contact Heather Cole hgcole@fas.harvard.edu 617.495.2449 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting            617.495.2449      end_of_the_skype_highlighting

CFP: Taking Liberties: Sex, Pleasure, Coercion (11/1/2011; 6/15-17/2012)

Call for Papers

Taking Liberties: Sex, Pleasure, Coercion (1748-1928)

15-17 June 2012, Newcastle University

Keynote Speakers:

Helen Berry (Newcastle University) on Sex, Marriage and the Castrato

Joseph Bristow (UCLA) on Oscar Wilde’s Sexual Practices

Cora Kaplan (Queen Mary, University of London) on Rape, Representation and Slavery

Richard P. Sha (American University) on Romanticism and the Paradoxes of Free Love

From the publication of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1748) to D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), literature has imaginatively exploited the relationship between freedom, coercion and sexual pleasure, constantly pushing at the boundaries of what it is permissible to describe, represent and perform. At the same time, the history of print, film and theatre censorship has been told as a story of progressive unshackling from constraint. In this narrative, these ever-widening freedoms and challenges have been understood as positively beneficial to individuals and to societies. Yet the idea of sexual liberty as an unqualified good has increasingly come under scrutiny, giving way to the realization that freedom from sexual constraint can sometimes mean imprisonment in new and alternate structures of power, frustration and denial. This international, multidisciplinary conference seeks to complicate and enrich our understanding of the relation between sex, pleasure and coercion in a liberal context. It will explore the many ways in which literary and visual texts and performances can be understood to create, reinforce, question and/or dissolve these structures, as well as interrogate the complicity of publishing and the law in their framing and dismantling.

Key conference questions are:

• How are the complex relations between sexual licence, pleasure and coercion understood, represented and negotiated during the long nineteenth century?
• How did censorship and obscenity laws shape the literary/cinematic/theatrical landscape?
• How were sexually controversial texts – from erotica to triple-decker novels, from peep-shows to West-End theatre – produced, circulated, preserved and consumed?

 We are interested in literary and visual texts/performances from across the cultural spectrum. We welcome papers from English, Drama, Film & Visual Culture, History, Law, Modern Languages, Sociology and Geography.

Possible topics include:

• Sex, Sexuality and the Law
• Gender and the Law
• Obscenity/Pornography
• Censorship
• Rakes/Dandies/Mollies
• Prostitutes/Madams/Pimps
• Rape/Sexual Violence
• Sex on Stage/Screen
• Sex Manuals/Diaries
• ‘Lewd’ Behaviour
• The Politics of Pleasure
• Flirtation, Seduction, Exploitation
• Corrupting the Innocent
• Voyeurism/Striptease/Burlesque
• ‘Dirty’ Books
• Bowdlerization
• Advertising Sex/Abortion/Contraception
• Sexual Initiations
• Sadomasochism/Masters and Slaves
• Tyranny and Slavery

 Proposals of no more than 300 words should be emailed by 1 November 2011 to TakingLiberties@ncl.ac.uk. Other inquiries should be directed to the conference organizer, Dr Ella Dzelzainis, at ella.dzelzainis@ncl.ac.uk.

CFP: Urban Monstrosities (10/1/2011; 4/1/2012)

Call for Articles: Edited Collection Urban Monstrosities
Joseph Lamperez and J. Alexandra McGhee, University of Rochester

The contemporary city bears the trace of at least two seismic developments: the Enlightenment rationalization of urban space, marked by the twinned banishment of death to the urban periphery and the creation of a regime of spatial surveillance; and the emergence of the modern city as simulacrum, its widened boulevards and glossy surfaces allowing for the continual flow of commodities and capital. How do contemporary authors of speculative fiction figure and respond to these and other major urban transformations in their own work? We are seeking articles that explore the city as a space of monstrous potential, and which examine how the uncanny cityscape has (d)evolved since the Industrial Revolution. SF and weird fiction, for example, often depict the city as a living organism that is alternately transformative and malicious. How do these and other literary and artistic modes figure urban space as a site of bizarre experiences and subjectivities? What entity can be read in, and attempts to speak through, the oneiric facades of the architectural fantasia?  What are the ramifications of a sentient city? How useful are Blake's “dark Satanic Mills," Dickens's "Animate London," and Eliot's "unreal" cities as models for reading contemporary instances of urban monstrosity?

This collection attempts to posit the neglected but important link between the nineteenth and early twentieth century city as an unreal spectacle of overwhelming crowds, urban wilderness, and new social formations, and contemporary representations of the city as an incipient organism or fantastic bestiary, its space a site of chthonic splendor and ruinous allure. What new readings become possible when sophisticated modern fantasists like China Mieville and Jeff VanderMeer are placed in a tradition of urban representation stretching back to Wordsworth and Blake, Baudelaire and Poe? How can Mayhew's explorations or Benjamin's body of work on the flâneur and the urban phantasmagoria offer new ways of theorizing the global renaissance of street art, or the burgeoning documentation and aestheticization of derelict architectural structures known as "ruin porn"? Are areas of potential insurrection within the city—Bhabha’s “third space,” the urban carnivalesque—inimical to, or in league with urban monstrosity?

Please send a 500-word abstract, tentative title and brief (1-2 pp) CV to Joseph Lamperez at josephlamperez@gmail.com and J. Alexandra McGhee at alimcghee@gmail.com by October 1, 2011. Completed articles will be due April 1, 2012, and should be between 3500-5000 words.  For queries please contact Joseph Lamperez and J. Alexandra McGhee at the email addresses above.

CFP: Paranoia and Pain: Embodied in Psychology, Literature, and Bioscience (11/15/2011; 4/2-4/2012)

Paranoia and Pain: Embodied in Psychology, Literature, and Bioscience

University of Liverpool, 2-4 April 2012

Organising Chair:

Dr Maryam Farahani (School of English)

Organising Board:

Dr Neville Cobbe (School of Biological Sciences)

Dr Maryam Farahani (School of English)

Dr Ian Schermbrucker (School of Psychology)

Conference Chair:

Dr Nick Davis (School of English)

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Christopher Eccleston (Centre for Pain Research, University of Bath, England)

Dr Emma Mason (English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, England)

Dr David Miller (English Literature, University of Stirling, Scotland)

Professor Andrej Stancak (School of Psychology, University of Liverpool, England)

Dr Anna Szczepan-Wojnarska (Cardinal Wyszynski University of Warsaw, Poland)

Call for Papers:

Paranoia and Pain: Embodied in Psychology, Literature, and Bioscience (University of Liverpool, 2-4 April 2012) is an international cross-disciplinary conference, seeking to raise an awareness of various intersections of literature and  science. The conference aims to explore overlapping paradigms of paranoia and pain in psychology, biological sciences, and literary texts/contexts.

How is paranoia related to pain? How is pain expressed with/without paranoia? How are these two terms exposed in various contexts? How does our understanding of the psychophysiology of pain interrelate with literary accounts of paranoia and pain? What does research in the field of paranoia offer to literary studies surrounding this concept and vice versa? To what extent does pain echo paranoia; and is this echo physiological, stylistic, psychological, symbolic, or literal? How do these terms regulate our behaviour and expression of emotions in relation to broader concepts such as faith, ethics, and the value of human life? What does the study of these concepts offer today’s generation of intellectuals with regard to human relationships and the way we communicate with each other? This international conference brings together experts from different fields to address these questions by incorporating individual presentations and panels that focus on cross-disciplinary studies. Considering the diversity of themes and questions for this conference, individual papers as well as preformed panels are invited to examine the following three key areas, proposed by the conference organizers.

Other inter- and multi-disciplinary topics, relevant to the conference, will also be considered:

1- Impressions:

Expression of paranoia and pain in literary/scientific contexts; Metaphorical and literal exposition of pain and paranoia; Paranoid texts, painful contexts; The image of paranoia and pain in poetry, prose, and visual arts; Textual culture and the symbolics of pain; Stylistics of pain and paranoia in communication; How does the narrative of pain/paranoia identify with studies of affect?

2- Intersections:

The biology of pain and the emotional interpretation; The biology/literature of anaesthesia; Physical symptoms, emotional translations; Aesthetics and affective perspectives on pain/paranoia; How have cultural attitudes to the experience of pain and/or paranoia changed over the course of history?

3- Dissections:

Faith and the formation of our ideas on pain/paranoia; Side effects of pain-relief medication; Ethics and the questions of double effect; Is it ever appropriate to withhold pain relief in order to extend the life of a sufferer where analgesics have the side effect of shortening life?

Submissions:

Deadline for 250-300 word abstracts for 20-minute papers and a 50-100 word biography for individual presenters (including each presentation within potential panels): 15 November 2011

Deadline for full draft of accepted papers and registration: 25 February 2012

After the conference a selection of presentations, developed and edited, will be considered for publication. Please send submissions and enquiries to the organising board at: paranoia.pain@gmail.com and painpara@liverpool.ac.uk

After great pain a formal feeling comes--

The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;

The stiff Heart questions--was it He that bore?

And yesterday--or centuries before?

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Image thanks to the Art Renewal Center® www.artrenewal.org

CFP:Rural Geographies of Gender and Space, Britain 1840-1920 (8/15/2011; 9/23/2011)

Rural Geographies of Gender and Space, 

Britain 1840-1920

23rd September 2011, University of Warwick

CALL FOR PAPERS

Whilst discussions of gender and space in the nineteenth- to early-twentieth century have typically focused on “women and the city”, rural spaces offer equally productive contexts for exploring the intersections between gender and space in this period. As the socio-spatial relations of the country are impacted by the move into modernity, rural environments are revealed in literary and historical texts as sites of complex, contradictory and changing gendered codes.

This half-day symposium offers a long-overdue forum in which to resituate the rural as a vital context for understanding the meanings of gender and space in this period. By bringing together scholars from different disciplinary perspectives we aim to understand the diverse experiences of gendered rural spaces and contribute to discussions about theoretical approaches to the (rural)space-gender intersection.

Proposals are invited for short papers from scholars in literary studies, history, geography, and any other discipline; postgraduate and early career researchers are especially encouraged to apply. Themes for discussion could include:

• theories of gender and rural place: what do we mean by rural space, how do we theorise “the rural” as a spatial context, and how does gender intersect?
• the impact of modernity;
• mobility: walking, vagabonds, pedestrians, wayward women;
• labour, class and gender in the country;
• masculinities;
• different ruralities;
• visibility/ invisibility

*CFP DEADLINE EXTENDED– 15th August*

Please send a 300-word proposal for 15 minute papers to the conference organisers: Gemma.Goodman@warwick.ac.uk and c.e.mathieson@warwick.ac.uk.

CFP: Narrative Matters 2012 "Life and Narrative" (11/15/2011; 5/29 - 6/1/2012)

Narrative Matters 2012: Life and Narrative

The American University of Paris

May 29th to June 1st 2012 

DEADLINE FOR SUBMITTING ABSTRACTS: November 15, 2011

The American University of Paris, The University of Paris Diderot-Paris 7, and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Narrative at St. Thomas University, invite scholars from all disciplines to reflect upon the productive interplay between life and narrative. 

What is the relationship between life and narrative? As noted by Jerome Bruner in his article on “Life as Narrative” (1987), this is one of the central intellectual questions facing narrative inquiry and narrative practice across multiple disciplines – psychology, narratology and literary theory, digital media, sociology, history, sociolinguistics, philosophy, medicine, education, gerontology, communications, social work, ethics, religious studies, etc. Indeed, there is broad agreement that narrative representations (from novels to histories, biographies, websites, films, museums) and life are essential to each other. Narrative draws upon life for inspiration to create an imagined world that has substance, color, texture, and meaning. Meanwhile, life draws upon narrative for resources to imagine our identity and to interpret others, situations, and the “real” world. Both are involved in an intricate exchange, playing off one another, informing and creating one another. However, the relationship between life and narrative – between experience and story - is not merely theoretical in nature but practical as well. Narrative has a profound impact on our understanding of what it means to be human; of the choices we make as persons; of the nature of health and wellness, teaching and learning; of the meaning of history; of how social groups work through conflict; and of how the cultural and political world is ordered. 

Panels and papers: Scholars are invited to organize panel sessions and present papers on various aspects of the broad theme of “Life and Narrative.” Possible questions include:
 

• What is the relationship between telling and living?
• How can the narrative concept help us to better understand experience, interpretation and action?
• What does literature teach us about aspects of life, experience, mind, and social relationships?
• How can narrative research have a greater impact on the lives of real persons and institutions? How can narrative theory and practice better inform one another?
• Can there be a “true” narrative? What are the boundaries between fact and fiction, between autobiography and autofiction?
• How is identity storied, restoried, even de-storied across the lifespan?
• What is the effect of the media (new and old) on identity?
• What is the relationship between what is archived in individual memories and social institutions and the stories that we tell?

Conversations: Two plenary sessions will ask prominent scholars from different disciplines to present a short paper and discuss a central question related to life and narrative. Time will be given for debate and interaction between the presenters and the audience. 

Confirmed Plenary speakers:

• Mark Freeman, College of The Holy Cross
• Alexandra Georgakopoulou-Nunes, Kings College London
• James Phelan, Ohio State University

Comparing interpretations: A final plenary will compare and contrast approaches to the study of narrative. Our plenary speakers will discuss approaches to the study of research interviews and literature. The audience will be provided with the texts in advance of the plenary and will be given ample opportunity to exchange ideas with the panelists.

Language: Although the language of the conference will be in English, papers delivered in French are welcome. Scholars presenting papers in French are requested to bring a translated copy of their paper to the conference for distribution to the audience.

Workshops: Pre-conference workshops will be organized, principally for graduate students and beginning scholars, along the following themes:
1.     Translating narrative theory

2.     Doing narrative inquiry

3.     Digital narratives

4.     Narrative and social change

           
Guidelines for submissions: We welcome proposals for individual papers (20 minutes plus ten minutes for questions) and panels (90 minutes). Submissions should be in the language of presentation (English or French). Please submit your proposal, including an abstract of less than 250 words, on-line at: http://my.aup.edu/conference/narrative-matters-2012 <http://my.aup.edu/conference/narrative-matters-2012>

Abstracts are due on November 15, 2011.

Publications: An edited book will be published including the best submissions from the conference. If you would like your paper to be considered, please submit a complete draft no later than May 30, 2012. 
 
Contact information: If you have questions, please email us at narrativematters2012@aup.fr. Conference website coming soon. 

Organizing Committe:

• Brian Schiff. The American University of Paris.
• Sylvie Patron.The University of Paris Diderot-Paris 7. 
• Claudia Roda. The American University of Paris.
• William Randall. St. Thomas University.
• Elizabeth McKim. St. Thomas University. 
• Andrea Olguin. The American University of Paris. 

Extended CFP: Production and Consumption in Victorian Literature and Culture (8/15/2011)

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 <http://www.victoriannetwork.org/index.php/vn/pages/view/guidelines> . Please note the extended deadline for submissions to our next issue is 15 August, 2011. Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com

Nines Community Group: Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities

A NINES community group has just been formed to discuss topics related to nineteenth-century DH issues. This was in response to a perceived need discussed in THATCamp Victoria 2011. Please join us and enter the discussion!

http://www.nines.org/groups/28

Here are some of the issues we might discuss:

• What are the special issues for 19th-century DH scholars?
• How can we use digital tools to focus on the materiality of the text?
• How does TEI need to be improved to meet the demands of the print culture of the period?
• Explosion of digital texts makes access better, but how to cope with scholar overload and usability?

Update: BAVS 2011 Conference schedule and registration (9/1-3/2011)

The program and schedule for the BAVS 2011 Conference, hosted by the University of Birmingham, are now available for viewing and downloading from our Google Docs site.

We are very excited about this wide an interdisciplinary programme, in which we are hosting around 120 papers over three days at the University of Birmingham Business School, on our Edgbaston campus. We have also schedule special sessions at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts: http://www.barber.org.uk/ and the Cadbury Research Library, home of our Special Collections: http://www.special-coll.bham.ac.uk/index.shtml
 
Keynote speakers are:

• Professor Tracy Davis (Northwestern), “Amelia Chesson Enters the Fourth Estate: ‘She must, therefore, be considered a pioneer in lady journalism’”  http://www.communications.northwestern.edu/faculty/?PID=TracyDavis
• Professor Herbert Tucker, (Virginia), on  “Compost Happens: A Synthetic Analysis” http://www.engl.virginia.edu/faculty/tucker_herbert.shtml
• Dr Colin Cruise (Aberystwyth), on”'Arranging Meanings: Pre-Raphaelite Compositions and Narratives” http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/art/staff/coc/
• Professor Shearer West, and panel, “The Value of Victorian Studies” http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2011/110902.html

 
Overall Schedule: https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkfTzomljON2dDV6ajNmMFIyMmdiSjFMd0czaEZCSkE&hl=en_US

 
Panel schedule:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nB6XgldKTLTCvLSwfSzbJEbMh5mSc_RLSP2Q0wG85og/edit?hl=en_US

You can register for the Conference via our online shop at: http://bit.ly/oxnKHv

Updated CFP: INCS 2012 "Picturing the Nineteenth Century" (10/17/2011; 3/22-25/2012)

INCS 2012: Picturing the Nineteenth Century

March 22-25, 2012, University of Kentucky

Update: The website for the INCS 2012 Conference, "Picturing the Nineteenth Century," is  now available at http://incs.as.uky.edu/. 

CFP: Though its title foregrounds art and visual culture, this conference will treat "picturing" in all its many senses: imagining, representing, framing, mapping. We invite papers and panels that consider how the nineteenth century represented itself to itself – through depictions of subjectivity, history, and culture; through emerging technologies and disciplines; through self-conscious "meta" attempts to understand methods of representation. We also encourage papers that consider how our own technologies and disciplines create multiple pictures of "the nineteenth century." Interdisciplinary papers and panels are especially welcome.

Featured speakers include Nancy Armstrong (English Department, Duke University), Julie Codell (Art History Department, Arizona State University), and Shawn Michelle Smith (Visual & Critical Studies, Art Institute of Chicago).

Themes include but are not limited to

• "The visual turn" and its technologies
• Display, exhibition, and spectatorship
• Cartographies, real and imagined
• Modes of representation: narrative, image, statistics, chronology
• Urban geographies and ethnographies; mapping and tracking people
• Imperialism as visual practice; global mappings and re-mappings
• Representations of selves and bodies; life writing
• Canons, institutions, and practices of art and literature
• The materiality of the literary: illustrations, cover designs, advertising, publication
• Archives, libraries, and their histories
• Digitizing the nineteenth century
• Teaching the nineteenth century

Deadline: October 17, 2011. For individual papers, send a 250-word proposals; for panels, send individual 250-word proposals for each paper plus a 250-word panel description. Please include your name, affiliation, and e-mail address on the proposals. Accepted papers will be due in early 2012.

Contact incs2012@uky.edu for more information.