Monday 9 December 2013

CFP: BAVS 2014 'Victorian Sustainability' (Deadline 31 March 2014)

Download the BAVS 2014 poster as a PDF here.

Call for Papers

From emerging ideas about the perils of environmental degradation to the establishment of the National Trust, the concept of sustainability began to take on a new importance in the Victorian period that remains relevant in 21st-century modernity. We welcome proposals which address any aspect of Victorian sustainability and especially encourage interdisciplinary approaches.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

*Victorian nature writing and/or discourses of nature and science
*Heritage and preservation (of built environments, natural landscapes, species, material cultures)
*Climate change and the Victorians
*Sustenance and sustainability
*Victorian discourses of emotional/psychological sustainability or wellbeing
*Eco-criticism and environmental aesthetics in Victorian literature
*Sustaining the Victorians (literary and/or cultural legacies)
*‘Green imperialism’ and/or colonial sustainability
*The emergence of self-sufficiency and sustainable ways of life in the Victorian period
*Waste/pollution vs. recycling/renewal in urban and industrial contexts
*Narratives of catastrophe, risk, decay or crisis in the Victorian period
*Representations of growth, flourishing and/or transformation in Victorian literature and culture
*Social ecology and the relation between human and non-human in the Victorian period
*Victorian pastoral and/or the legacy of Romanticism
*The sustainability of Victorian Studies

Proposals (300 words max.) are due by March 31, 2014, and should be sent to kentbavs2014@gmail.com. Panel proposals (comprised of 3 paper proposals, plus an additional 300 words explaining how the papers are linked in addressing the theme) are also welcome.

The 2014 BAVS conference will be hosted by the new Centre for Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Any inquiries about the Centre or the conference may be sent to the Centre Director, Professor Wendy Parkins at W.J.Parkins@kent.ac.uk


Thursday 28 November 2013

Journal Announcement: Special issue of AJVS on Neo-Victorianism


Issue 18.3 (2013) of the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies has just been published and is freely available at the journal website. It is a special themed issue on Neo-Victorianism guest edited by Michelle J. Smith.

Articles:
*Neo-Victorianism: An Introduction
Michelle J. Smith

*Neo-Victorian Biofiction and the Special/Spectral Case of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus
Marie-Luise Kohlke

*Neo-Victorian Presence: Tom Phillips and the Non-Hermeneutic Past
Christine Ferguson

*Twisting Dickens: Modding Childhood for the Steampunk Marketplace in Cory Doctorow’s “Clockwork Fagin” (2011)
Sharon Bickle

*Tme Machine Fashion: Neo-Victorian Style in Twenty-First Century Subcultures
Christine Feldman-Barrett

*Robert Browning and Mick Imlah: Forming and Collecting the Dramatic Monologue
John Morton

*The Spectre and the Stage: Reading and Ethics at the Intersection of Psychoanalysis, the neo-Victorian, and the Gothic
Jessica Gildersleeve

Book Reviews
*Dickens and Modernity by Juliet John, ed. (rev.)
Grace Moore

*Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire by Elizabeth Ho (rev.)
Kristine Moruzi

*Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009 by Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn (rev.)
Michelle J. Smith

*Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, eds (rev.)
Tammy Ho Lai-Ming

Thursday 31 October 2013


Issue 18.2 of the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies has now been published and is available online. The issue includes the following articles and book reviews.

Articles:

*Business and Terror in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities
Lynn Shakinovsky
*Home Baked: Dickens's English Muffins and Corporate Characters
Susan Elizabeth Cook
*The English Warner Brother triumphs over religious hegemony on the road to celebrity and dynasty.
Ann Lazarsfeld-Jensen

Book Reviews:

*Science, Sexuality and Sensation Novels: Pleasures of the Senses (rev.)
Heidi Logan
*Picturing Scotland through the Waverley Novels: Walter Scott and the Origins of the Victorian Illustrated Novel (rev.)
Josef Alton Olson
*Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession (rev.)
Karen McLean
*British Colonial Realism in Africa: Inalienable Objects, Contested Domains (rev.)
Hamish Dalley
*The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885-1918 (rev.)
Fiona Paisley

Monday 28 October 2013

REMINDER: CfP AVSA 2014, 'Victorian Transport', Hong Kong (Deadline 30/11/13)

William Powell Frith, The Railway Station (1862). Royal Holloway College, London.















Australasian Victorian Studies Association Annual Conference

'Victorian Transport', Hong Kong, 10-12 July 2014  http://www.english.hku.hk/events/victoriantransport/

The Victorian Age is one of mobility and of transportation: goods, people and money were transported within Great Britain, across Europe, and to the far reaches of Empire. Ideas – whether economic, political, educational, religious or philosophical – were imported and exported. And far from being unemotional, the Victorians were also regularly ‘transported’ by emotions which doctors, scientists and psychologists tried to theorise.

This conference seeks to redefine the parameters of transport through inter-disciplinary approaches to material, metaphorical and metaphysical journeys during the Victorian era. Papers on global crossings are particularly welcome.

Keynote speakers: 
James Buzard (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Stephen Davies (Hong Kong Maritime Museum)
Josephine McDonagh (King’s College, London)
Peter McNeil (University of Technology, Sydney)

Topics might include but are not limited to:
* Transporting people, transporting goods
* Modes of Transportation
* Intellectual transport
* Trade and trafficking
* Penal colonies
* Theorising ‘transport’
* Theories of the emotions
* Women and transport
* Transport, its politics and policies
* Transatlantic and Transpacific transportation
* Transference and the subconscious
* Dreams and Telepathy
* Transporting and translating literature abroad
* Transport hubs/ urban development
* Speed
* Transportive music
* Landscape and environment
* Immobility
* Time Travel
* Neo-Victorian Transport

A special section of the conference calls for papers on Victorian Transport related to China and the ‘China-West’ axis. Please signal in your application whether you would like your paper to be considered for inclusion in any of these ‘China’ or ‘China-West’ panels.

Five postgraduate travel bursaries (also applicable to SWIFs) will be awarded by the Conference Committee, on the basis of need and merit. Please include a short covering letter and cv in your application for such funding.

Abstracts of up to 300 words, together with your biodata (ca. 100-150 words), should be sent to: avsa2014@hku.hk. 
Deadline for Abstracts: 30 November 2013. Notification by end-January 2014.

Saturday 26 October 2013

CfP: "Victorian Treasures and Trash", VPFA (Deadline 4/4/14)

The Victorian Popular Fiction Association
CFP: Victorian Treasures and Trash
6th Annual Conference, 8-10 July 2014
Institute of English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Keynote Speaker: Dr Jonathon Shears (Keele), ‘“[...] battered [...] soiled [...] broken [...] empty [...] half-smoked [...] stale”: The Hangover in Victorian Popular Fiction’.

Guest Speaker: Judith Flanders, ‘Painting Reality: Home vs. Home-ness’

Senate Library Special Collections Talk and ‘hands-on’ mini-exhibition: Dr Karen Attar, ‘Trash, Treasure or Trashy Treasure at the Institutional Library’.

The Victorian Popular Fiction Association conference is recognised as an important event on the annual conference circuit and offers a friendly and invigorating opportunity for established academics and post graduate students to share their current research. We remain committed to the revival of interest in understudied popular writers which is pivotal to the reputation this conference has established.  

The organisers invite a broad, imaginative and interdisciplinary interpretation of the topic and its relation to any aspect of Victorian popular literature and culture which might address literal or metaphorical representations of the theme.

We welcome proposals for 20 minute papers, or for panels of three papers, on topics which can include, but are not limited to:

*Treasures and Trash in: the home, the street, the store, the library, the gutter, the island, the workhouse, the factory, etc.
*Print culture and the literary marketplace: ‘trash’ fiction, high/low culture, taste, fashion, rarity, cheap editions, fine editions, ‘specials’, royalties, contracts, collectors, etc.
*Treasure: buried, hoarded, displayed, collected, traded, neglected, etc.
*Waste: scrap/s, refuse, recycling, reclamation, that which is/those who are discarded/unwanted, the abandoned, etc.
*Dirt: gossip, scandal, degeneracy, decay, cleanliness, healthfulness, godliness, etc.
*Trashed: defaced, vandalised, wasted, defamed, scandalised, denounced, drunk, drugged, etc.
*Industry: the ethics of production, craftsmanship, the cheap, the mass-produced, etc.
*Money: markets, debts/debtors, savings, shares, inheritances, ransoms, fortunes, etc.
*Papers and artefacts: archives, special collections, the museum, the preserved, the priceless, the lost, digitised treasures, etc.
*The Beloved: persons, possessions, memories, moments, etc.
*Values: validity, value/worth, cost, price, morals, family values, etc.
*Things: junk, clutter, paraphernalia, bric-a-brac, curiosities, trinkets, tokens/keepsakes, troves, etc.
*People: fortune-hunters, gold-diggers, prospectors, speculators, pirates, con-artists, thieves, beggars, prostitutes, consumers, etc.

Special author panels: This year we will schedule special panels to be hosted by guest experts on each of six key popular authors; therefore we especially welcome papers about the following authors:

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (hosted by Anne-Marie Beller)
Wilkie Collins (hosted by Mariaconcetta Constantini)
Marie Corelli (hosted by Nickianne Moody)
Florence Marryat (hosted by Greta Depledge)
Ouida (hosted by Jane Jordan and Andrew King)
Robert Louis Stevenson (hosted by Sara Clayson)

Other suggested authors/papers in previous years have also discussed authors such as:
J. M. Barrie | Mrs Beeton | Anne Brontë | Charlotte Brontë | Emily Brontë | Rhoda Broughton | Lewis Carroll | Mary Cholmondeley | Arthur Conan Doyle | Charles Dickens | George Eliot | Elizabeth Gaskell |
George Gissing | Thomas Hardy | Jerome K. Jerome | Rudyard Kipling | Eliza Lynn Linton | Edith Nesbit |
Margaret Oliphant | Dinah Craik | Olive Schreiner | Bram Stoker | William Makepeace Thackeray | Anthony Trollope | Mary Augusta Ward | H.G. Wells | Ellen Wood | Charlotte Yonge

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words to Drs. Kirsty Bunting, Janine Hatter and Helena Ifill at vpfamembership@gmail.com

Deadline for proposals: Friday 4th April 2014

Organisers will offer acceptances in the days following the 18th April 2014.

The VPFA 2014 conference website can be found here: http://victorianpopularfiction.org/ and conference registration details will be announced shortly. All speakers must be a member of VPFA to present. To become a member, please visit the website or email vpfamembership@gmail.com for a membership form.

Meanwhile you can meet delegates and hear the latest conference news on the VPFA Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Victorian-Popular-Fiction-Association/128736877207708 and through the twitter account @VPFA1. Also, you can follow the conference discussions using the hashtag #VPFA14.

Tuesday 15 October 2013

CfP: BAVS 2014, 'Victorian Sustainability' (proposal deadline 31/3/14)

Victorian Sustainability, British Association of Victorian Studies conference
University of Kent, Canterbury 
September 4-6, 2014

Call for Papers

From emerging ideas about the perils of environmental degradation to the establishment of the National Trust, the concept of sustainability began to take on a new importance in the Victorian period that remains relevant in 21-st century modernity. We welcome proposals which address any aspect of Victorian sustainability and especially encourage interdisciplinary approaches.

Topics may include but are not limited to:
- Victorian nature writing and/or discourses of nature and science
- Heritage and preservation (of built environments, natural landscapes, species, material cultures)
- Climate change and the Victorians
- Sustenance and sustainability
- Victorian discourses of emotional/psychological sustainability or wellbeing
- Eco-criticism and environmental aesthetics in Victorian literature
- Sustaining the Victorians (literary and/or cultural legacies)
- ‘Green imperialism’ and/or colonial sustainability
- The emergence of self-sufficiency and sustainable ways of life in the Victorian period
- Waste/pollution vs. recycling/renewal in urban and industrial contexts
- Narratives of catastrophe, risk, decay or crisis in the Victorian period
- Representations of growth, flourishing and/or transformation in Victorian literature and culture
- Social ecology and the relation between human and non-human in the Victorian period
- Victorian pastoral and/or the legacy of Romanticism
- The sustainability of Victorian Studies

Proposals (300 words max.) are due by March 31, 2014, and should be sent to kentbavs2014@gmail.com. Panel proposals (comprised of 3 paper proposals, plus an additional 300 words explaining how the papers are linked in addressing the theme) are also welcome.

The 2014 BAVS conference will be hosted by the new Centre for Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Any inquiries about the Centre or the conference may be sent to the Centre Director, Professor Wendy Parkins at W.J.Parkins@kent.ac.uk

Thursday 3 October 2013

Journal Announcement: Colonial Girlhood Special Issue of the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies

Issue 18.1 of the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies has been published. This special issue, guest edited by Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith, focuses on the theme of Colonial Girlhood. All AJVS articles and book reviews are freely available on the journal site.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Articles
* Colonial Girlhood - Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith
* Girlhood in Transition: Girls’ Shipboard Diaries on Journeys to New Zealand, 1879-1881- Lilja Sautter
* The Disruption Of Fairyland: “Fairies Had Never Known How To Cry Until Then” - Anita Callaway
* She Rides Astride: Mateship, Morality and the Outback-Colonial Girl - Caroline Campbell
* From Victorian Accomplishment to Modern Profession: Elocution Takes Judith Anderson, Sylvia Bremer and Dorothy Cumming to Hollywood, 1912-1918 - Desley Deacon
* “These forces are in our midst”: YWCA “Girls” and Challenges of Transnationalism Between the Wars -
Ellen Warne

Book Reviews
*Genteel Women: Empire and Domestic Material Culture, 1840-1910 - Erin Atchison
*White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 - Desley Deacon
* X Marks the Spot: Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790–1895 - Ruth Feingold
* Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, the Law, and the Making of a Settler Society - Laura Ishiguro
* A Sisterhood of Suffering and Service: Women and Girls of Canada and Newfoundland During the First World War - Jan Noel

Wednesday 25 September 2013

CFP: NAVSA/ACCUTE, Victorian Uses and Abuses of History (15 Nov 2013)

Joint North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA)/Association  of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) sessions 2014
May 24 – 27th 2014
Brock University,St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

Victorian Uses and Abuses of History

What were the uses of history in the Victorian period? The period saw the publication of numerous historical novels  following the success of Sir Walter Scott’s “Waverley.” Many novelists, including Charles
Dickens, Charles Reade, William Makepiece Thackery, Charles Kingsley, George Eliot and Robert Louis Stevenson all addressed history in their novels. The French Revolution figured largely as a historical warning
against revolution in the minds of many Victorian sages, while the Fall of Rome could be used to warn against overweening pride in the Empire. History could figure as nightmare in Gothic novels. Inspired
by Ruskin and Morris, many looked back to the Medieval period as a source of values and an alternative to industrialized Britain. This call for papers invites proposals for individual or collaborative papers on the theme of "Victorian Uses and Abuses of History.”
Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

•       The Victorian Historical Novel
•       Victorian Medievalism
•       "The Renaissance" according to Victorians
•       Victorian Historians and Historiography
•       Historical Time vs. Geological Time
•       Past and Present Contrasts
•       "Neo" Architecture and Literature of the Victorian Period
•       Historical Self-Consciousness
•       History and Aesthetics
•       Historical Utopias and Dystopias

Send 250 word proposals or completed papers for 15-20-minute talks to
Martin Danahay <mdanahay@brocku.ca>.   Deadline: 15 November 2013

Neo-Victorian Uses and Abuses of History

In the relatively new field of Neo-Victorian studies the status of history is the focus of much debate. Is the recourse to the Victorian period necessarily nostalgic? Can the Victorian period be used to critique racism, violence and homophobia? And what of imaginative reconstructions of the Victorian period in genres such as Steampunk: are novels that reconfigure the Victorian period with contemporary technology and issues “historical” or do they call into question totalizing historical narratives?

Possible topics include but are by no means limited to:

•       History, collective memory and nostalgia
•       The commodification of the Victorian period
•      Retro-futurism and the status of history
•       Refiguring colonialism in Neo-Victorian texts
•       Ecohistory and Neo-Victorianism
•       Play and history in Neo-Victorian texts
•       The Victorian period as utopia/dystopia
•       Race, history and Neo-Victorianism
•       Subverting the “Victorian” in Neo-Victorianism

Send 250 word proposals or completed papers for 15-20-minute talks to
Martin Danahay <mdanahay@brocku.ca>.   Deadline: 15 November 2013

Sunday 15 September 2013

Journal Announcement: New Edition of The Latchkey: Journal of New Woman Studies

We are pleased to announce that the new issue of The Latchkey: Journal of New Woman Studies is now online.
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. We accept article submissions year-round and are always looking for qualified book reviewers, peer reviewers, and contributors of New Woman biographies to our "Who's Who" page.  Please send any inquiries to our journal email address, unbolt@gmail.com.
Best wishes,
The Editorial Team: Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Sharon Bickle, and Joellen Masters

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Essays

Jad Adams, “Feminist Solidarity in the Life and Work of Ella Hepworth Dixon”
Karsten Piep, “Business as Usual: Re-Domesticating the New Woman in Henry Sydnor Harrison’s Post-World War I Novel, Saint Teresa (1922)”
Melissa Purdue, “’She had suffered so many humiliations for want of money’: The Quest for Financial Independence in Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book”

Book reviews
Catherine Morris, Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012. Reviewed by Heidi Hansson.
Jessica Cox, ed. New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012. Reviewed by Gabrielle Malcolm.
Ouida, The Massarenes. Vol. 7 of New Woman Fiction, 1881-1899. Ed. by Andrew King. London: Pickering & Chatto 2011. Reviewed by Catherine Pope.
Shannon Hunter Hurtado, Genteel Mavericks: Professional Women Sculptors in Victorian Britain. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012. Reviewed by Paula Murphy.
Ann R. Hawkins and Maura Ives (eds.), Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. Reviewed by Donna Parsons.
Jill Rappoport, Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Reviewed by Jennifer Redmond.
Emelyne Godfrey, Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes. (Crime Files series, Gen. ed. Clive Bloom.) Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Reviewed by Lena Wånggren.

Featured New Women
Ouida. By Kirby-Jane Hallum
Rhoda Broughton. By Kirby-Jane Hallum.

New in our Gallery section: 
“The New Woman in Context.” An image essay by Molly O’Donnell.

Wednesday 11 September 2013

CfP: The Michael Field Centenary Conference (Deadline 31/12/13)

The Michael Field Centenary Conference: New Directions in Fin de Siècle Studies
11-12 July 2014
Institute of English Studies, Senate House, University of London

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Professor Joseph Bristow (UCLA)
Professor Margaret D. Stetz (University of Delaware)

Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) occupies an increasingly central role as one of the most fascinating figures of the fin de siècle. Following ground-breaking revisionist scholarship of the 1990s which rediscovered Bradley and Cooper’s poetry, the last twenty years has seen a major resurgence in work on Michael Field – reflecting Bradley and Cooper’s own belief that their work would not be appreciated until sometime in the distant future.

This major international conference will mark the Michael Field Centenary, bringing together world-renowned scholars of fin de siècle literature, poetry, life writing, women’s writing and gender and sexuality.

The Michael Field Centenary conference also aims to acknowledge and celebrate the diversity and vitality of new scholarship surrounding Michael Field and fin de siècle literature generally, providing a platform for new voices and perspectives from postgraduate/ early career scholars. As the first major Michael Field conference following the 2004 ‘Michael Field and their World’ conference at University of Delaware, we aim to assess the how the ‘field’ has changed over the last ten years; for example, following the publication of significant works such as Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson’s Michael Field and their World (2007), Marion Thain’s ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Fin de Siècle and Sharon Bickle’s The Fowl and the Pussycat: Love Letters of Michael Field, 1876-1909 (2008).

We invite proposals for 20 minute papers on topics related to Michael Field and fin de siècle culture, which may include, but are not limited to:

Fin de siècle poetry
Late-Victorian literary culture
Aestheticism and Decadence
Verse drama/closet drama
Drama and performance
Poetic form, prosody, the lyric
History, time, historiography
Interactions with different periods/literary traditions
Life writing, biography, autobiography
Gender, sexuality, desire
Michael Field’s circle/influences
Fashion and dress culture
Catholicism and religious writing
Art and design
Book history, book design, printing
The New Woman, the Female Aesthete
Modernity, modernism
Michael Field’s influence on later writers

Deadline for abstracts: 31 December 2013
Please email 300-word abstracts to michaelfield2014@gmail.com

Organisers: Dr Ana Parejo Vadillo (Birkbeck, University of London), Dr Sarah Parker (University of Stirling) and Dr Marion Thain (University of Sheffield)

Monday 9 September 2013

CfP: Victorian Network special issue "Victorian Bodies and Body Parts" (30/11/13)

Call for Papers: Victorian Bodies and Body Parts 
Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed online journal devoted to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies.
The ninth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Professor Pamela K. Gilbert (University of Florida), is dedicated to a reassessment of the place of the human body in the Victorian literary and cultural imagination. Rapid medical and scientific advances, advancing industrialization and new forms of labour, legal reforms, the rise of comparative ethnology and anthropology, the growth of consumer culture, and the ever changing trends of Victorian fashion are just a few of the many forces that transformed how Victorians thought about the human body and about the relationship between the embodied, or disembodied, self and the object world.
Nineteenth-century configurations of the body have long been of interest to Victorian scholars. However, recent years have seen the field reconfigured by the emergence of a range of exciting new and theoretically sophisticated approaches that harness the insights of the new materialism, thing theory, cultural phenomenology and actor-network theory to explorations of Victorian embodiment, bodies and body parts.
We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words, on any aspect of the theme. Possible topics include but are by no means limited to the following:
·      embodied experience and the senses
·      the body in stillness and in motion: practices of confinement and mobility
·      consumerism, fashion and the stylized body
·      the body and technology
·      bodies of empire and colonialism
·      bodies and body parts on display: anatomical museums, ethnological shows, hospital ward        tours
·      sciences of the body: medicine, biology, ethnology, statistics, etc.
·      bodies, sex and gender
·      health and illness
·      affective bodies and embodied emotions
·      labour power and the body as property
·      the poetics and aesthetics of the human body
·      human and animal bodies before and after Darwin

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines.
 Deadline for submissions: 30 November 2013.

Friday 2 August 2013

CfP: Special Edition of Victorian Periodicals Review on Digital Pedagogies (1 July 2014)

“Digital Pedagogies: Building Learning Communities for Studying Victorian Periodicals”

Essays of 6,000-7,000 words are sought for a special number of Victorian Periodicals Review inspired by the range of research and good practice that has been developed in recent years by scholars of the nineteenth century periodical press.

Since Patrick Leary’s seminal essay “Googling the Victorians”, first published in 2005, significant advancements have been made in the field of periodical research, largely as a result of the rise in digital projects.  In almost ten years of scholarship, researchers have been examining and developing new digital methods for analysing and extrapolating data. Scholars have been considering not only the construction of digital resources but how they can be used in many different ways; to enhance research, to identify neglected texts, to inspire and engage students.   This special number of VPR gives us the opportunity to bring together these ideas and debates, to reflect on how the field of periodicals research has changed as a result of the digital revolution and to consider where it may be in the next ten years.

Possible topics might include:
      The role of the digital archive in uniting disparate periodicals and newspapers
       Building, constructing, maintaining digital projects on periodicals
        Rise of the collaborative digital project
        New methods for research and data analysis of circulation figures, distribution and ‘popularity’ of publications
        Advances in the visualisation of data for identifying patterns of consumption
        Contribution of genealogy studies  to identifying periodical authors
        New software packages for the presentation of periodical research and analysis
        Models of good practice in teaching and learning with periodicals and newspapers
        Student publishing – selection, editing and curation of periodicals projects
        Building learning communities for staff and students to enhance knowledge of the nineteenth century press
        Debates about the emergence of an alternative ‘digital’ canon of periodicals and newspapers
        Digital literacy/digital competency in accessing periodicals online

Please submit completed manuscripts by 1st July 2014 (for publication in 2015) in Word (no PDFs please) to C.L.Horrocks@ljmu.ac.uk

In the meantime, informal queries or expressions of interest are welcome.

Thursday 4 July 2013

CfP: 'Decadence and the Senses', Goldsmiths, 10-11 April 2014

Decadence and the Senses, An Interdisciplinary Conference
Goldsmiths, University of London, 10 – 11 April 2014

Keynote Speaker: Catherine Maxwell (Queen Mary, University of London)

From the perfumed verse of Baudelaire to the ‘fleshly’ poetry of Swinburne, from the extravagant and perverse sensory experiences of Des Esseintes in A Rebours to the refined visual aesthetics of Dorian Gray, we encounter corresponding senses (synaesthesia) and extreme sensations, intensified by nervous or pathological psychological states.  Reading Decadence, from ancient times to the present day, is to indulge in voluptuous pleasures (and pain), to sample exotic tastes and sounds, and to envisage states of mind in highly visual terms.  ‘For each emotion’, as Oscar Wilde imagined for his drama, Salomé (1894), ‘a new perfume’.

This interdisciplinary conference explores the relationship of Decadence and the senses, and the ways in which Decadent writers attempt to capture fleeting sensations.  It is an opportunity to trace common visual, aural and ‘perfumed’ motifs in Decadent works, and to reflect on the extent to which the senses are important to our understanding of the tradition.

We welcome proposals on any aspect of Decadence and the senses.  Papers (about 20 mins in length) might include discussion of:

sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch
decadent objects: fur, perfume, jewels
correspondences
synaesthesia
kinaesthesia
hypersensitivity and hypersensuality
nerves and nervousness
perception
pleasure and pain
hypersexuality and erotomania
appetite and femininity
feasts
fecal, feral, floral
bodily fluids
perversity
dream states and memory
invention and ornamentation
symbolism
nature and the organic
artifice
altered states
decay and degeneration
deliquescence

Abstracts of 500 words plus brief biography should be sent to: decadence2014@gold.ac.uk by 31st December 2013

For further details and updates please see the website: decadence2014.wordpress.com

Wednesday 3 July 2013

CfP: 'Liberty and Limits 1789-1920', Macquarie Uni, 5-6 Dec 2013


Call for Papers
'Liberty and Limits 1789-1920', Macquarie University, Sydney
 5-6 December 2013
Abstracts due 1 August 2013


Keynote speakers
Professor Nancy Armstrong (Duke), Professor Deirdre Coleman (Melbourne), Professor David Punter (Bristol)
The long nineteenth century was inaugurated by the French Revolution and closed in the aftermath of the First World War. In Britain the intervening period was marked by a dialectic compounded of sub-revolutionary change and processes of containment. In all cultural fields new modes of knowledge, theories, and aesthetic forms emerged. The Romantics and Victorians inherited the discursive energies of the eighteenth century in terms of the ways in which literary and other forms of writing were lauded or vilified as intervention, catalyst, palliative or purge. The energy of this period was enacted as much through writing and reading as through empire building and military/mercantile expansion. We invite papers that engage with all aspects of cultural change – including evolution, excess, experimentation, nostalgia, suppression, dissent.

Themes addressed can include, but are not confined to, the following:

Material print culture and new modes of dissemination of information
Literary revolutions
Life writing and the private as public performance
The modern city
The fin de siècle and the emergence of Modernism
Gender/sexual identity
Class mobility/instability
Industrialisation
Anglophone writing and readership
Self-help and social mobility
Romantic and Victorian poetics
Crime and detection
Policing
Juvenilia
The rise of children’s literature
Education and literacy
Evolutionary theory and social Darwinism
The marketplace and the birth of the consumer
Science and technology
Celebrity authorship as cultural phenomenon
The changing nature of readership
The politics of Empire
Photography/ images
Cultural and literary antecedents
Afterlife: Steampunk and neo-Victorian narratives, the long nineteenth century in film adaptations

Date: 5-6 December 2013
Venue: MGSM, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

Please send 300 word abstracts by 1 August to: libertyandlimits@mq.edu.au

Thursday 20 June 2013

Gaskell Journal Graduate Student Essay Prize: Deadline 10 January 2014

The Gaskell Journal
Joan Leach Memorial Graduate Student Essay Prize 2014

Deadline for submissions: January 10th 2014

The Gaskell Journal runs a biennial Graduate Student Essay Prize in honour of Joan Leach MBE, founder of the Gaskell Society.

Aims of the Prize
The essay competition is open to all graduate students currently registered for an MA or PhD in Victorian Studies. Entries are welcome which consider Gaskell's writings within Victorian cultural, religious, aesthetic and scientific debates, and which have an inter-disciplinary aspect. Also welcome are essays which offer innovative and focused close readings of Gaskell's works, including those enlightened by critical theory.
In all cases, clarity of argument and control of expression are paramount, and the essay must clearly offer an original contribution to the field of Gaskell studies.
The Prize
The winning essay will be published in The Gaskell Journal and its author will receive £200 from the Gaskell Society, and a complimentary copy of the Journal. High quality submissions other than the winner will also be considered for publication in the journal.
Conditions
Essays should be no longer than 7,000 words, and not under consideration for publication elsewhere. We request that you use the MHRA system of referencing, with endnotes rather than footnotes.
Judging
Essays will be judged by members of The Gaskell Journal Editorial Board, with the final decision being made from a shortlist by a leading scholar in Gaskell studies.

IMPORTANT: All judging will be anonymous. Please keep your name and affiliation separate from your article. Complete the below form, and send with your anonymised essay to The Gaskell Journal editor, Rebecca Styler rstyler@lincoln.ac.uk by/on January 10th 2014. All entrants will be informed of the outcome of their submission. These details are also available though the journal website:www.gaskelljournal.co.uk

Friday 14 June 2013

Call for Abstracts: 'Fire Stories' Symposium, University of Melbourne, 4-6 December 2013

Call for Abstracts: 'Fire Stories' Symposium presented by The Australian Centre, The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800) and The University of Melbourne.

Full-size PDF of poster available here.


Confirmed keynote speakers:

Dr Danielle Clode (Flinders University), Professor Bill Gammage (Australian National University), Associate Professor Alan Krell (College of Fine Arts, UNSW), Associate Professor Pablo Mukherjee (University of Warwick).

A source of survival, comfort and terror, humans have struggled to control and harness fire since its discovery tens of thousands of years ago. This symposium will address emotional responses to fires in literature and history, looking particularly at how the fleeting destruction of a blaze is conveyed in narrative terms. Participants will be invited to consider a dialogue between ancient and modern representations of fire (including the mythical) and the affective responses that they evoke. Speakers are also encouraged to address the role that fictional representations of burning landscapes or cityscapes can play in the aftermath of a major disaster.

Topics may include:
• fire and mythology
• disaster narratives/environmental  catastrophe
• The ecology of fire
• Representations of bushfires/wildfires
• Climate change
• performing fire/ the aesthetics of fire
• The poetics of the flame
• fire in the colonies
• sati
• fire and colonial settlers
• indigenous representations of fire
• fire and childhood
• fire and folklore
• fire and national identity
• firescapes and emotions
• psychological responses to fires
• survivor stories
• fire and memory
• Artefacts/conservation
• Trauma
• Arson/pyromania
• Campfires
• The domestic hearth
• destruction/reconstruction

Please send abstracts to: fire-stories@unimelb.edu.au  by no later than August 31st 2013.

Please note that the conference will  incorporate a symposium to be convened by the Australian Centre, on species:  ‘Narrative, Indigeneity, Ecology’. This  symposium will take place on Wednesday December 4 and a program will be released  in due course. Confirmed keynote speaker: Professor Ursula Heise (UCLA).

Monday 10 June 2013

CfP: Special Issue of Victorian Review, "Victorians and Risk" (Deadline 1 Sept. 2013)

Victorian Review seeks proposals for articles for a special issue on “Victorians and Risk,” to be published in Fall 2014 and guest edited by Dr. Daniel Martin.

Since the publication of Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society (1992), sociologists and historians have interrogated the frequency of risks of all kinds in modern life: railway accidents, colliery explosions, natural and industrial catastrophes, spills, fires, and collisions, among countless others. However, the emergence of risk as a sociological and economic reality of everyday life in the nineteenth century still lacks significant scholarly theorizing in the humanities. Current scholarship about Victorian contributions to a modern “risk society” requires a sustained dialogue about how the Victorians conceived of accidents, disasters, catastrophes, and risks of all kinds beyond the limited scope of the local. For this issue, we seek papers that address such a dialogue through analysis of Victorian culture’s fascinations with and anxieties about risky activities, behaviors, industries, legalities, philosophies, and forms of expression.

In general, risks have a peculiar temporality. To “run a risk” is to operate in that space between the historian or statistician and the prophet or sage, to exist in a present moment that requires a continual reconsideration of simple linear or chronological time. Risks mark themselves off against past accumulations of data and past accidental phenomena, but they also anticipate spaces and developments for future prevention. We seek original essays that attempt to situate such theoretical and abstract notions of risk within literary, historical, and cultural contexts. We are especially interested in essays that draw connections between specific risk events and Victorian theorizing about the constantly accumulating risks and accidental phenomena of modern life.    

Interested scholars may wish to develop their ideas according to the following topics:
* Risk and the Victorian railway network
* Representations of accidents in the Victorian press
* Risk and Victorian theories of temporality
* The subjectivity/performance of risky activities and behaviors
* Victorian insurance and the origins of risk management
* Insurance frauds and risky business
* The phenomenology of bodies at risk
* Risk, athletics, and bodily performance/techniques
* Risk and the limits of the body
* Risky bodies and the origins of statistical personhood
* Rethinking, revising, reevaluating the notion of a “risk society”
* Risks in their local and global contexts
* Genres of risks and genres of the accidental
* Risk and the periodical press
* Danger, affliction, and disability
* Transformations in Victorian concepts of space and time
* Industrial or human-made disasters and catastrophes
* Risk and catastrophic thinking in Victorian social theory
* Risk and decadence/ the aesthetics of risk

Please submit abstracts of 500 words or address enquiries to Dr. Daniel Martin (dmartin@wlu.ca) by Sept 1, 2013. Final essays will be due by Feb 1, 2014.

Monday 29 April 2013

CfP: AVSA 2014 Conference, 'Victorian Transport'

William Powell Frith, The Railway Station (1862). Royal Holloway College, London.
Australasian Victorian Studies Association Annual Conference
'Victorian Transport', Hong Kong, 10-12 July 2014
http://www.english.hku.hk/events/victoriantransport/

The Victorian Age is one of mobility and of transportation: goods, people and money were transported within Great Britain, across Europe, and to the far reaches of Empire. Ideas – whether economic, political, educational, religious or philosophical – were imported and exported. And far from being unemotional, the Victorians were also regularly ‘transported’ by emotions which doctors, scientists and psychologists tried to theorise.

This conference seeks to redefine the parameters of transport through inter-disciplinary approaches to material, metaphorical and metaphysical journeys during the Victorian era. Papers on global crossings are particularly welcome.

Keynote speakers: 
Stephen Davies (Hong Kong Maritime Museum)
Josephine McDonagh (King’s College, London)
Peter McNeil (University of Technology, Sydney)

Topics might include but are not limited to:

  • Transporting people, transporting goods
  • Modes of Transportation
  • Intellectual transport
  • Trade and trafficking
  • Penal colonies
  • Theorising ‘transport’
  • Theories of the emotions
  • Women and transport
  • Transport, its politics and policies
  • Transatlantic and Transpacific transportation
  • Transference and the subconscious
  • Dreams and Telepathy
  • Transporting and translating literature abroad
  • Transport hubs/ urban development 
  • Speed
  • Transportive music
  • Landscape and environment
  • Immobility
  • Time Travel
  • Neo-Victorian Transport

A special section of the conference calls for papers on Victorian Transport related to China and the ‘China-West’ axis. Please signal in your application whether you would like your paper to be considered for inclusion in any of these ‘China’ or ‘China-West’ panels.

Five postgraduate travel bursaries (also applicable to SWIFs) will be awarded by the Conference Committee, on the basis of need and merit. Please include a short covering letter and cv in your application for such funding.

Abstracts of up to 300 words, together with your biodata (ca. 100-150 words), should be sent to: avsa2014@hku.hk. 
Deadline for Abstracts: 30 November 2013. Notification by end-January 2014.



Saturday 30 March 2013

CFP: Neo-Victorianism and Globalisation (2014 special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies)


Neo-Victorianism and Globalisation:
Transnational Dissemination of Nineteenth-Century Cultural Texts
2014 Special Issue of Neo-Victorian Studies

This special issue seeks to explore the rise and the scope of the globalisation of neo-Victorianism. We are witnesses today to a transnational spread of all things Victorian verging on ‘Victorianomania’, where different elements of nineteenth-century literature and material culture are continuously translated, adapted and recycled for contemporary use. On the one hand, the re-visioned revival of popular genres of the nineteenth century is evident in a spate of neo-Victorian novels that re-visit Victorian fiction in terms of style and content as well as rethink the narrative format of the eponymous ‘loose, baggy monsters’. Whether they are playful investigations of cosmopolitanism within the history of globalised economy – as depicted in Amitav Ghosh’s The Sea of Poppies – or of transatlantic narratives and cultural connections between Victorian London and the contemporary US cityscape – as in HBO’s TV series The Wire – neo-Victorian fictions engage not only with nineteenth-century narrative pace and plotting but also with the period’s cross-fertilised popular genres. At the same time, the plethora of TV, film, video games, graphic novels, fashion and interior design adaptations and appropriations of Victorian art, literature and culture are clearly influenced by the global market, testifying to the impact of the ever-spreading ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins 2006). This special issue aims to chart the patterns and politics of neo-Victorianism’s transnational production and dissemination.

Some of the key questions Neo-Victorianism and Globalisation seeks to address are:

· To what extent can we talk about the process of translating elements of nineteenth-century literature and culture into contemporary media as ‘neo-Victorianism’ outside of the Anglo-American context?

· How does nostalgia inform/deform the relationship between appropriated Victorian narrative forms and their global circulation?

· What political dynamics underlie the transnational dissemination of the ‘(neo-) Victorian’, both as a term and concept, and what are its ideological implications?

· How broadly can ‘neo-Victorian’ be expanded as a generic term before it loses its critical value?

· Does neo-Victorianism run the risk of being construed as a form of cultural imperialism?

· How does postcolonialism contest and/or intersect with trans- and multiculturalism in neo-Victorian remediations of the nineteenth-century past?

· How can attention to multiple (national, ethnic, and cultural) publics and markets avoid totalising ‘neo-Victorianism’ as a monolithic concept?

· Which particular Victorian genres (such as Gothic, detection or sensation fiction), predominate in different neo-Victorian media and cultural contexts and why?

· What unacknowledged, potentially discriminatory or disabling mechanisms may be discerned in neo-Victorian critical discourse (e.g. Anglo-American/Euro-centrism, Western-focused trauma discourse, new forms of sexism, etc.)?

Please address enquiries and expressions of interest to the guest editors Antonija Primorac at primorac@ffst.hr and Monika Pietrzak-Franger at pietrzak@anglistik.uni-siegen.de. Completed articles and/or creative pieces, along with a short biographical note, will be due by 15 October 2013 and should be sent via email to the guest editors, with a copy to neovictorianstudies@swansea.ac.uk. Please consult the NVS website (submission guidelines) for further guidance.

NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA Venice Conference Registration

Just a reminder for those attending the combined NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA conference, 'The Global and the Local' in Venice, that attendees need to ensure that they have paid their membership fees to their relevant association in order to register. Details of how to join or renew your membership to AVSA are available at the AVSA website. Please note that if you registered for the 2013 AVSA conference in Melbourne, then you are already an AVSA member for this year and do not need to pay a separate membership fee.

Thursday 21 March 2013

CfP Reminder: BAVS 2013, 'Victorian Numbers', 29-31 August


Victorian Numbers: British Association for Victorian Studies Annual Conference: 29-31 August 2013

Keynote Speakers: Alice Jenkins (University of Glasgow); Michael Hatt (University of Warwick); Mary Poovey (New York University); Theodore Porter (University of California, Los Angeles)
The BAVS conference 2013 will be held at Royal Holloway, University of London which was founded by the Victorian entrepreneur and philanthropist Thomas Holloway at Egham, Surrey in 1886. The College and the nearby former Holloway Sanatorium are products of surplus wealth accumulated in the course of Holloway’s activities as financier, in the large-scale manufacture of patent medicines, and in mass marketing – including advertising to Britain’s overseas colonies. While its theme reflects these institutional origins, the Conference aims to explore the relevance of numbers to nineteenth-century studies in a wide variety of ways. We welcome proposals for papers and panels which speak to the interdisciplinary conference theme broadly and innovatively.
Call for Papers
- Mass culture, mass politics and reform; crowds, population, over population; Malthus and Darwin; proliferation and extinction; the residuum and the best circles.
- Collecting and cataloguing; replication; periodicals and serials; prosody and metre; music and rhythm; architecture and proportion; sequence and sequels.
- Mathematics; statistics; geometry; time and technology; timetables and navigation; mass mobility; computation; money; finance and economics.
- The one and the many; duration; the infinite; age and aging.
- Research methodologies in the digital era; quantitative and qualitative; corpus linguistics; periodization; information overload.
Deadline for abstracts: 28th March 2013. Please submit all abstracts to BAVS2013@gmail.com. Visit our blog http://BAVS2013.wordpress.com for regular updates, downloads, and discussion pages. Enquiries about proposing themed panels can be sent to ruth.livesey@rhul.ac.uk or juliet.john@rhul.ac.uk.

Friday 1 March 2013

CFP: Special AJVS neo-Victorian edition





Call for Papers: Special Edition of the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies on Neo-Victorianism

The Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies (AJVS) invites submissions for a special edition on Neo-Victorianism to be published in September 2013. AJVS is a fully refereed journal published by the Australasian Victorian Studies Association, with articles covering topics as diverse as archaeology, architecture, art, economics, history, literature, medicine, philosophy, print culture, psychology, science, sociology and theatre appearing in its pages.

The past decade has seen  increasing scholarly interest in what Marie-Luise Kohlke, editor of Neo-Victorian Studies, calls "the afterlife of the nineteenth century in the cultural imaginary". This edition aims to contribute to the growing interdisciplinary dialogue about the ways in which the Victorian period is re-imagined in contemporary culture. The guest editor invites research papers on any aspect of the neo-Victorian, including, but not limited to:
  • Neo-Victorian literature, popular fiction, graphic novels and comic books;
  • Film, television and dramatic adaptations of Victorian literature;
  • Steampunk fiction, art and fashion;
  • Neo-Victorianism and cultural conservatism;
  • Neo-Victorianism and its significance for Victorian Studies;
  • Nostalgia and remembering;
  • Gender, sexuality and class politics and neo-Victorianism.
Papers of no more than 7,000 words in length should be emailed as a Word document with an accompanying abstract of approximately 200 words to Dr Michelle Smith, msmith[at]unimelb.edu.au by 1 April 2013.
Author guidelines are available at the journal site.

Tuesday 26 February 2013

Call for Papers: Neo-Victorian Cultures, Liverpool, 24-26 July 2013


NEO-VICTORIAN CULTURES: THE VICTORIANS TODAY, LIVERPOOL JOHN MOORES UNIVERSITY
Conference website


While aesthetic, political and artistic returns to the Victorians have been prevalent throughout the twentieth century, the last decade has seen a particular surge in scholarly work addressing the seemingly ceaseless desire to reassess and adapt Victorian texts, theories, ideas and customs. Such work has focused in particular on manifestations of the neo-Victorian on page and on screen; this conference seeks to build on but also expand these debates by bringing together writers, practitioners and researchers working on the lasting presence of the Victorians since 1901 in a wide variety of realms, ranging from art and architecture to science, politics, economics, fiction and film. In doing so, the event aims to further expand the vibrant field of neo-Victorian studies both within and beyond the arts and humanities through an examination of the Victorians’ continuing influence on twentieth and twenty-first century culture. We therefore welcome and encourage abstracts from postgraduate students, academics and independent researchers from all academic realms in the hope of capturing the diverse work being done on Victorian afterlives across a wide spectrum of disciplines and across traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Topics may include, but are by no means limited to, the following:
* the ethics, politics and aesthetics of adaptation
* neo-Victorianism in contemporary politics and economics
* the gender and sexual politics of neo-Victorianism
* neo-Victorianism on page, screen and canvas
* neo-Victorian subcultures
* the Victorians in contemporary architecture, art and design
* neo-Victorian journalism/ the Victorian press and contemporary journalism
* the Victorians in contemporary science and medicine
* the neo-Victorian canon
* teaching neo-Victorianism
* the neo-Victorian marketplace; consuming and marketing the (neo-)Victorians
* Steampunk

Presentations should take the form of 20-minute papers. We also welcome proposals for fully-formed panels or roundtables. For individual papers, please submit a 300-word abstract as well as a short biographical note. For panel and roundtable proposals, please provide a brief outline of the session’s aims together with abstracts and biographical notes for each speaker and for the proposed panel chair or discussant. All proposals should be emailed to the organisers at organisers@neovictoriancultures.org.uk no later than
1 March 2013 (NB: Organisers will consider later submissions from AVSA members)
. Please do not hesitate to email us if you have any questions about the event.

Monday 25 February 2013

Welcome to the AVSA blog!

AVSA has just enjoyed another successful annual conference at the University of Melbourne. At the Annual General Meeting, members agreed that AVSA ought to have a blog to complement its website and Facebook page. The blog will be a simple and accessible way for Victorianists within Australasia and beyond to keep up with AVSA activities (specifically our journal, the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies), calls for papers, conference news and new book announcements. 

If you would like to forward an item for inclusion on the AVSA blog, please email your submission to avsablog[at]gmail.com