CFP: WSECS 2010: “The Arts of Enlightenment and the Digital Archive,” Las Vegas

UPDATE: This Conference has been canceled by the organizers:

“Due to scheduling conflicts, competing conferences (including CAA), and budgetary considerations, we have regrettably been forced to cancel the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies meeting planned for February 12-14, 2010. We hope to have selected a venue for the 2011 conference to be announced at the upcoming ASECS meeting. Thanks and apologies to all who submitted proposals.”

The Arts of Enlightenment and the Digital Archive
Annual Meeting of the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
February 12-13-14, 2010
President’s Day Weekend
Las Vegas, Nevada

WSECS invites presentations on a variety of interdisciplinary topics for its 2010 conference at UNLV in Las Vegas. If you would like to present a paper or chair a panel, please submit a proposal to Prof. Janet White (janet.white@unlv.edu). Deadline for submission is January 4, 2010. Authors of selected submissions will be notified by January 15, 2010. Please note that if your proposal is accepted, you will need to register for the conference through UNLV Educational Outreach. Those who submit paper or panel proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference attendees who do not intend to present papers may register at any time.

For more information and a more detailed call for papers, see http://faculty.unlv.edu/jwhite

CFP: International Byron Society Conference: “Byron and the Book,” Boston 2010

SAVE THE DATE and CALL FOR PAPERS

 

BYRON AND THE BOOK
The 36th International Byron Society Conference
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
26-31 July 2010

‘Tis pleasant, sure, to see one’s name in print;
A Book’s a Book, altho’ there’s nothing in’t.
- Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers

The Byron Society of America is pleased to announce the 36th International Byron Society Conference, Byron and the Book, which will examine Byron’s place in print culture. The conference will be held at Northeastern University, Houghton Library (the principal rare books and manuscripts library of Harvard University), the Boston Athenaeum, and other cultural venues in greater Boston, from Monday, 26 July, through Saturday, 31 July 2010.

Academic sessions might include: Byron’s Reading; Byron’s Readership; Byron as Bibliophile; Byron’s American Reputation; Byron and His Publishers; Byron’s Illustrators; Images of Byron; Byron in Translation; Byron in Fiction; Byron and Contemporary Poetry; Byron on Film; Editing Byron; Byron Online; Collecting Byron; Byron and the Bible; Byron’s Textual History; Byron and the Romantic Book; Byron and the Book of the World; Byron and the Pirates; Byron and Forgery and In Memoriam: The Great Byronists. Proposals for papers on other aspects of Byron and the Book or for other sessions or round tables are welcome.

The academic organizing committee invites paper proposals for the conference. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes in length. Please send 250-word proposals by 15 February 2010 to Andrew Stauffer at: email or Department of English, University of Virginia, PO Box 400121, Charlottesville, VA 22904. Email submissions are preferred. Please include the subject line: Byron and the Book CFP. Please note that you must be a current member of a national Byron Society in order present a paper at the conference.  For example, American and Canadians submitting proposals should be members of the Byron Society of America.

The conference will coincide with a major Houghton Library exhibition entitled “Let Satire Be My Song”: Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, curated by Peter X. Accardo.

The conference organizers, Stuart Peterfreund, Northeastern University and Peter Accardo, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, will be announcing details about the conference over the next several months, so please check the website periodically at www.byronsociety.org.

The content of this email was provided by Peter Accardo.

CFP: Midwest Victorian Studies Conference: “Diverse Victorians,” Iowa City, April 2010

Diverse Victorians
Midwest Victorian Studies Association
Annual Conference
University of Iowa
April 23-25, 2010

We invite all Victorian scholars to MVSA’s 2010 conference to be hosted by the University of Iowa in Iowa City on April 23-25, 2010.  The theme for the Midwest Victorian Studies Conference’s thirty-fourth annual conference is “Diverse Victorians.”

We invite submissions of papers covering the full range of possible meanings of “Diverse Victorians,” including, but not limited to racial and ethnic differences; Great Britain’s “four nations”; class formation and class identity; discourses of normality and abnormality; foreigners in Britain; musical diversity; Victorian understandings of the diversity of species; the range of Victorian religion and the era’s smaller sects; diversity in the imperial context; the meaning of diversity to notions of citizenship; literary and artistic representations of diversity.

In keeping with the theme, our plenary address will be by Patrick Brantlinger, author of Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, and other works. Other special features include a concert of Victorian songs by baritone opera and concert singer Stephen Swanson and pianist Alan Huckleberry, and a program of Scottish dancing led by Anne Stapleton of the Stapleton School of Highland Dance in which conference participants can learn some steps. Even if you do not submit a paper, we hope you will attend this unique conference experience.

Located on a 1,900 acre campus on the Iowa River and home to 30,500 students, the University of Iowa was founded in 1847 as the nation’s first public university to admit men and women on an equal basis. Iowa City, one of three cities granted UNESCO’s label of “World City of Literature” (along with Edinburgh and Shenzhen), offers an array of bookshops, restaurants, parks and historical sites within walking distance of campus and the conference hotel (located in the Iowa House, facing the Iowa River). Further details about registration and the conference program will be posted on the website at
www.midwestvictorian.org.

Those interested in proposing papers or full panels should submit 500-word abstracts and vitas by November 15, 2009 to the Midwest Victorian Studies Association’s email: conferencesubmissions@midwestvictorian.org; if you receive no response, please re-send.

Victorianists studying and working in the midwestern or southern United States will want to make a home in this long-standing scholarly organization.  Graduate students are particularly welcome as attendees and presenters at MVSA conferences: conference fees are adjusted to make attendance more affordable, MVSA annually awards the Bill and Mary Burgan Prize for an outstanding paper by a graduate student at the conference, and the prestigious Arnstein Prize supports interdisciplinary dissertation research.  A new annual award for a first book by a Victorianist in the Midwest was inaugurated in 2008.

http://www.midwestvictorian.org/

CFP: “Southey and Romantic Contexts,” April 14-16, 2010, Keswick

CALL FOR PAPERS

SOUTHEY AND ROMANTIC CONTEXTS

14-16 April 2010

Keswick, Cumbria

A conference on the writers, people and issues with which Robert Southey was connected. Hosted at Keswick School and at Keswick Museum and Art Gallery, the conference offers three days of talking, dining and – if you wish – hiking in the heart of the Lake District.  Papers take place in a state-of-the-art conference centre next to Crosthwaite Church, under the slopes of Skiddaw.  Discussions continue in the evenings in Morrels’ restaurant and in the Dog and Gun (the best of Keswick’s many pubs).   Delegates will be able to take tea in Southey’s study in Greta Hall, his and Coleridge’s home, where ‘The Vision of Judgement’, ‘The Curse of Kehama’ and ‘Dejection: an Ode’ were written and the Immortality Ode was read aloud from manuscript.  There will also be a chance to view Keswick Museum and Art Gallery’s Southey holdings, which include manuscripts of poems and letters, and even his bookplate – a beautiful woodblock cut by the famous engraver Thomas Bewick.

We welcome proposals (max 200 words) for 20 minute papers on any topic or author in relation to Southey, our aim being to stimulate the widest
possible debate among Romanticists and scholars of nineteenth and twentieth century literature and culture.    Possible topics might include:

Hartley Coleridge, Sara Coleridge (wife and fille), Caroline Bowles, the Hutchinson family, Wordsworth, Malthus, Coleridge, Keats, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Shelley, Scott, De Quincey, Byron, Hazlitt, Lake Poets, Thelwall, Macaulay, Carlyle, Muldoon, Bristol literary culture, Scottish reviewers, Magazine/journal culture, Colonialism, Labouring-class writers, the Chivalric Romance, Politics of Conservatism/Radical
culture, Romantic religion, South/North America, Translation, Children’s literature, Travel-writing, History, the Napoleonic War, War
Poetry, Life-writing, Correspondence.

Keynote speakers to include:

• Professor M. Gamer, University of Pennsylvania
• Professor Alan Vardy, Hunter College, CUNY
• Dr Lynda Pratt, University of Nottingham

Please send proposals by 5 December 2009 to Dr Carol Bolton, Loughborough University C.J.Bolton@lboro.ac.uk

For further details, email tim.fulford@ntu.ac.uk

CFP: “Victorian Systems and Standardization” VSAO/ACCUTE, Montreal, May 28-31, 2010

Call for papers: “Victorian Systems and Standardization”

Joint Session: Victorian Studies Association of Ontario (VSAO) at the
Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE)
Conference 2010

Montreal, QC, Canada

May 28-31, 2010

 

Our little systems have their day.

- Tennyson

 

From the factory to the railway, the telegraph to the postal service, the
growth of empire to the establishment of national educational curricula, the
nineteenth century was marked by large-scale impositions of system, and by a
concurrent emphasis on the standardization of objects, concepts, and people.
This panel seeks to explore the imbrications of system and standardization
throughout the Victorian era, and to examine how the concept of rationalized
organization was imagined and understood by Victorians. How did the
generalized abstraction inherent in the process of standardization shape the
lived experience of individuals? What supra-individual needs were
anticipated in the construction of various kinds of system? To what extent
did the Victorians envisage a connection between systematization and
knowledge production?

Papers may focus on any occurrence of system or standardization during the
Victorian period, such as: genre as artistic standardization; disciplines
(scientific and otherwise); domestic conventions; bodies in systems;
heterodox and orthodox belief systems; formal and informal economies; the
aesthetics of system.

We are also interested in events and ideas that were explicitly figured as
resistances to system, such as: works of genius or inspiration; free love;
anarchy; mutiny.

Following the ACCUTE submission instructions (which can also be found at
http://www.accute.ca/joint.html#submit), please send your 700 word proposal
(or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word
biographical statement, and the submitter information form to
VSAOatACCUTE@gmail.com by November 15th. You must be a current ACCUTE member
or a member of VSAO to submit to this session.

This panel is being organized by Fiona Coll (University of Toronto) and
Constance Crompton (York University/Ryerson University). Please feel free to
send any panel-related questions you might have for us to the following
address: VSAOatACCUTE@gmail.com

CFP: VISAWUS: “Oceania and the East in the Victorian Imagination,” Honolulu 2010

The 15th Annual Conference of the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies
Association of the Western United States (Visawus) will be held in Honolulu,
Hawaii, October 28-30, 2010.

Conference theme: “Oceania and the East in the Victorian Imagination”

The conference will focus on the complex relationships between the
Victorians and the East, including India and China, Malaya and the East
Indies, Australia and New Zealand, and the South Sea Islands.  This
international conference will bring together specialists in Asian and
Victorian art history, literature, gender studies, science, history,
literature, politics, and biographical studies, among others, to explore how
the Victorians perceived the East, and how they were perceived in the East.
We invite paper proposals (300 word abstract plus 1-page CV) on political,
cultural, social, religious, artistic, scientific, economic, agrarian, and
other aspects of this rich interaction.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

Investors and the East                          Indigenous Women and English
Men

Australia in literature                             Art and the South Seas

South Seas and Paradise                      The marketing of Australia

Malays and the Anthropologists             The East and the Crystal Palace

The East and the Military                      Clash of Cultures and
Ecological Destruction

Settling in the South Seas                     The South Seas and World
Naval Politics

Cannibals and Paradise                         The Empire in Australian
Schools

Sex and the Sailor                                 Imperial Vision of the
Maori

Island Kings and the British Empress    Women Travelers in Oceania and the
East

Robert Louis Stevenson and Hawaii       The Scots in the Islands

For a complete CFP and more information about the conference and visawus,
please see our web site at www.Visawus.org

Deadline for abstracts to be emailed to Richard Fulton at Fulton@hawaii.edu
is March 19, 2010.

CFP: “Nature and the Long 19th-Century” Postgraduate Conference, Univ. of Edinburgh

CALL FOR PAPERS:
Nature and the long nineteenth century is a one-day interdisciplinary postgraduate conference exploring intersections of the natural world with nineteenth-century literature and culture.

University of Edinburgh, Saturday, 6 February 2010.

Keynote speakers:
Dr Martin Willis, University of Glamorgan,
Dr Christine Ferguson, University of Glasgow,
Professor Nick Daly, University College Dublin

In the twenty-first century, environmentalism and the impacts of climate change form a nexus of intense debates about relationship between human culture and the natural world. However, the centrality of the natural world to the nineteenth century imagination has long been acknowledged by scholars, way-marked by Lynn Merrill’s The Romance of Victorian Natural History (1989) for example, while Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (2002) demonstrates the relevance of nineteenth-century research to the modern world.

This conference probes the significance of nature to the long nineteenth century and to our study of its literature, history, science, art, and other media. How did the natural world influence people in the nineteenth century?and how did nineteenth-century culture shape attitudes to the natural world? Have twenty-first century questions over nature, climate, and the environment changed the way we view and study the cultural products of the nineteenth century, or offered new avenues for research, especially interdisciplinary research?

Postgraduate and early-career researchers are invited to submit 300 word proposals for 20 minute papers or proposals for panels to natureconference@ed.ac.uk by 16 November 2009. Please include a brief biog with your abstract.

For further information including the full call for papers and registration details, see: www.englit.ed.ac.uk/other/NatureConference/landingpage.htm.

Conference organisers:
Claire McKechnie, University of Edinburgh and Dr Emily Alder, Edinburgh Napier University.

CFP: 12th Coleridge Summer Conference, 21-28 July 2010

PROGRAMME RAPIDLY FILLING PLEASE SEND ABSTRACTS NOW …

Please go to our website for full details:

http://www.friendsofcoleridge.com/Conference.htm

‘The Genius of Coleridge’

— with a  genial emphasis, of course…

21-28 July 2010

Plenary Lecturers:   Paul Cheshire, David Fairer, Marilyn Gaull, Noel Jackson, Kiyoshi Nishiyama,  and Alan Vardy.

The 12th Coleridge Summer Conference will be held at the beautiful Clifford Hall at Cannington continuing our long established residence in Coleridge’s Somerset at the foot of the Quantock Hills. STC 2010 will present a full and stimulating programme of lectures, papers, walks, excursions, and convivial social gatherings.  The Conference tradition of avoiding ‘parallel sessions’ of papers continues in 2010.  The College’s extensive garden grounds will be available for all participants, and there are a variety of walks in the village and across the levels towards the River Parrett. Join us  for Coleridgean conversation and drinks under the stars on long balmy summer evenings.

The Conference Excursion in 2010 will be to Coleridge’s Clevedon by way of the National Trust property of Tyntesfield House. Alternatively, join guide Peter Larkin on a walk up to Cadbury Camp and along wooded ridges into the heart of Clevedon through byways Coleridge would have known to finish at the Victorian Pier.  It is hoped to call first at Brockley Coombe where there will be a reading of the poem.

Alex Alec-Smith will be present with her Romantics bookstall for academics, collectors, students and general readers.

Conference Format

STC 2010 will start on Wednesday 21 July with a 6:30 pm reception; the conference will close after breakfast on Wednesday 28 July.  For those coming to the conference for the first time, our outline programme on our web site (http://www.friendsofcoleridge.com/Conference.htm) sets out the format.

Costs

For STC 2010 we have kept the increase in fees to a minimum, just £50 more than STC 2008. The cost of attending the conference, including accommodation with ensuite bathroom and meals, will be £600 per person (£1100 for shared double accommodation), or £425 non-residential.

Call for Papers

Our Conference theme for 2010 is ‘The Genius of Coleridge’ and we  invite papers on all aspects of  Coleridge’s achievements.  We also welcome proposals for papers on poems by others in the Coleridge Circle.  As in previous Coleridge Conferences, the theme is non-exclusive, a suggested guideline only, and we will be pleased to see proposals for papers on all aspects of Coleridge and British Romanticism.

Proposals should be in the form of an abstract, not less than 200 and not more than 250 words in length, sent in the first instance as an e-mail attached document to the Academic Director, Nicholas Roe at  nhr@st-andrews.ac.uk, not later than 15 March 2010.  Confirmations will be sent by e-mail prior to 1 April 2010. PLEASE INCLUDE YOUR E-MAIL AND POSTAL ADDRESSES ON THE ABSTRACT ITSELF.  Those wanting confirmation before that date for funding purposes will be given a conditional response upon request.  A committee of the Conference organisers will consider all proposals.

Bursaries

We are committed to enabling graduate students, who would not otherwise be able to finance the cost of the conference, to come to this essential Coleridgean event, and are delighted to announce that Bursaries will be available for 2010. Two of our bursary awards for 2010 are generously funded by the Charles Lamb Society.  At STC 2008, Scholarships and Bursaries were awarded to ten graduate students, thanks to the generosity of the Charles Lamb Society and our other donors, especially the authors of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (OUP, 2001) who started the conference bursary fund by donating their royalties. For up to date information and news about STC 2010, including bursaries and online registration forms, please visit and return to the Friends of Coleridge Website at

http://www.friendsofcoleridge.com/Conference.htm

and click on the ‘Conference’ button. We look forward to welcoming you to Cannington next summer.

Nicholas Roe, Academic Director

Graham Davidson, Conference Secretary

Paul Cheshire, Hon. Treasurer, The Friends of Coleridge

CFP: 2010 British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) Conference: “Victorian Forms and Formations”

CFP:  British Association for Victorian Studies 2010 Conference :

‘Victorian Forms and Formations’

2-4 September 2010

University of Glasgow

The 2010 BAVS conference seeks to address the question of ‘form’, in all its varied meanings, in Victorian culture. We invite papers that address the topic of literary form, and that engage with current debates in the field over the return to form in literary criticism, but also wish to broaden the topic to encompass forms and formations in other disciplines, including but not limited to art history, science, architecture, politics, religion and history of the book. Papers might consider the role of different social and political groupings and institutions in the Victorian period, or the formation of a particular idea or discipline. They might deal with wide-ranging debates over varied attempts at reform in the nineteenth century, or could focus on the formation or reformation of the individual. Papers considering material forms, including the fashioning of the body in medical and other discourse, are welcome, as are papers on the physical features of the Victorian landscape: urban and rural spaces, natural forms and the built environment. We also invite papers that are concerned with the reworking of Victorian forms in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and culture.

Plenary speakers:

James Eli Adams
Matthew Campbell
Margaret Macdonald
Catherine Robson

A number of postgraduate bursaries will be available for postgraduate students presenting a paper at the conference or acting as a conference reporter. Please check this site in spring 2010 for details of how to apply.

Deadline for submission of abstract: 15 March 2010.  Please send a 200-word abstract to bavs@arts.gla.ac.uk

Suggested topics for consideration:
Poetic form* Narrative form* Generic formation* Neoformalism*  Political formations* Social reform* Educational reform* Scientific formations* Geological forms*  Religious formations* Imperial formations* Urban forms* Architectural form* Sculptural form* Domestic design* Intellectual formations* Forms of publication* Bodily formations* Gendered forms* Forms of conduct* Forming identities*  Moral forms*Neovictorian forms*

CFP: 2010 Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Conference at Yale

Call for Papers

“The Material Cultures of Periodicals”
Research Society for Victorian Periodicals
Annual Conference
Yale University, September 10-11, 2010

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) will hold its annual conference at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, September 10-11, 2010. Proposals for papers that address any aspect of nineteenth-century British magazines or newspapers will be welcome. This year, we particularly seek proposals dealing with the conference theme, “The Material Cultures of Periodicals,” including ones that integrate displays of related material, either from private collections or (by special arrangement with the conference host) from Yale’s libraries.

Please e-mail two-page (maximum) proposals for individual presentations or panels of three to RSVP2010@rs4vp.org.  Include a one-page C.V. with relevant publications, teaching, and/or coursework. The deadline for submissions is Feb 1, 2010. Final papers should take 15 minutes (20 minutes maximum) to present.

The program will also include a plenary speech named in honor of Michael Wolff and a presentation by the winner of the 2010 Colby Scholarly Book Prize. More information about the conference can be found at www.rs4vp.org.

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Ashgate Publishing, RSVP is able to award partial travel funding to three graduate student presenters. Graduate students who would like to be considered should include a cover letter explaining how their conference proposal fits into their long-term research plans as well as any other special considerations. Recipients will be notified in early spring 2010.

Victorians Institute Conference: this weekend at Converse College

The annual conference of the Victorians Institute will be held October 16-17, 2009 at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C.

The theme is “Creativity and the Arts in Victorian Culture,” and the keynote lecture will be given by Linda Peterson.

More information on the conference is available here:

http://www.converse.edu/vi/

William Godwin’s Diary: Web Project and Conference

A research team at the University of Oxford has been awarded a grant from the Leverhulme Trust to digitize the diary of William Godwin, located in the Abinger Collection in the Bodleian Library. The project will be directed by Mark Philp.

Project website: http://godwindiary.politics.ox.ac.uk/

The group will hold a conference in July 2010. The deadline for submissions (Oct. 1) has unfortunately just past. Speakers at the conference will include John Barrell, Luisa Calé, Julie Carlson, Greg Claeys, Pamela Clemit, Beth Lau, Jon Mee, Jane Moody, and Philip Schofield.

Reminder: NVSA Conference CFP: “Fighting Victorians”

Just a note to remind everyone that the deadline looms (October 15) for submissions to the 2010 Northeast Victorian Studies Association Conference, to be held at Princeton next April.

Here’s my original post of the CFP:

http://thehoarding.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/nvsa-conference-2010-fighting-victorians/

CFP: Re-Orienting Victorian Studies (AVSA; Singapore, June 2010)

Call for Papers (Deadline: 1 Feb 2010)

“Re-Orienting Victorian Studies”
25-27 June 2010
Keynote speaker:
Talia Schaffer (Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY)

The next annual conference of the Australasian Victorian Studies Association (AVSA) will take place on 25-27 June 2010 in Singapore, hosted by the Centre of the Liberal Arts & Social Sciences (CLASS) and the Division of English at Nanyang Technological University.
To mark this move to Asia, the theme of the conference held in 2010 will be “Re-Orienting the Victorians.” This “re-orientation” is intended to comprise any form of reformulation or re-conceptualisation of the field and its analysis, inviting redirections beyond geographical extensions of the long nineteenth century.

Keynote Speaker:

Talia Schaffer is an Associate Professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her books include Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (2006); an edition of Lucas Malet’s 1901 novel The History of Sir Richard Calmady (2004); The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (2001); and Women and British Aestheticism (1999), co-edited with Kathy A. Psomiades. She has published widely on late-Victorian noncanonical novels, women’s writing, and material culture. Her book in progress analyses the Victorian domestic handicraft as a model for mid-Victorian realism.

We invite submissions of papers covering the full range of possible meanings of a “re-orienting” of Victorian studies, including, but not limited to
-    Reconsidering “the long nineteenth century”
-    Directions and re-directions in literary culture
-    Disoriented Victorians
-    Being undirected, redirected, unsettled, resettled, or otherwise disturbed in Victorian literature
-    The orientations of the Victorian home / family
-    Literary, cultural, social, and geographical orientations, including the Victorians’ “Orient” reconsidered
-    Travel, emigration, settlement, and returns
-    new and redirected forms in Victorian literature, art, and culture
-    reworking/rewriting/

reorienting traditions in Victorian concepts of history, the arts, literature, and social practices (e.g. folklore, neo-medievalism, archaeology, &c.)
-    the orientations of Victorian realism, sensationalism, &c., including Gothic re-orientations of form
-    re-orienting the canon and the different orientations in traditional and new recovery work
-    re-orienting the Victorians and their literary legacies in neo-Victorian film and fiction
Those interested in proposing 20-minute papers or full panels (of three speakers, plus a chair) should submit 500-word abstracts and a 200-word bio by 1 February 2010 through the following website at http://portal.hss.ntu.edu..sg/AVSA_CFP.

Full details about the conference will also be posted on the website.

Contact Details

Conference convenor:
Dr Tamara Wagner
Division of English
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
NTU
Secretariat:

Ms Sitinur Ain Yuza
Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Email: d-class@ntu.edu.sg
Tel: (65) 65148382
Fax: (65) 6795 5119
Please use the portal for submissions. Should you have any specific queries about the nature of the conference, please direct them to
Divya Athmanathan
Email: divy0013@ntu.edu.sg
Esther Wang
Email: h090072@ntu.edu.sg
More general queries about the conference location, &c., please direct to d-class@ntu.edu.sg

CFP: 18th & 19th-C British Women Writers

CALL FOR PAPERS:

18TH ANNUAL 18TH- AND 19TH-CENTURY BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS CONFERENCE

“JOURNEYS”

Texas A&M University
April 8-11, 2010

Keynote Speakers: Kate Flint and Felicity Nussbaum
Plenary Panel Speakers: Mary Fissell, Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, and Erika Rappaport

This conference will explore the abundant varieties of journeys found in 18th- and 19th-century British women’s writings.  We encourage interdisciplinary considerations of topics such as migration, travel, exile, exploration, tourism, border crossing, religion, travel writing, art, fantasy, children’s literature and more.  Proposals for panels and individual papers might consider, but are not limited to, the following issues:

•        Travel writing/art
•        Biographical narratives
•        Marriage/Honeymoon
•        Continental tours
•        Philosophical/Scientific investigations
•        Motherhood/Childhood
•        Colonialism and Empire
•        Religious exploration/Spiritual awakenings
•        Transatlantic movement of persons, ideas, and/or goods
•        Memory as travel
•        Mapping the body
•        Rites of passage
•        (Dis)Orienting Sexuality
•        Crossing class boundaries
•        Exile (Social, Political, Familial)
•        Re-envisioning the past/Envisioning the future
•        Women and work
•        Education
•        Intertextuality
•        Movement between private and public spheres

Individual proposals should be two pages: a cover sheet including name, presentation title, university affiliation, address, e-mail address, phone number, and brief biographical paragraph; and a 500-word abstract.  Please do not include any identifying information on the abstract.

Panel proposals should include a coversheet—containing panel title, presenters’ names, presentation titles, university affiliations, addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, brief biographical paragraphs, and the name of a moderator—followed by separate abstracts (500-word) that describe the significance of the panel topic and each presentation.  Please do not include any identifying information on the abstracts.

Proposals must be submitted electronically as an attachment in .doc or .rtf format by October 15, 2009 to the conference e-mail address:
BWWC18@tamu.edu.

For more information and updates, please visit the conference website:  http://www-english.tamu.edu/bwwc18.

CFP: INCS 2010 at UT-Austin: “Family/Resemblance”

CALL FOR PAPERS:

INTERDISCIPLINARY NINETEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES CONFERENCE

University of Texas at Austin

25-27 March 2010

FAMILY/RESEMBLANCE

The 2010 Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) Conference invites proposals for papers and panels on Family/Resemblance in the 19^th Century.  The conference will consider how both family and resemblance were conceived/constructed in the 19^th century from multiple interdisciplinary perspectives, including and/or integrating Literature, History, Art History, Law, Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Philosophy, Music, Economics, and Theology.

Topics may include:

• extended families; metaphoric families
• evolution and Darwin
• replication, reproduction
• sexualities
• sisterhoods, brotherhoods
• sister arts and sibling rivalry
• portraiture and family; portraiture and resemblance
• mimesis, imitation, parody
• genealogies
• law and the family
• the animal family; animal resemblances
• cyborgs and robots
• photography
• maternity/paternity/patriarchy
• gender and family; the gender of family
• domesticity
• artistic/literary/historic families
• dynasties (monarchies, Napoleon)
• legitimacy/illegitimacy
• colonialism

Hosted on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, the 2010 INCS Conference will take place 25-27 March and will include a reception at the Harry Ransom Center and a plenary address by Elizabeth Helsinger, John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago.

Please submit 250 word abstracts by 1 November 2009 to Alexandra Wettlaufer at akw@mail.utexas.edu.  For more information on INCS, see www.nd.edu/~incshp/.  Selected conference papers will be published in Nineteenth-Century Contexts.

CFP: NEMLA panel on “The Ethics of Charity” in Victorian Era

Northeast Modern Language Association
April 7-11, 2010
Montreal, Quebec
www.nemla.org/convention

To Give or Not To Give: The Ethics of Nineteenth-Century Charity

In Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, Tony Weller, the disgruntled spouse of a charity woman, complains, “[W]ot aggrawates me, Samivel, is to see ‘em a wastin’ all their time and labour in making clothes for copper-coloured peoples as don’t want ‘em, and taking no notice of the flesh-coloured Christians as do.”  While we may be tempted to dismiss Weller’s position as xenophobic isolationism, his argument highlights the ways in which foreign and domestic charity may be understood as in competition.  To do good for one is to not do good for another, a position only furthered by perhaps Dickens’ most well-known do-gooder, Mrs. Jellyby, whose ambitious African projects come at the expense of at least one English family.

This panel will address the ethical considerations of nineteenth-century charity work to show where doing good is perhaps to do harm.  In Weller’s complaint, we can see that acts of charity often leave the charitable giver at a loss, trapped between wanting to do good in the world and the knowledge that any good act likely has unintended negative consequences.  While I am particularly interested in papers which address the relationships between the giving of “things” such as clothing, reading materials or even homes and the giving of immaterial instruction such as spiritual guidance and moral improvement, I am broadly interested in work which asks how the Victorian devotion to charity engages citizens’ allegiance to local and global political, ethnic and religious communities and how charity projects have been or might be constructed to benefit both the giver and receiver.  Please submit 250-word abstracts to Leslie Graff at leslie.graff@gmail.com by September 30, 2009.

CFP: “Victorian Forms and Formations:” BAVS Conference, University of Glasgow, September 2-4 2010

CFP:  British Association for Victorian Studies 2010 Conference :   ‘Victorian Forms and Formations’

September 2-4, 2010, University of Glasgow

The 2010 BAVS conference seeks to address the question of ‘form’, in all its varied meanings, in Victorian culture. We invite papers that address the topic of literary form, and that engage with current debates in the field over the return to form in literary criticism, but also wish to broaden the topic to encompass forms and formations in other disciplines, including but not limited to art history, science, architecture, politics, religion and history of the book. Papers might consider the role of different social and political groupings and institutions in the Victorian period, or the formation of a particular idea or discipline. They might deal with wide-ranging debates over varied attempts at reform in the nineteenth century, or could focus on the formation or reformation of the individual. Papers considering material forms, including the fashioning of the body in medical and other discourse, are welcome, as are papers on the physical features of the Victorian landscape: urban and rural spaces, natural forms and the built environment. We also invite papers that are concerned with the reworking of Victorian forms in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and culture.

Plenary speakers:

• James Eli Adams
• Matthew Campbell
• Margaret Macdonald
• Catherine Robson

A number of postgraduate bursaries will be available for postgraduate students presenting a paper at the conference or acting as a conference reporter. Please check this site in spring 2010 for details of how to apply.

Deadline for submission of abstract: 15 March 2010.  Please send a 200-word abstract to bavs@arts.gla.ac.uk

Suggested topics for consideration:
Poetic form* Narrative form* Generic formation* Neoformalism*  Political formations* Social reform* Educational reform* Scientific formations* Geological forms*  Religious formations* Imperial formations* Urban forms* Architectural form* Sculptural form* Domestic design* Intellectual formations* Forms of publication* Bodily formations* Gendered forms* Forms of conduct* Forming identities*  Moral forms*Neovictorian forms*

Dr Christine Ferguson
Department of English Literature
5/302 University Gardens
University of Glasgow
G12 8QQ
c.ferguson@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk

NASSR 2010: “Romantic Mediations”

The Eighteenth Annual North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Conference

ROMANTIC MEDIATIONS

August 18-22, 2010
Coast Plaza Hotel and Suites
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

The 2010 NASSR Conference is co-hosted by the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University in association with the University of Victoria.  The theme of the conference is ‘Romantic Mediations.’  The main focus is the communications technologies and print culture of the Romantic period.  But we also conceive of ‘mediation’ in a broadly metaphorical sense and look forward to papers on such topics as contacts between peoples and cultures, the tensions between bodies and minds, and the intersections of disciplines and forms of knowledge.

PLENARY SPEAKERS:

Heather Jackson (English, University of Toronto)
Iwan Rhys Morus (History, University of Wales at Aberyswyth)
Clifford Siskin (English, NYU) and William Warner (English, UCSB)

Please note that the conference will begin on a Wednesday evening with the first plenary and the opening reception.  We have decided to begin the conference on the Wednesday evening to avoid having panels on Sunday morning and to make room for the Annual General Meeting.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The organizers of the eighteenth annual NASSR conference, co-hosted by Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia, invite proposals from any discipline on the subject of Romantic Mediations.  A major Pacific Rim port, Vancouver marks the cultural intersections of the East and West and is a centre of both digital invention and environmental action—it is a city of meetings and mediations, broadly understood.   Similarly, the field of Romantic studies has been expanded and transformed by its engagements with the study of print culture, the histories of writing, technology, and scientific thought, the philosophy of mind and its environments, and the increased recognition of global movement.  The era that saw the invention of semaphore, telegraphy, the continuous-feed press, and the difference engine, the Romantic in all its senses might be characterized as a period of significant experimentation in media and ideas of mediation.  We imagine a conference that will engage the topic of mediation across a broad spectrum that includes materialist appreciation as well as theoretical inquiry—indeed, that emphasizes their meeting, or their mediations.

Possible Topics include:

* Communication and its Technologies
* The histories of writing and print
* Professionals and Amateurs
* Minds, Bodies, and Environments
* Culture and Nature
* Realities material and virtual
* Mediations of peoples and nations
* Cosmopolitanisms and Trans-nationalisms
* Spiritual Encounters and Religious Meetings
* Collecting and Antiquing
* Mediation and Disciplinarity
* Generic Blends and Mixtures (more to follow)

Please send abstracts of 250-500 words  to NASSR.2010@ubc.ca. The deadline for submission to the conference is 1 March 2010.

CFP: 19th-Century Literature at the CEA: “Voices”

NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE

Call for Papers
The 41st Annual College English Association Conference
March 25-7, 2010
San Antonio, Texas
www2.widener.edu/~cea

Conference Theme: Voices
“And in my voice most welcome shall you be.”
_As You Like It_ 2:4.87

San Antonio. Images of the River Walk merge with the memories of its most famous location, the Alamo. Remember it, the voices from the past call out, and we do.

Those voices on opposing sides of its walls, representing Santa Anna and Sam Houston, spoke for two distinctly diverse cultures. And within those cultures were voices and texts that influenced the actions during that struggle, significant cultural markers of time, place, and being.

Before and after the struggle there, writers everywhere have reflected and influenced the events of their day, and from their experience, the great writers have created texts that have become ageless connections to what is past, or passing, or to come.

In the shadow of San Antonio’s famous symbol of voices that call for attention and allegiance, College English Association asks you to submit papers on any aspect of the following topics:

Native Voices
Giving Voice
Voices in Poetry, Fiction, Drama
Voice in Oral Literatures
Voices from the Center
Poet as Sayer; Poet as Voice-giver
Voice (lessness) as Power
Vox Populi
Composition and Voice
Voices of the Home
Oral Interpretation of literature
Voice as Speech
Digital Voices
Voices of Deception
Voices in the Wilderness
Voices of Joy
Voice Studies
Voices as Vocalizations
Voices of the Folk
Voices in Material Culture
Voices of Praise
Voices of Protest
Voice in Curricula, Courses, & Programs

Submission Instructions
Submit proposals online at www2.widener.edu/~cea

Electronic submissions open on August 21 and close on November 1, 2009.
Abstracts for proposals should be between 200 and 500 words in length
and should include a title.

CFP: British Women Writers @ Texas A&M, April 2010

Cross-posted from the VICTORIA list:

The 18th Annual 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers Conference
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX

“Journeys”
April 8-11, 2010

Call for Papers

This year’s conference will explore the abundant varieties of journeys found
in 18th- and 19th-century British women’s writing. We encourage
interdisciplinary considerations of topics such as migration, travel, exile,
exploration, tourism, border crossing, religion, travel writing, art,
fantasy, children’s literature and more.

We are pleased to announce that our speakers will include Kate Flint,
Felicity Nussbaum, Mary Fissell, Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, and Erika Rappaport.

Proposals for panels and individual papers might consider, but are not
limited to, the following issues:

-Travel writing/art
-Biographical narratives
-Marriage/Honeymoon
-Continental tours
-Motherhood/Childhood
-Colonialism and Empire
-Philosophical investigations
-Scientific inquiry
-Religious explorations
-Spiritual awakenings
-Transatlantic movement of persons, ideas, and/or goods
-Immigration/Emigration
-Memory as travel
-Dreams
-Re-envisioning the past/future
-Mapping the body
-Rites of passage
-Crossing class boundaries
-Movement between private and public spheres
-Exile (Social, Political, Familial)
-Women and work
-Education
-Intertextuality

Individual proposals should be two pages: a cover sheet including name,
presentation title, university affiliation, address, email address, phone
number, and brief biographical paragraph; and a 500-word abstract. Please do
not include any identifying information on the abstract.

Panel proposals should include a coversheet–containing panel title,
presenters’ names, presentation titles, university affiliations, addresses,
email addresses, phone numbers, brief biographical paragraphs, and the name
of the moderator–followed by separate abstracts (500-word) that describe
the significance of the panel topic and each presentation. Please do not
include any identifying information on the abstracts.

Proposals must be submitted electronically as an attachment in .doc or .rtf
format by October 15, 2009 to the conference email address: BWWC18@tamu.edu.

For more information and updates, please visit our conference website
http://www-english.tamu.edu/bwwc18

Thank you!
Elizabeth Talafuse
BWWC 2010 Organizing Committee
Texas A&M University

CFP: “Nature and the Long Nineteenth Century” (Edinburgh, Feb 2010)

Call for papers: Nature and the long nineteenth century

A one-day interdisciplinary postgraduate conference exploring intersections of the natural world with nineteenth-century literature  and culture at the University of Edinburgh, Saturday, 6 February 2010.

Keynote speakers:

Dr Martin Willis, University of Glamorgan,

Dr Christine Ferguson, University of Glasgow

Professor Nick Daly, University College Dublin
In the twenty-first century, environmentalism and the impacts of climate change form a nexus of intense debates about relationship between human culture and the natural world. However, the centrality of the natural world to the nineteenth century imagination has long been acknowledged by scholars, way-marked by Lynn Merrill’s The Romance of Victorian Natural History (1989) for example, while Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (2002) demonstrates the relevance of nineteenth-century research to the modern world.

This conference probes the significance of nature to the long nineteenth century and to our study of its literature, history, science, art, and other media. How did the natural world influence people in the nineteenth century?and how did nineteenth-century culture shape attitudes to the natural world? Have twenty-first century questions over nature, climate, and the environment changed the way we view and study the cultural products of the nineteenth century, or offered new avenues for research, especially interdisciplinary
research?
Possible topics could include but are not limited to:
Representations of nature in history, literature, drama, poetry, art, theatre
Representations of, or human relationships with: oceans and the seaside, mountains and the countryside, rivers, lakes, gardens, working animals, pets
Natural history, specimens, collecting, displaying
Science and human or animal nature: hybridity, husbandry, eugenics; Darwinism and biology; Lyell and geology
Climate change, environmentalism, eco-criticism, the ecotopia
The natural world in romance, Gothic, the fantastic
Natural horror, biological monstrosity and the limits of the human
The (un)natural city, machine, media
The (super)natural world: ghosts, spiritualism, Gothic
Theoretical approaches to human and animal nature or the representation of nature.

Postgraduate and early-career researchers are invited to submit 300 word proposals for 20 minute papers or proposals for panels to natureconference@ed.ac.uk by 16 November 2009. See also: www.englit.ed.ac.uk/other/NatureConference/landingpage.htm.

Organisers: Claire McKechnie, University of Edinburgh and Dr Emily Alder, Edinburgh Napier University. Contact us at natureconference@ed.ac.uk.

We are grateful for the support of the British Association for Victorian Studies, the British Society for Literature and Science, and the Centre for Literature and Writing at Edinburgh Napier University.

NVSA Conference 2010: “Fighting Victorians”

The peace, that I deem`d no peace, is over and done.

–Alfred Tennyson, 1855

CFP: NVSA 2010

FIGHTING VICTORIANS: DISUNION, POLEMIC, CONTROVERSY

Princeton University: April 16-18, 2010

NVSA website:  http://web.stonehill.edu/nvsa/

NVSA solicits submissions for its annual conference; the topic this year is FIGHTING VICTORIANS.

The conference will feature a keynote panel including Anna Clark, Elaine Hadley, and Alex Woloch, and visits to Special Collections at the Firestone Library and the Princeton Art Museum.

This conference will take up the nature and significance of Victorian fighting and disunion, from international warfare to peevishness. What did the Victorians think was worth fighting about? Is there a specifically Victorian culture of argument? In what ways did the Victorians value disagreement and controversy? “The age of equipoise” saw more than its fair share of dust-ups, imbroglios, scraps, and battles. Rather than enumerating the varieties of Victorian belligerence, we seek papers that will reflect upon the ways Victorians experienced, valued, and represented fighting, disagreement, and other modes of disunion. What forms of debate and disagreement did the Victorian public sphere promote or exclude? What are the forms of solidarity and separation not only imagined by British social, political, and evolutionary theory, but also experienced as part of the development of empire or national movements? What is the force of dissension in artistic, literary or political rivalries and movements? What are the sites, genres, and modes of Victorian fighting? What are the forms of representation, visual or textual, most suited torepresenting violence or controversy? Finally, how do we Victorianists argue now? Do we argue now?

While specificity is welcome and encouraged, the program committee is not looking simply for papers describing particular instances of violence. We are especially eager to see presentations that make a claim about the nature, conception, or representation of disunity or violence in the period.

* * *

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

-Oscar Wilde, 1891

Arts of Combat

-Fights in literature: the novel, poetry, drama

-Warfare in the fine arts

-Literary forms and social interventions; novel arguments

-The emotions of Victorian disunion and fighting

-The styles and affects of refusing to argue: peevishness, grudges, funks, the slow burn, the silent treatment, envy, ressentiment

-Accommodation and appeasement

-The belligerence of aesthetic movements

Does the boxer hit better for knowing that he has a flexor longus and a flexor brevis?

-Carlyle, 1831

Thoughtful Belligerence

-Cultures of Victorian argument

-Styles of pugilism: bare knuckle, street fighting, boxing

-Fighting words: diatribes and other rhetorics of disunion

-Belligerent thoughts, belligerent thinkers

-The genres of Victorian fighting: polemic, manifesto, dialogue, debate

-The concept of struggle

-Rules of engagement: the Queensberry rules, duels, fencing

-Victorian fights and contemporary theories of struggle and debate

Say not the struggle nought availeth,

The labour and the wounds are vain.

-Arthur Hugh Clough, 1855

What is Worth Fighting For? / What is Fighting Worth?

-The Victorian public sphere: liberalism and the culture of argument

-Forms of dialectic

-Political fights: Chartism, Reform, Abolition

-Class: identity and struggle

-Religious schism: Dissent, The Oxford Movement, conversion

-Solidarity and separation: forms of antisociality or social enmity, the transcendence of social bonds

-Literary forms of solidarity and disunion: the novel and character space, lyric poetry and intersubjective tension

-Dissension as style in the visual arts

-Rivalries: literary, political, artistic, athletic

-Disciplinary formation: competition among the faculties, literature versus science, word versus image

-Fighting as a way of life: evolution as struggle, struggle and the field of culture

-Break-ups: empire and disunion, divorce, romantic break-ups, fallings out

-What do Victorianists argue about now? How do we argue?

. . . as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

-Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” 1867

Fight Sites: Spaces of Disunion, Violence, Controversy

-More is less: one nation or two, Unionism and / or nationalism

-Imperial violence

-International warfare

-Civil war

-Memories and fantasies of war

-Domestic violence: gender and the home

-Venues of fighting and controversy: the periodical press, lecture halls, the university, the boxing ring, the streets

* * *

Proposals (no more than 500 words) by Oct. 15, 2009 (e-mail submissions strongly encouraged):

Professor Gage McWeeny, Chair, NVSA Program Committee,

(gmcweeny@williams.edu)

English Department, Williams College, 85 Mission Park Drive,

Williamstown, MA 01267

Please note: all submissions to NVSA are evaluated anonymously. Successful proposals will stay within the 500-word limit and make a compelling case for the talk and its relation to the conference topic.

Please do not send complete papers, and do not include your name on the proposal.

Please do include your name, institutional and email addresses, and proposal title in a cover letter. Papers should take 15 minutes (20 minutes maximum) so as to provide ample time for discussion.

The Coral Lansbury Travel Grant ($100.00) and George Ford Travel Grant ($100.00), given in memory of key founding members of NVSA, are awarded annually to the graduate student, adjunct instructor, or independent scholar who must travel the greatest distance to give a paper at our conference. Apply by indicating in your cover letter that you wish to

be considered. Please indicate from where you will be traveling, and mention if you have other sources of funding.

RSVP Conference: “Victorian Networks and the Periodical Press”

As posted by Kelly Hulander to VICTORIA:

Victorian Networks and the Periodical Press

Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Annual Conference
University of St. Thomas, Minneapolis, MN
August 21 – 22, 2009

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) is pleased to announce that its annual conference will be held at the University of St. Thomas, Minneapolis, August 21 – 22, 2009.

Simon Potter (National University of Ireland, Galway) will deliver the annual Wolff Lecture, titled “The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876 – 1922.”  Potter’s book,  News and the British World, was published in 2003.

The program will also include a lecture by Catherine Waters (University of New England, New South Wales), whose book Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household
Words:  The Social Life of Goods, received the 2009 Colby Scholarly Book Prize.  Her lecture is titled, “‘Much of Sala, and but little of Russia’:  A Journey Due North.”

Panel presentations will address themes such as Children’s Journalism, Correspondence and Fundraising, Women’s Poetry in the Periodical Press, Defining National Identity, Religious Networks, the Female Image in the Press, and Readers’ Networks.

The program will also include a Roundtable Discussion focused on using digital resources and a Teaching Workshop highlighting pedagogical approaches in the field of Victorian jouralism.

Pre-conference activities include the William Holman Hunt exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.  Registration information and other conference details are available at www.rs4vp.org or www.stthomas.edu/english/victorian.

Wordsworth Summer Conference 2009: Program Available

The Wordsworth Summer Conference will be held in Grasmere July 27 – August 6, 2009, featuring keynote lectures by Nick Roe, Fiona Stafford, Paul Fry, Claire Lamont, Stephen Gill, Frances Ferguson, Gillian Beer, Richard Cronin, Yoko Ima-Izuma, Anne Wroe, Michael O’Neill, and Fred Burwick.

The conference program has been released and is available here as a Word document.

A full prospectus for the conference is available here as a PDF.

CFP: Material Cultures conference in Edinburgh, July 2010

The Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh has posted the following call for paper proposals:

A three-day conference
at The UNIVERSITY of EDINBURGH
July 16-18, 2010

ROGER CHARTIER
JEROME McGANN
PETER STALLYBRASS

Following the Material Cultures conferences which took place at The University of Edinburgh in 2000 and 2005, the third in the series is scheduled to take place in July 2010. The key theme of the conference is ‘Technology, Textuality, and Transmission’, though proposals relating to all aspects of Bibliography and the History of the Book are
welcome.

• MATERIALITY AND TEXTUALITY
• ELECTRONIC TEXT
• THE CULTURES OF PRINT
• CENSORSHIP AND REGULATION
• COLLECTIONS AND THEIR PRESERVATION
• READERS AND READING PRACTICES
• TECHNOLOGY AND TRANSMISSION
• THE INFORMATION REVOLUTION
• GEOGRAPHIES OF THE BOOK

Proposals of 200-300 words are invited on these or any other topic related to the history of the book, to be sent no later than NOVEMBER 30, 2009, to Material Cultures, Centre for the History of the Book, University of Edinburgh, 22a Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9LW, or by email to materialcultures@ed.ac.uk

NCSA Conference: March 2010 at the University of Tampa

[From the NASSR-L listserv:]

CALL FOR PAPERS

31^st Annual Conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association

The University of Tampa, March 11-13, 2010, Tampa, Florida

Theatricality and the Performative in the Long Nineteenth Century

Dramatic expression and self-conscious performances marked almost every aspect of nineteenth century life and artistic culture, as theatrical turns and performative mindsets introduced in the 17^th-18^th centuries expanded in the 1780s through the beginning of World War One.  We invite paper and panel proposals that explore these themes and subjects in the long Nineteenth Century (1780-1914).  Papers might address the theatrical shows—whether serious drama, circus displays, vaudeville, operas, or Shakespearean revivals—that appeared in cities and towns on both sides of the Atlantic (as well as in more distant lands). Or they might investigate how politics, social events, military engagements, domestic affairs, public trials, crime reports, religious rituals, architectural spaces, sculptural moments, exhibition halls, artistic and musical compositions, and the early moving pictures of the cinema, assumed a  theatrical sensibility. Welcome also are proposals for papers and panels that bring scholarly and theoretical interests in performativity to bear on concepts of identity, individuality, and audience in the given era.

Please submit abstracts of approximately 500 words along with a brief (one page) c.v. to the Program Co-Chairs, Janice Simon (U of Georgia) and Regina Hewitt (U of South Florida) at the conference address ncsa2010@earthlink.net by Sept. 15, 2009.  Speakers will be notified by or before Dec. 15.

Any graduate student whose proposal is accepted may at that point submit a full-length version of the paper in competition for a travel grant to help cover transportation and lodging expenses.

Conference sessions will be held at the University of Tampa, a campus with both the historic late-19^th century Plant Hall (formerly the Tampa Bay Hotel) and a state-of-the-art conference center.  Accommodations will be available at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Tampa, a short walk from campus. For further information—available in midsummer—please visit the NCSA website http://www.english.uwosh.edu/roth/ncsa/ or contact Elizabeth Winston, Local Arrangements Director (U of Tampa), at the conference address ncsa2010@earthlink.net.

Victorians Institute CFP: “Creativity and the Arts in Victorian Culture” (6/15/09; 10/16-17/09)

Victorians Institute Call for Papers
October 16 & 17, 2009
Converse College
Spartanburg, SC

CREATIVITY AND THE ARTS IN VICTORIAN CULTURE

KEYNOTE SPEAKER:  LINDA PETERSON, YALE UNIVERSITY

We are interested in papers examining a range of arts. Possible topics include:
-       high arts (painting, drawing, sculpture, music, drama, dance, and the
literary arts)
-       middle-brow arts
-       popular culture and art
-       folk arts
-       the arts and crafts movement
-       architecture and art
-       literary treatment of the arts and responses to arts
-       culturally significant aspects of these arts in their own right
-       additionally, as 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Tennyson’s birth, we
welcome papers that specifically address Tennyson’s relationship to, and
treatment of, the arts

Address questions, and send 250 – 500 word abstracts, to:

Anita Rose
Department of English
Converse College
580 E. Main St.
Spartanburg, SC  29302
Email submissions (preferred): anita.rose@converse.edu

By June 15, 2009

2009 NASSR Conference program: Duke, May 21-24

There’s just enough time left to plan a trip to Durham for the 2009 NASSR Conference; the program is available on this page.

Among the presenters and topics will be Frances Ferguson on progress, Rei Terada on Adorno, Ted Underwood on secularization, Gillen D’Arcy Wood on the nightingale, Mark Parker on the literary magazine, Michael Macovski on the Romantic museum, Piya Pal-Lipinski on phantasmic torture, Noel Jackson on melancholy, Jeffrey Robinson on Shelley and avantgarde Modernism, a roundtable celebrating the career of Robert Gleckner, Tillotama Rajan on excitability, Tim Michael on Shelley and skeptical idealism, Kevis Goodman on nostalgia, Michael Gamer on the collected author, Jonathan Mulrooney on Keats’s Hyperion, Denise Gigante on the essay form, Tom Mole on Byron in bronze, Nicholas Halmi on truth in Don Juan, Adam Potkay on post-modern ecology, Diane Hoeveler on the gothic and modernity, Mark Canuel on utility,…too many intriguing possibilities to list!  This promises to be a great conference.

Swinburne and BAVS/NAVSA conference programs

The conference program for the Swinburne Centenary conference to be held July 10 and 11 at the University of London has been released.  It looks like the entire Swinburnean world will be there.

Immediately following this will be the 2009 NAVSA/BAVS conference at Cambridge: the draft program is available on their site.  Looks to be a terrific conference. A sample session that caught my eye:

‘Uses, Re-Uses and Disposals’ (Fellows’ Dining Room)
Chair – Simon Dentith ( Reading)
Herbert F. Tucker (Virginia), ‘Indisposed:  Towards a Victorian Ecology of Junk’
Dino Franco Felluga (Purdue), ‘George Eliot, Lord Byron and What Must be Kept in the Act of Casting Away’
Nicholas Dames (Columbia), ‘Novel Uses for Biblical Form c. 1860’