CFP: NAVSA 2016, 'Social Victorians', Phoenix, AZ (2-5 November 2016) [Deadline 1 February 2016]

Social Victorians
November 2-5, 2016
Sheraton Phoenix Downtown Hotel, Phoenix, AZ


Keynote Speakers:
Gowan Dawson, University of Leicester,Caroline Levine, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a panel commemorating the anniversary of Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians

The Conference Committee for the 2016 annual NAVSA conference invites proposals for papers and panels on the subject of Social Victorians.

What does it mean to speak of the social in the Victorian era? In what ways were the Victorians social, antisocial, or both at once? What definitions of sociability circulated during the period, and through which structures? What models of sociability vyed, prevailed, and emerged? Topics might include:

Social frameworks and models
Kinship, familial and personal relationships (e.g., friendship, courtship, marriage)
Religion and the social
Social class/economic class and the mingling of classes
Regional, national, and cosmopolitan concepts of sociability
Comparative, revisionary, and colonial forms of the social

Empire as a social or anti-social force
The social in “other” cultures
The transcultural social
Social traditions, rituals, events, displays, and gatherings

Holidays and birthdays
Illness, death, funerals, and practices of mourning and remembrance
International exhibitions as social and socializing sites
Problematic and contested concepts of the social

Antisocial behaviors (e.g., neglect, abuse)
The criminal, deviant, revolutionary, unladylike/unmanly, and un-English
Paranoia, agoraphobia, xenophobia, and social anxiety
Social networks and organizations

Archiving/digitizing as a social form
Academic, scientific, professional, social clubs, societies, organizations, political parties, and advocacy
Social discipline, control, and punishment

Familial models of empire (e.g., mother country)
Restrictions, modifications, and surveillance of the social (e.g., through government, policing, penal system)
Explicit directions for sociability (e.g., etiquette manuals, signs/notices, finishing schools)
Implicit social instruction (e.g., education, legal system, media)
Bans, erasures, gaps, and silences on alternate social forms
Non-human social relations, interactions, and exchange

Sociable objects (and the human)
Sociable non-human animals (exclusive and inclusive of human animals)
Social spaces (e.g., drawing rooms, ballrooms, parks, hotel lobbies, museums, galleries, exhibitions, lecture halls, advertising, the press)
Social ephemera (e.g., visiting cards, menus, invitations)
Art as a social form

Collaboration, editing, publishing, and marketing
Reading and writing practices
The socializing function of the arts, arts criticism, art displays, and spectating (e.g., exhibitions, performances)
Visual, aural, and literary depictions of socialization and marginalization

The deadline for paper and panel submissions is February 1, 2016. For individual papers, submit 250-word paper proposals, along with a one-page CV. For entire panels, submit the above for each paper, as well as a one-page summary of the panel.

CFP: RSVP 2016 Conference: Bigger, Better, More! (deadline 1 Feb 2016)

CFP: Research Society for Victorian Periodicals
BIGGER, Better, More! — Growth and Expansion in the Victorian Press

University of Missouri-Kansas City, September 9–10, 2016

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals invites proposals for its 2016 conference on the theme of growth and expansion in the Victorian press. We encourage broad interpretation of what “Bigger, Better, More!” means for Victorian newspapers and magazines, with possible topics including:

Proliferation of news events, headline stories, scandals
Serialization, sequels, symposia, rejoinders, recurring columns
Developments in printing technology, formats, editorial vision
Increased readership, population, urban and imperial expansion
Economic growth, profits, investments, windfalls, boom-and-bust cycles
Excess, hyperbole, filler
Malignant growth, plagues, floods, parasites
Natural growth, plants, parks, green spaces
Education, maturation, age, experience, longevity
Emerging taxonomies, catalogs, indexes, censuses
Developing networks, movements, professional and amateur organizations, bureaucracies
Growth of periodical studies, methodologies, pedagogies, archives

RSVP is an interdisciplinary and international organization welcoming all scholars interested in the richly diverse world of the 19th-century British press. Please send a proposal (250 words maximum) and one-page CV to rs4vp2016@gmail.com by February 1, 2016. Individual presentations should be fifteen to twenty minutes, and proposals for panels of three are welcome; be sure to include a brief rationale for the panel along with an abstract and CV for each presenter. A limited number of travel grants will be awarded to graduate students and independent scholars; please indicate in your email if you would like to be considered for one of these grants.

We are pleased to announce that the eighteenth annual Michael Wolff Lecture will be given by James Mussell, Associate Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds and author of Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press (2007) and The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age (2012). The RSVP conference also features the Robert and Vineta Colby Lecture, given by the winner of the Colby Prize for the year’s best book on the Victorian press. This year’s recipient will be announced in spring 2016.

The University of Missouri-Kansas City is a vibrant public research institution located in the heart of the city. It is walking distance to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, built on the estate of a nineteenth-century newspaper tycoon. The museum houses one of the world's largest collections of daguerreotypes. Attendees will find lodging on the Country Club Plaza, an outdoor retail and dining destination, the first of its kind when it was established in 1922. Nearby is historic Westport, site of a Civil War battle and final stop on the way to the Western Frontier, with its many locally owned eateries, live music venues, and funky shops.

For more information, please visit the conference website: rsvp2016-kc.com.

Find RSVP on the web at rs4vp.org and follow us on Twitter @RS4VP, #RSVP2016.

CFP: 2016 AVSA Conference Stream at AHA Conference, Ballarat, 7-9 July 2016 (Deadline 3/2/16)

Call for papers: AVSA 2016, "Victorian Margins",  Ballarat, Victoria, 7-9 July 2016 (Abstracts due 3 Feb 2016)
Keynote speaker:  Prof. Joseph Bristow (UCLA)

In 2016, AVSA will join the Australasian Historical Association conference in Ballarat from 5-8 July, with a stream of AVSA papers and Keynote scheduled on 7-8 July, and a program of local sightseeing on Sat 9 July.  This is a welcome opportunity to connect with Australasian colleagues in history with shared interests in the long 19th century, and for AVSA members to visit one of Australia's finest Victorian cities. The conference will be held in Ballarat's historical precinct.  Delegates may wish to allow time to explore local sites such as the Ballarat Mechanics' Institute's extensive library of 19th-century books, periodicals and newspapers.

AVSA's Keynote Speaker will be Professor Joseph Bristow (UCLA), on “Homosexual Blackmail in the 1890s,” drawing on research for his new study of Oscar Wilde’s two criminal trials.
Papers (20 minutes) or panel proposals (2-3 papers) are invited on the AVSA conference theme ‘Victorian Margins’ – some possible angles include:
• geographic margins (in the UK; in the Empire; elsewhere)
• marginalised groups (marginalised by ethnicity; class; sexuality; region; nationality)
• temporal margins (1830s; fin de siecle)
• marginalised forms of culture
• economic margins (profits and losses; costs and benefits)
• margins as gaps
• margins as liminal spaces
• marginal values
• marginalia
• margins and centres

The AVSA stream committee welcomes papers relating to Victorian Margins from any discipline in the humanities. Proposals consisting of an abstract (400 words), together with a brief author bio/note of affiliation (particularly for postgraduates) , should be submitted to Meg Tasker m.tasker@federation.edu.au by Wednesday 3 February 2016.

Those who would like to have their papers considered for an issue of the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies on the theme, please indicate this with your abstract and aim to have the paper in a suitable form for publication as well as oral delivery by the time of the conference.  Thanks!

The Australian History Association theme is ‘From Boom to Bust.’ AVSA members may offer papers on either theme, or neither, but all paper-givers must be financial members of either AVSA or AHA.  Registration details available early in 2016, and venues will be in Ballarat CBD.

Please note that this joint conference is being organised by the Collaborative Research Centre for Australian History at Federation University, with Dr Jolanta Nowak as Administrative Officer.  General enquiries to:  aha2016@federation.edu.au please.