The Hardy at Yale II Conference (6/9-12/2011)

The Hardy at Yale II Conference, sponsored by the Thomas Hardy Association and the Yale Center for British Art,  is now less than two months away.

Plenary presentations include:
Professor Penny Boumelha (Victoria University of Wellington) - "Hardy's Displacements"
Professor George Levine (Rutgers and New York University) - "Hardy's 'inward turn': From Mindless Matter to the       Realities of Mind"
Professor Herbert Tucker (University of Virginia) - "At the Bottom Line: How Hardy Tries Conclusions"
Professor Keith Wilson (University of Ottawa) - "The Epistolary Hardy: Volume Eight of The Collected Letters"

Other invited speakers include Dr. Linda Shires (Yeshiva University), Dr. Anna Henchman (Boston University), Dr. Gillian Forrester (Yale Center for British Art), Dr. Angelique Richardson (University of Exeter), Dr. Phillip Mallet (St. Andrews University), Prof. Pamela Dalziel (University of British Columbia), Dr. Jane Thomas (Hull University), Dr. Judith Mitchell (Victorian University), and Dr. Rosemarie Morgan (St. Andrews University).

Selected sessions include "Hardy, Empire and the Metropole," "Hardy and the Visual," "Embodied Hardy," "Hardy and the Ambivalences of Science," "Ecocritical Hardy," and "Jude the Pessimist, Jude the Optimist."  For a complete version of the conference program, and for registration information, please visit the conference website at http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ttha/hay/index.shtml.

Everyone is welcome, and we look forward to seeing you in New Haven from June 9 to June 12.
Registration due May 27. 

Literature and Mathematics in the Long Nineteenth Century (5/16-18/2011)

Registration Open:
A colloquium on 'Literature and Mathematics in the Long Nineteenth Century' will be held at the University of Glasgow, 16-18 May 2011.  All are very welcome to attend.  The programme and registration information are available at www.englit.arts.gla.ac.uk/conference/.  Papers will include:

• Marilyn Gaull: ‘Euclid Alone’
• Nigel Leask:‘‘Snatched from the Sickle and the Plough, To Gauge Ale-Firkins’: Robert Burns and the Excise’
• Daniel Brown:‘James Joseph Sylvester: The Romance of Space and the Calculus of Forms’
• Matthew Wickman: ‘Scott’s Shapes’
• Rachel Feder:‘Romantic Infinity: The Calculus & The Sublime’
• Melanie Bayley:‘Flatland, Darwin, and the Struggle for Persistence’
• Mark Blacklock:‘“Seeing as a Higher Child”: Hinton's Cubes and their Cultural Afterlives’
• Jason Hall: ‘Metre, Mathematics and the Fantasy of Accurate Measurement’
• Jonathan Farina:‘Calculation and Literary Interpretation’
• Elizabeth Throesch: Title TBA.
• Laurence Davies: ‘How to See the Fourth Dimension: Puzzles and Speculations’
• Alex Craik:‘Lord Kelvin's Popular Lectures and Addresses’
• Maggie Gover:‘Geometrically Inclined: Nineteenth-Century Optics and the War Between Mathematics and Experimentation’
• Michelle Boswell:‘The Poetical Mathematics and Mathematical Poetics of James Clerk Maxwell’
• Mark McCartney: ‘A Mind Running Slow and Clear: The Poetry of James Clerk Maxwell’
• Alice Jenkins: ‘Was There a ‘Common Context’ for Literature and Mathematics in English Periodicals?’
• Gabriela Fernandes Barberis:‘Spanish Contributions to Mathematical Literature and European Literary Influences’
• Joetta Harty:‘Empire of the Sums: The Power of Mathematics in Kim and Peter Pan’
• Nina Engelhardt:‘The Imaginary Domain as Transition Zone: Mathematics, Language and Reality in Musil's “The Confusions of Young Törless”’

CFP: Dickens Society Symposium (3/31/2012; 7/13-15/2012)

Dickens Society Symposium
University of Massachusetts Lowell & Lowell National Historical Park
Lowell, Massachusetts
13–15 July 2012

The Dickens Society will be offering an additional symposium and Dickens dinner during the bicentenary year.  These festivities will be held stateside at the Lowell National Historical Park on 13–15 July 2012. Hotel accommodation in downtown Lowell at the UMass Lowell Inn and Conference Center will provide easy access to a major exhibition at the National Park -- Dickens and Massachusetts: Untold Stories.  The exhibition will include several rare artifacts, including the 1842 portrait of Dickens by Boston painter Francis Alexander and the Boston Line Type edition of The Old Curiosity Shop donated by Dickens to the Perkins School for the Blind in 1868. Interactive elements such as electronically sensored skull models will enable visitors to try a phrenological "reading" of Dickens.  The popular Dickens walking tour of Lowell (first offered at the Dickens and America conference in 2002) and interactive sessions at the Tsongas Industrial History Center will also be featured offerings of the symposium.

Paper proposals on any aspect of Dickens and his works are invited. Final papers must be readable in twenty minutes. Please send one-page proposals electronically, by attachment, to Joel J. Brattin at jjb@wpi.edu no later than 31 March 2012. Further symposium information and updates will be available on the Dickens Quarterly website (http://www.DickensQuarterly.org) and from symposium co-chairs Diana Archibald (diana_archibald@uml.edu, English Department UMass Lowell, 61 Wilder St., Lowell, MA 01854) or Joel J. Brattin (Humanities & Arts Department, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA 01609-2280). Scholars at all stages of their careers are encouraged to submit proposals, and graduate students may register for the symposium at a reduced rate.

Located in the historic industrial city of Lowell, 25 miles northwest of Boston, the University of Massachusetts Lowell campus spans more than 125 acres along the Merrimack River. UMass Lowell is easily reached by either Manchester (New Hampshire) Airport or Boston’s Logan Airport. Lowell is connected to Boston via Amtrak trains (through north station in Boston) as well as bus service. Lowell is a great location from which to launch a side trip to the city of Boston, the beaches of Cape Cod, the resorts of Newport (Rhode Island), and even bustling New York City.

CFP: Crabbe's Tales (1/13/2012; 7/12 - 13/2012)

Crabbe's Tales
Newcastle University
Thursday 12 to Friday 13, July 2012

Confirmed keynote speakers: Dr. Mina Gorji (University of Cambridge), Prof. Claire Lamont (Newcastle University), Prof. Fiona Stafford (University of Oxford).

Reviewing 'Tales' (1812) Francis Jeffrey claimed that Crabbe was 'upon the whole, the most original writer who has ever come before us'. In marking the bicentenary of its publication this conference will focus on the telling of stories and the imagining of communities in Crabbe's nineteenth-century oeuvre including 'Poems' (1807), 'The Borough' (1810), 'Tales' and 'Tales of the Hall' (1819). its aim is to test Jerome McGann's claim (in an essay published in 1981) that Crabbe is 'a writer whose true historical period has yet to arrive.'

Proposals of 250 words are invited for 20-minute papers that address the following themes (although the list is not exclusive)

• Crabbe and the traditions of storytelling (Chaucer, Arabian Nights, New Testament parables)
• Crabbe and theories of narrative (Bakhtin, Benjamin, Barthes, Genette, Jameson)
• Crabbe and verse narrative (Byron, Hemans, Scott, Pushkin)
• Crabbe and Shakespeare
• Crabbe and gender
• Crabbe's readers, or the lack of them
• The geography and social geography of Crabbe's poems
• Crabbe and cultural periodization
• Crabbe in an age of revolution and war
• Hallucination, derangement and madness ('Peter Grimes', 'The Voluntary Insane', 'Where Am I Now?')
• Crabbe and his environments: maritime Suffolk, London, industrial Trowbridge
• Crabbe as 'Malthus turned metrical romancer'
• Crabbe and religion
• Crabbe's politics
• Crabbe's influence: Austen, Scott, Clare, Dickens, George Eliot, Clough, Britten
• Crabbe's paratexts: manuscripts, editions, illustrations, translations
• Crabbe's contemporary critics (Hazlitt, Jeffrey)

Proposals should be e-mailed to edwardsgavin@hotmail.com or michael.rossington@ncl.ac.uk by Friday 13 January 2012.

Conference organisers: Dr. Gavin Edwards (Institute of English Studies, University of London) and Dr. Michael Rossington (Newcastle University)

Conference website: http://conferences.ncl.ac.uk/crabbestales/

This conference is sponsored by the Medieval and Early Modern Studies @ Newcastle research group: http://research.ncl.ac.uk/mems/

CFP: 2011 Trollope Prize, now in partnership with The Fortnightly Review (6/1/2011)

New Partnership with The Fortnightly Review
The Trollope Prize at the University of Kansas is pleased to announce a new partnership with The Fortnightly Review.  The Fortnightly Review, an on-line version of the magazine begun by Anthony Trollope in 1865, will publish the winning graduate essay and will add a modest honorarium to the graduate award.

The Fortnightly Review has a storied history and was one of the most influential English-language periodicals of the nineteenth-century.  The brainchild of Anthony Trollope, who was inspired by Matthew Arnold’s call for “a current of true and fresh ideas” in his 1864 lecture on “The Function of Criticism,” The Fortnightly Review launched on May 15, 1865 under the
editorship of George Henry Lewes.  The new on-line series of The Fortnightly Review, edited by Anthony O’Hear and Denis Boyles, publishes articles on art and literature, philosophy and culture, informed by an awareness of the Fortnightly’s archived content.

The Trollope Prize
The Fortnightly Review is a natural place to publish the winning graduate essay of the annual Trollope Prize.  The Trollope Prize is awarded annually to the best undergraduate and graduate essays in English on the works of Anthony Trollope. The Prize is designed to help promote the study of Trollope in college classrooms and to encourage student engagement with both Trollope's work and Victorian literary history through their own intensive
research and writing.  Submissions for the prize are accepted from around the world.  The deadline is June 1, 2011. Winners will be announced in August 2011.

Essays are invited on the topic of "Trollope and His World." Submissions may include essays focusing exclusively on the works of Anthony Trollope; comparative essays on Trollope and other writers; essays examining Trollope's work and career in the larger context of Victorian history, culture and society; historical or literary essays on topics central to Trollope's work and illuminated by his work; or essays on the reception of Trollope's work or on his larger cultural influence.

Beginning in 2011, two prizes will be awarded: one to an essay written by an undergraduate student and one to an essay written by a graduate student. The writers of the winning undergraduate essay will receive a $1,000 award and a hardcover copy of a Trollope novel. The winning undergraduate student's faculty adviser will also receive a $500 award to help support the continued development of curriculum focusing on Trollope's works.

The graduate winner will receive a $2,000 award and a hardcover copy of a Trollope novel.  In addition, the winning graduate essay will be published in The Fortnightly Review and the winner will receive a modest additional honorarium from the publication.

Visit trollopeprize.ku.edu for more information about the Trollope Prize, including submission criteria and guidelines.  Visit fortnightlyreview.co.uk for more information about The Fortnightly Review.

Modes of Transport: Travel Writing and Form, 1780-1914 (5/6/2011; 5/26-27/2011)

Registration is now open for: 


Modes of Transport: Travel Writing and Form, 1780-1914
An interdisciplinary conference
King’s College London 
26 & 27 May


Keynote Speakers: Mary Beard, Dane Kennedy, and Clair Pettitt


Other speakers include: Simon Goldhill, Alison Chapman, Peter Garratt, Anne Green, Michael Ledger-Lomas, Muireann O’ Cinneide, Matthew Rubery & Carl Thompson

There has always been a certain amount of unease and anxiety about how best to mould the quotidian, often repetitious, experience of travel into a digestible, literary narrative. The travel writer cannibalises other modes of literary, geographical and scientific writing, while simultaneously forging experimental, innovative and dynamic forms in the struggle to represent the heterogeneous and often chaotic experience of travel. It is the aim of this two-day conference to bring together academic researchers and professional travel writers in order to explore the relationship between travel writing and formal innovation in a variety of media across the long-nineteenth century.

Journals and Letters / Ephemera / Guidebooks / Travel in Verse / Transport and Literary Form / Mobile Reading / Tourism and Visual Culture / Literary Pilgrimage / Illustration / Maps / the Sea

Special Workshop: The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) historical collection

For registration and further details please visit:
http://travelconference.blogspot.com/p/registration.html

The deadline for registration and receipt of payment is Friday, 6 May 2011. Further enquires may be directed to Brian Murray and Mary Henes at travelconference@gmail.com

NAVSA Donald Gray Prize (5/9/2011)

NAVSA is now seeking nominations for the Donald Gray Prize for best essay published in the field of Victorian Studies.   The prize carries with it an award of $1000 and will be awarded to essays that appeared in print or online in journals from the previous calendar year. Essays may be on any topic related to the study of Victorian Britain.   Note that the actual date of appearance trumps the date given on the issue itself since it's common for journals to lag behind official issue dates. (The prize is limited to journal essays; those published in essay collections are not eligible.) The winner will also receive complementary registration at the NAVSA conference at which his or her award will be announced. 

Anyone, regardless of NAVSA membership status, is free to nominate an essay that appeared in print between 1 January 2010 and 31 December 2010.   Nominations will also be solicited from the Advisory Board of NAVSA and the prize committee judges; self-nominated essays are equally welcome.   Authors may be from any country and of any institutional standing.

To nominate an essay, please submit by Monday, 9 May 2011 (that's a receipt deadline, not a postmark deadline): (1) a brief cover sheet with complete address and email information for both the essay's nominator and its author, and (2) four hard copies of the essay to the Executive Secretary of NAVSA at the following address:

Meegan Kennedy
English Department
631 University Way
P.O. Box 3061580
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306-1580

Questions may be directed to meegan.kennedy@fsu.edu. You can find more information here: 

http://www.purdue.edu/NAVSA/Prizes/GrayPrize.cfm

CFP: Mediamorphosis: Print Culture and Transatlantic Public Sphere(s), 1880-1940 (4/15/2011; 9/9-10/2011)

"Mediamorphosis:  Print Culture and Transatlantic Public Sphere(s), 1880-1940"

Sept 9-10, 2011
University of Delaware

This two-day symposium will provide a forum for literary scholars, historians, media historians, and art historians to share works-in-progress on the transformations of print media and Transatlantic public spheres at the turn of the twentieth century.  The symposium will feature work that probes artificial literary-historical boundaries, challenges national divisions, traverses the divide between nineteenth- and early-twentieth century print culture, and links texts and or/writers across different genres or sectors of the print media of the period.  There will be ample time for open discussion; there will be no concurrent panels; participants will be expected to attend all sessions.  The symposium is conceived as a follow up to the 2007 symposium, "Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880-1940:  Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms," which resulted in an edited collection under the same title (Palgrave 2008).

A wide array of work is welcome, but papers should engage substantially with several of the following areas of common interest:
advancing our understanding of print culture's role in the period's movements for racial, class, and gender equality.

• identifying and theorizing the relationship between print culture, empire, and cross-cultural (transatlantic, transnational) writing, reading, and publishing.
• bringing the theories and methods of material culture studies to bear on the analysis of print artifacts as "objects" or "things."
• grasping the increasing textual hybridity of the period's print artifacts, by examining such phenomena as the interactions between illustration and text and the complex collage effects created by advances and experiments in typography and image reproduction.
• developing our knowledge of Anglo-American links, interactions, and networks among writers, publishers, editors, agents, and other participants in the period's print culture.
• analyzing and theorizing the relationship between transformations in print culture and evolving notions of authorship and the literary, including the role of the nascent academic field of English, in Britain, the United States, and/or the colonies/commonwealth.

Send 500-word abstracts for 20-minute papers by April 15 to: printculture@bsu.edu.

Conference on William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair and Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (4/11/2011; 4/16/2011)

Do Victorian novels by (agnostic?) writers with unreliable narrators have moral authority?
A Day Conference on William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair and Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

Presentation and Discussions by
Judith Fisher (Trinity University)
Marianne Thormählen (Lund University)
Micael Clarke (Loyola University Chicago)
Peter Shillingsburg (Loyola University Chicago)
and a panel discussion

Saturday, 16 April 2011
Loyola University Chicago
Crown Center Room 530
9:30 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Coffee, Lunch, Receptions provided

NO Registration FEE
Sponsored by Martin J. Svaglic Chair in Textual Studies, Loyola
University Chicago

RSVP by Monday, 11 April 2011 to pshillingsburg@luc.edu

Program:
9:30 am Registration and Reception

10 am “Reading in and Out of Vanity Fair; or, How to Acquire an Uncomfortable Talent” Judith Fisher, Professor of English, Trinity University, San Antonio

11 am “What is the Moral Center of Vanity Fair?” Peter Shillingsburg, Professor of English, Loyola University Chicago

12  Lunch

1 pm   “The Writing on the (Dungeon) Wall:  Reading Wuthering Heights by the Light of Brontë's Poems” Micael Clarke, Assoc. Professor of English, Loyola University Chicago

2 pm   “The Moral of Wuthering Heights” Marianne Thormählen, Professor of English Studies, Lund University, Sweden

3 pm Coffee Break

3:20 pm  Roundtable discussion: "Narrative, Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Novelist’s Responsibility" Mark Bosco, Joyce Wexler, Steve Jones, Michael O’Connell, Julia Bninski, Jason Kolkey, and Kari Kronsbein

5 to 7:30 pm  Reception

CFP: M/MLA Permanent Session "English II: English Literature 1880-1900" (4/30/2011; 11/3 - 6/2011)

This year’s Midwest Modern Language Association Conference will be held November 3-6, 2011 in St. Louis, Missouri. Stacey Kikendall is soliciting papers for one of the permanent sessions, English II: English Literature 1800-1900, and is hoping to form several different panels.  This year's conference is looking for papers that investigate the conference theme "Play" in problematic or evocative ways.  You might consider play in terms of performance, identity or representation, seriousness vs. dallying, wagering, strategy, being a player in a game, movement or action, or diversions/recreation. You might also consider idioms such as "fair play" or "foul play."

Please send 300-word abstracts and a brief CV to Stacey Kikendall at kikendal@unm.edu by April 30, 2011.
M/MLA: http://luc.edu/mmla/

INCS 2011 Conference "Speaking Nature" (3/31 - 4/3/2011)

The Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) 2011 conference "Speaking Nature" will take place next week at Pitzer College, in Claremont, California. Registration is now open.  Please check the the conference website for the program and further details: http://www.pitzer.edu/incs/

Keynotes and featured presentations include:

• Reading by Anca Vlasopolos, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Wayne State University, From the "Isles of the Blessed" (Thursday, March 31)
• Talk by Laura Skandera Trombley, President of Pitzer College (Friday, April 1), "Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them": Mark Twain's America"
• Talk by Robert Polhemus, Professor Emeritus of English, Stanford University (Friday, April 1), "God Defying in Paint and Poetry: the 'Speaking Nature' of Orozco's Prometheus
• and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound"
• Talk by James Kincaid, Aerol Arnold Professor of English, University of Southern California (Friday April 1), "The Laborious Construction of the Natural Child"
• Talk by Harriet Ritvo, Arthur J. Conner Professor of History, Massachusetts, Institute of Technology (Saturday, April 2)
• Roundtable: Sustaining the Profession (Saturday, April 2), James Kincaid, Teresa Mangum, Helena Michie, Susan Morgan, Deborah Denenholz Morse, Robert Polhemus, and Harriet Ritvo

Final Reminder: CFP: "Unexpected Agents" Postgraduate Symposium (4/1/2011; 6/24/2011)

Unexpected Agents: considering agency and subjectivity beyond the boundaries of the human (1800 to the present day)

Hosted by the English Department at the University of Birmingham

24 June 2011

Whilst questions of human subjectivity and/or identity remain a persistent focus in literary and cultural studies, this one-day postgraduate symposium aims to consider how we might explore and account for agency from unexpected sources. Papers, plenaries 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.

Bruno Latour and the Actor Network Theory (ANT) to which his work is seminal have interrogated the ways in which our reified notion of "the social" has obfuscated the role and potential agency of apparently inanimate objects. When we consider "the social," Latour argues, emphasis overwhelmingly falls upon the agency of intentional human actors. That objects too might be considered as actors or agents has not been granted due attention, since from "the very definition of actors and agencies most often chosen, if action is limited a priori to what 'intentional,' 'meaningful' humans do, it is hard to see how a hammer, a basket, a door closer […] could act." In other words, because the ways in which an object might be considered to ‘act’ appears so incommensurate with the apparently purposeful, intentional and highly thought-out actions of human beings, the idea that objects might be considered as agents in their own right has suffered much neglect in sociological discourse.  ANT is largely concerned with attacking this imbalance.

This symposium aims to acknowledge and yet exceed Latour’s and others’ focus upon the agency of objects to envision how authors, theorists and cultural producers have imagined and re-imagined the potential agencies of a wide range of entities, to which and to whom access to power is conventionally seen as foreclosed. It will explore how this over-looked but fascinating trope persists across genres and historical boundaries, from Romanticism to Science Fiction, and from 1800 to the present day.

Plenary Speaker: Dr. Sarah Kember of Goldsmiths, University of London

The organisers invite 200-word proposals from postgraduate research students for 20-minute papers which engage with the symposium theme discursively and imaginatively.  Papers might focus on the following kinds of "unexpected agent":

 *   Objects (art objects, artefacts, antiques)
 *   Spaces/ Landscapes
 *   Ghosts and the deceased
 *   Mediums and the hypnotised
 *   Babies/ Infants
 *   Animals
 *   Technology (radio, machines, scientific apparatus)
 *   Nature
 *   Words themselves

The deadline for proposals is Friday 1 April 2011.

Please send your proposals to unexpectedagents@gmail.com

CFP: The Latchkey: Journal of New Woman Studies

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
The editorial team of The Latchkey: Journal of New Woman Studies is interested in receiving new submissions of scholarly articles and book reviews for our upcoming issues. All scholarly articles will undergo double blind peer review; book reviews will be published at the discretion of the editors.  We accept submissions year-round and have a reasonable turn around time (usually no more than three months, often much less).  Submission Guidelines and further information about the journal, as well as our current issue, can be found at http://www.oscholars.com/Latchkey/start.htm.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

The Latchkey is a peer-reviewed, open-access online journal devoted to the concept of the New Woman, covering the lives and writings of New Women authors and figures, the representation of the New Woman in literature, culture, art, and society, proto-feminism and early feminist journalism, and current innovative scholarship on the New Woman. While the term "New Woman" originated in England, the cultural phenomenon extended beyond Britain. We wish to explore its presence (or reasons for its absence) and influence in other countries and across disciplines, and aim at covering both canonical and non-canonical New Woman figures and aspects. Starting with the next issue (anticipated for late spring 2011), The Latchkey is merging with another Oscholars journal, The Michaelian, currently edited by Sharon Bickle. The Latchkey will keep its name and focus on the New Woman, while appreciating and benefiting additionally from The Michaelian’s interests and expertise in the poetry and culture surrounding Michael Field (Edith Cooper and Katharine Bradley).

We are associated with the group of journals known as THE OSCHOLARS 
(www.oscholars.com), and published by The Rivendale Press, UK. Please send all enquiries to the editors at unbolt@gmail.com.

Thank you sincerely for your interest.
The Co-editors,

Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Stanford University, USA
Sharon Bickle, University of Queensland, Australia

"The Politics of Form" 2011 Nineteenth-Century Graduate Conference (4/22/2011)

The Politics of Form: 2011 Graduate Student Conference

Columbia University Nineteenth-Century Colloquium

Friday, April 22^th, 2011, 9:00 am – 6:45 pm 

Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room

Keynote Speaker: Caroline Levine, “Politics as Form,” 5:15 pm

In recent years, Victorian studies have seen a resurgence of interest in literary form and formalist criticism.  However, these renewed formal interests do not represent a simple swing of the critical pendulum.  Rather than retreating from historicism, current critical models seek to amend and complicate New Historicist practices by combining them with examinations of genre, aesthetics, and other formal concerns.  Recent work along these lines has been characterized by an attentiveness to form in the service of historically specific claims and an interest in the historical specificity of nineteenth-century literary forms and their cultural meaning.  Correspondingly, the conscious significance of literary form and genre to the Victorians themselves is a topic ripe for further examination. This conference seeks to explore what is particularly at stake for Victorian literary studies in this turn towards form, and to consider the future of aesthetic and political intersections in our critical practice.

This event is free and open to the public. 

For more details, contact Anna Clark aec2137@columbia.edu

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

W. T. Stead: Centenary Conference for a Newspaper Revolutionary
British Library, London, 16 & 17 April 2012


When William Stead died on the maiden voyage of the Titanic in April 1912, he was the most famous Englishman on board. He was one of the inventors of the modern tabloid. His advocacy of ‘government by journalism’ helped launch military campaigns. His exposé of child prostitution raised the age of consent to sixteen, yet his investigative journalism got him thrown in jail. A mass of contradictions and a crucial figure in the history of the British press, Stead was a towering presence in the cultural life of late Victorian and Edwardian society.


This conference marks the centenary of his death. We aim to recover Stead’s extraordinary influence on modern English culture and to mark a major moment in the history of journalism. In 2012 the British Library will open its state of the art newspaper reading rooms. In Stead’s spirit we will also investigate our own revolution in newspapers and print journalism in the age of digital news.


With Stead as a focal point, we will use aspects of his career to develop multiple avenues into the history of his time and ours. This is not a narrowly focused specialist conference, but one that aims to adopt wide cultural perspectives.


We welcome proposals on the following, in respect of Stead and/or related topics:

• Stead’s "New Journalism." The Pall Mall Gazette, Review of Reviews and other journals were crucial in the emergence of the modern day broadsheet and tabloid press. Stead provides the opportunity to re-assess some of the key phases in the influence and structures of the press in modern Britain.
• Stead and technology. Stead was one of the best recorders of the second industrial revolution of the late Victorian period, when telegraphs, gramophones, microphones, telephones, Kodak cameras, wireless telegraphy, horseless carriages, typewriters and new printing technologies transformed everyday life.
• Stead and the New Imperialism. Stead’s support for English colonies was part of his advocacy for a white commonwealth that would be united through journalism and new communication technologies. We welcome papers on specific elements of Stead’s imperialism, from the support for General Gordon, his opposition to the South African War, to his friendship with Cecil Rhodes.
• Stead and the Titanic. Rumours about Stead’s manly self-sacrifice and Christian acceptance of death in the last hours of the boat were still being repeated as late as the film A Night to Remember (1958). How was Stead’s death reported? What was his cultural significance in 1912? We also particularly welcome papers on any aspect of the Titanic, especially on the role of newspapers in securing the mythic place the sinking has in our culture.
• Stead and the occult. Stead tended to report Spiritualism favourably, as part of the non conformist world of religion. He became active in the movement in the 1880s and tried to foster support for the Society for Psychical Research. He ran the journal Borderland from 1893-7, which reported on ghosts, psychical experiments, hypnotic rapports, astral doubles and messages from the dead.
• Stead and religion. We aim to trace his early non-conformity, conversion to secular Evangelicism, and his advocacy of a National Church through investigative annuals, such as If Christ Came to Chicago. We also hope to examine his alliance to William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, whom he helped compose In Darkest England and the Way Out in 1890.
• Stead and the Northeast. Stead’s career, which includes the editorship of the daily Northern Echo in Darlington for eight years in the 1870s offers an opportunity to investigate the trajectories of regional journalists, Stead’s career at the Echo, and the provincial press in the late nineteenth century.
• Stead and women’s rights. Stead employed women journalists and writers and championed their role in public life. Typically conflicted, this support derived in part from a Christian sense of women’s benign influence on public purity (so that he was disturbed by the overtly sexual New Woman literature of the 1890s). Stead is an exemplary figure to explore the anxieties and contradictions of the gender and sexual liberations of the late nineteenth century.
• Stead’s "invention" of the tabloid moral campaign. Through his famous campaigns (‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, the relief of General Gordon, British rearmament) Stead interceded into contemporary political and social debates and pioneered this major journalistic genre.
• Stead and politics. Stead’s political radicalism put him at the centre of events in the 1880s, including the ‘Bloody Sunday’ riots of 1887 and the Match Girl Strike in 1889. He was also a notable campaigner for world peace, speaking at international gatherings in the United States and Russia.
• Stead and the industry of print. As journalist, editor, publisher, proprietor, with a career that includes regional as well as metropolitan dailies, various monthly magazines, annuals, and a stream of serialised works in part issue, including his ‘Penny Poets’, Stead is a rich node for new research.
• The continuing newspaper revolution. 2012 is the date when the British Library Newspaper Library moves from Colindale to new, state of the art reading rooms. What will the new digital archive mean for historical research? And what will be the future of print journalisms?

Submitting Proposals:
We put out a call for expressions of interest in 2010. In the light of the positive response, we would now like to ask for proposals for 20 minute papers. Proposals should be no more than 500 words and sent to stead2010@googlemail.com by the 20 May 2011. Further details are here: https://sites.google.com/site/stead2012/


Conference Organizers:

• Professor Laurel Brake (Birkbeck College): expert in nineteenth-century journalism, with extensive publications relating to Stead’s career and milieu.
• Ed King (British Library): Head of Newspaper Collections.
• Professor Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck College): expert in late nineteenth-century culture, who has written on Stead’s interests in technology and the occult.
• Dr James Mussell (University of Birmingham): author of work on nineteenth-century press and science, and an editor of the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition.