19th-Century Panels at MLA 2015

If you will be attending the 2015 MLA Convention in Vancouver (8-11 January), you may be interested in the following sessions on British literature of the long 19th century. The complete convention program is available and searchable on the MLA website. If we’ve left anything out, feel free to let us know.

THURSDAY, 8 JANUARY

Deep Time of the Nineteenth Century: A Literary Archaeology of Media and Objects
1:45–3:00 p.m., 215, VCC West

The Endurance of Alice: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at 150
3:30–4:45 p.m., 120, VCC West

William Morris and Old Norse
3:30–4:45 p.m., 121, VCC West

Visual Dickens
3:30–4:45 p.m., 205, VCC West

Victorian Ecologies
5:15–6:30 p.m., 220, VCC West

Teaching Nineteenth-Century Transatlanticism: New Configurations and Curricula
7:00–8:15 p.m., 220, VCC West

Conrad’s Victory at One Hundred: A New Text and a Reassessment
7:00–8:15 p.m., 204, VCC West

Romanticism and Translation
7:00–8:15 p.m., 114, VCC West

FRIDAY, 9 JANUARY

Tea, circa 1770 to 1840
8:30–9:45 a.m., 111, VCC West

John Clare: Vanishings
10:15–11:30 a.m., 114, VCC West

Romanticism at Sea?
12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 1, VCC East

The Ballad beyond Bibliography
12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 215, VCC West

Victorian Animal Studies
12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 220, VCC West

Romantic Antipathies
12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 112, VCC West

Scottish Literature: Into the Great Unknowns
1:45–3:00 p.m., 115, VCC West

Dickens: Surface, Depth, Close, Distant
1:45–3:00 p.m., 113, VCC West

Oscar Wilde, Literary Forgery, and Historical Memory
3:30–4:45 p.m., 120, VCC West

Romantic Ephemerality
3:30–4:45 p.m., 215, VCC West

William Morris: The Ecological and the Oceanic
5:15–6:30 p.m., 120, VCC West

Conrad and Ecocriticism

5:15–6:30 p.m., 113, VCC West

SATURDAY, JANUARY 10, 2015

Scaling Romanticism
10:15–11:30 a.m., 121, VCC West

Spatial Poetics
12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 120, VCC West

Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Sites of Memory
1:45–3:00 p.m., 120, VCC West

“To Feel for Ever”: Young Keats, Affect, and History
1:45–3:00 p.m., 112, VCC West

New Approaches: Victorian Studies and Science Studies
3:30–4:45 p.m., 116, VCC West

Newspapers as a Poetic Medium, 1880–1900
January, 3:30–4:45 p.m., 217, VCC West

Byron Now

5:15–6:30 p.m., 112, VCC West

Narratological Dickens
5:15–6:30 p.m., 121, VCC West

SUNDAY, 11 JANUARY

Victorian Travelers and the Afterlives of Cultural Memory
8:30–9:45 a.m., 116, VCC West

British Romantic Life Writing
8:30–9:45 a.m., 120, VCC West

Theater, Melodrama, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel
10:15–11:30 a.m., 215, VCC West

The Buried Portrait: Media, Aura, and Memory in Victorian Image Culture
12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 217, VCC West

Literary History and Ideas of Mind
1:45–3:00 p.m., 202, VCC West

Constrained Labors: Working within Confines in the Long Nineteenth Century
1:45–3:00 p.m., 113, VCC West

Speculative Approaches to Feelings in Romanticism

1:45–3:00 p.m., 210, VCC West

CFP: “Devouring: Food, Drink and the Written Word, 1800-1945,” U of Warwick (March 2014)

Devouring: Food, Drink and the Written Word, 1800-1945

 

Saturday 8th March 2014, University of Warwick

Keynote speakers: 

Professor Nicola Humble (University of Roehampton) 

Dr Margaret Beetham (University of Salford)

CALL FOR PAPERS

This one day interdisciplinary conference will explore the place of food, drink and acts of consumption within the textual culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The years 1800-1945 are marked by food adulteration scandals, the growth of the temperance movement, and significant reforms in the regulation and legislation of food standards, as well as the influence of the colonies on British cuisine and a relationship with food and drink made increasingly complex by wartime paucity and rationing. These changes are both precipitated and responded to in a vast array of textual forms, including periodicals, the press, recipe books, household management manuals, propaganda, literature and poetry. This conference will therefore engage with the intersections of food/drink cultures and the written word.

We are seeking papers which explore how food and drink were written, experienced and imagined during the period: as a commodity, a luxury item, a source of poison or nutrition, in its abundance or in short supply. We hope to attract all researchers who have an interest in the culinary cultures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including those working in the histories of medicine, art and food, as well as anthropologists, historians of the nineteenth century and war years, and those working in literary studies. By bringing together scholars from many disciplines, we hope to provide a space in which to open up dialogue about nineteenth and early twentieth century narratives of eating, drinking, consuming, and their worth, and to provide a timely examination of our relationship with food and drink at a moment when economic and ecological pressures herald a re-appropriation of the values of wartime thrift and Victorian domestic economy.

Possible topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Representations of food and drink in specific texts and their wider implications.
• Cultures of eating, drinking and cooking.
• Social histories of food and drink.
• The uses of food and drink in the articulation (or challenging) of community, nation or empire.
• Food or drink as metaphor/trope/structural device.
• The relationship(s) between reading and eating or drinking.
• The role of food and drink in cultural constructions of domestic space.
• Perspectives from ‘fat studies’/‘fat feminism’.
• Gendered practices of food and drink consumption.
• Food and drink in medical/psychiatric discourse: alcoholism, eating disorders, compulsive behaviour.
• The cultural legacies and/or persistence of Victorian and early twentieth century cultural imaging of food and drink.
• Recipe books, household management manuals and aspirational food.
• The narrating of gluttony or hunger.
• Textual representations of farms, breweries, pubs and restaurants.

Applicants should note that papers may also be considered for inclusion in a possible publication resulting from the conference.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words, accompanied by a brief biographical note of no more than 100 words, should be sent to devouring2014@gmail.com by 31st October 2013.

This conference is being organised by Mary Addyman, Laura Wood and Christopher Yiannitsaros (University of Warwick).

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/food/

http://devouring2014.blogspot.co.uk/

CFP: “in:flux 1845-1945: A Century in Motion,” Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference (Birmingham), June 2013

in:flux 1845-1945: A Century in Motion

University of Birmingham, 27^th June 2013

Keynote speaker – Dr Matthew Rubery, Queen Mary University of London

Interdisciplinary postgraduate conference – call for papers

How did the rapid period of industrialisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries help to shape societies and lifestyles in the West? What types of social changes, movements and developments characterise this time period? This interdisciplinary postgraduate conference, in affiliation with the Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity and hosted by the College of Arts and Law, seeks to explore the various ways in which this century was one of ‘motion’, in every sense of the word. The conference title seeks to encapsulate both the uncertainty and upheaval of this period as well as the physical and cultural movements that occurred at this time. We invite papers addressing these themes from postgraduate researchers and early-career academics working on this period from a variety of backgrounds.

Topics could include, but are not limited to:

Cultural or social movements

• political movements
• the Women’s Movement
• arts movements (musical, artistic, literary)
• religious and philosophical
• popular cultural trends (food, fashion, advertising)

Physical movements

• mass movement of people (mobilisation of soldiers, migration from towns to cities)
• transatlantic and inter-continental travel (including emigration and immigration)
• leisure and tourism
• transport
• changing landscapes

Development and progress

• media (cinema, audio technology and radio, print media)
• scientific and medical advances
• technology
• economic growth and/or recession
• development of nationhood

These headings are suggestions only; we welcome proposals exploring crossovers between these topics, or addressing them from interdisciplinary perspectives. Abstracts of 250-300 words for 20 minute papers along with a short biographical note of no more than 50 words should be sent to pgculturalmodernity@contacts.bham.ac.uk by the 17^th May 2013. We welcome any questions that you may have; please do not hesitate to contact us at the above address.

For more information about the Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity please visit their website:

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/activity/culturalmodernity/index.aspx

CFP (deadline approaching): “Victorian Modernities,” VISAWUS (Portland, OR), November 2013

VISAWUS 2013 CONFERENCE INFORMATION

VISAWUS, the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States, announces its 18th annual conference:

“Victorian Modernities” November 14-16, 2013

Courtyard by Marriott, Portland City Center, Portland, Oregon USA

“Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly.” – Oscar Wilde

VISAWUS 2013 explores the Victorians’ enthusiasm and apprehension regarding modern progress and innovation.We encourage papers across all disciplines, including (but not restricted to) art history, literature, gender, history of science, history, material culture, political science, performance, life writings, journalism, photography, popular culture, and economics.

Keynote Speaker: Joseph Bristow (English, UCLA), author and editor of numerous works on Victorian and modern literature and theories and histories of sexuality, including Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (1995), Sexuality (1997), The Fin-de-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s (2005), and Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend (2009), is currently working on a project on “The Sex of Victorian Poetry” and editing the Journal of Victorian Culture and the Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture series.

Papers are solicited for topics such as:

-Urbanization, urbanity, and the flux of modern life -New nationalisms -Modern understandings of the global and the cosmopolitan -Class mobilities and new professions -Progressive Victorian social reform movements -New Victorian types: New Women, dandies, Decadents, swells -Anticipations of modernist formal styles -New media: audio and visual technologies -Advances in Victorian drama -New sciences and pseudo-sciences -Modern illnesses and modern medicine -The novel and novelty -Commodity culture and consumerism -Modern understandings of sexuality and desire -Resistances to modernity: nostalgia, pastiche -New religions -The apex of empire -Modern warfare -Neo-Victorianism and steampunk aesthetic

To submit: By March 15, 2013, email 300-word abstracts and a 1-page CV (name on BOTH) to visawus2013@gmail.com.

Please note: Graduate student papers are eligible for the William H. Scheuerle Graduate Student Paper Award ($300.00).

Conference Hotel: Courtyard by Marriott, Portland City Center, Portland, Oregon USA

 

Looking for past VISAWUS conference information?

The 2005-2011 conference schedules are now archived online. Click here to view and download them, or browse the list below.

PAST VISAWUS CONFERENCES

1996 – California State University, Northridge – Victorian Success – James R. Kincaid
1997 – California State University, Northridge – Victorian Sights and Sounds – Philippa Levine
1998 – Clark College (Vancouver, Washington) – Victorian Sexualities – Donald Hall
1999 – Clark College (Vancouver, Washington) – Victorianisms – Alison Winter
2000 – UCLA – Artifacts of Victorian Culture – Sally Mitchell
2001 – UCLA – The Victorian World – Chris Kent
2002 – Boise State University – Victorian Institutions – Linda K. Hughes
2003 – University of Texas (Austin) – Victorian Legacies – Martin Wiener
2004 – University of Washington (Seattle) – Victorian Innovations – Susan P. Casteras
2005 – University of New Mexico (Albuquerque) – Victorian Rituals, Celebrations, and Anniversaries – James R. Kincaid
2006 – Pepperdine University (Malibu) – The Presence of the Past in the Victorian Age – Philippa Levine
2007 – University of Colorado (Boulder) – Victorians in Motion – Lawrence Goldman
2008 – University of Washington (Seattle) – The Public and Private Politics of Victorian England – Antony Harrison
2009 – Coast Renaissance Hotel (Vancouver, British Columbia) – Victorian Markets and Marketing – Erika Rappaport – Joint Conference with the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada
2010 – University of Hawaii (Honolulu) – Oceania and the East in the Victorian Imagination – Jane Samson
2011- University of Houston-Downtown – The Vulgar and the Proper: Victorian Manners and Mores – Helena Michie

 

CFP: “Future Directions in Byron Studies,” MLA 2014 (Chicago).

Byron Society of America: MLA Convention 2014

Future Directions in Byron Studies
January 09-12 2014, Chicago

The Byron Society of America solicits paper proposals featuring new research and fresh methodologies applied to any aspect of Byron’s life or works for the 129th MLA Annual Convention (Chicago, 9-12 January 2014). Paper proposals should demonstrate a desire to expand the field of Byron studies by placing the poet and his works in conversation with understudied aspects of Romanticism and/or innovative approaches. Topics may include but are not limited to: material culture studies, object -oriented criticism, cosmopolitanism, nationalism, theories of empire, “spatial turn,” digital humanities, and/or the history of the book.

Preference will be given to junior faculty and graduate students.

A 250 word abstract and brief autobiography (one paragraph) are due by 25 March. Please send materials and inquiries to: Halina Adams (halinaad@udel.edu).

CFP: 39th Annual International Byron Conference (King’s College London), July 2013

INTERNATIONAL BYRON CONFERENCE 2013

 

Registration and Call for Papers NOW OPEN

 

The Byron Society and King’s College London are pleased to announce that the website for the 39^th International Byron Conference, 1-6 July 2013, is now open.

 

See  http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/chs/events/Byron-Conference/index.aspx for details of registration, booking of accommodation and options, and the call for papers.

 

Early booking is advised since there are limited numbers of places for some events and some types of accommodation.

 

—————-

 

BYRON: the poetry of politics and the politics of poetry

This conference will examine Byron’s engagement with politics in the widest sense: as a poet, as a member of the House of Lords, as a commentator on his time, and latterly as a would-be revolutionary.

 

The conference will be held at King’s College London’s Strand Campus in the heart of London. Accommodation will be available in King’s College London’s Stamford Street Apartments (a limited number of single ensuite rooms 10 minutes’ walk from the conference venue, at a cost of £41.25 per person per night – early booking is advised) and at the Strand Palace Hotel (five minutes’ walk from the venue – bookings to be made directly with the Hotel). Conference discount available when booking for the conference, see booking page.

A limited number of student bursaries will be available for those presenting a paper.

 

Highlights of the Conference Programme include:

•  a special exhibition ‘Byron and politics’: manuscripts, printed books and memorabilia from the John Murray Archive and the Foyle Special Collections Library, King’s College London, curated by David McClay (National Library of Scotland), Stephanie Breen and Katie Sambrook (King’s College London)

• ‘Byron, Elgin and the Marbles’: readings and reception hosted by the British Museum (including a private viewing of the Parthenon Sculptures)

• Byron, The Two Foscari: a dramatised reading, with excerpts from Verdi’s opera, I Due Foscari, performed by students of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama

• Debate on the motion: ‘that Lord Byron has had no meaningful impact on European history or politics’ (proposed by Peter Cochran, opposed by Jack Gumpert Wasserman)

• Orthodox Vespers in King’s College London Chapel, sung by members of the renowned King’s College London Choir

• Reception and dinner at the House of Lords, with a guided tour of the Palace of Westminster

• Excursion to Harrow School (optional)

 

CFP: Victorians Institute Conference 2013: “Through the Looking Glass”

CFP: Victorians Institute 2013 Conference: Through the Looking Glass

 Proposals: 5/1/2013       

 

The 42nd Meeting of the Victorians Institute

November 1-2, 2013

Middle Tennessee State University

Murfreesboro, TN
Please send 300-500 word proposals for papers and a 1-page c.v. via email to Rebecca.King@mtsu.edu by 1 May 2013.

 

We invite papers on any aspect of the theme, which refers to Lewis Carroll’s 1871 sequel to Alice in Wonderland, but invites much wider consideration.  The story begins on November 4, the day before Guy Fawkes Night, and is also associated with issues of time and space, the game of chess, fairy tale and fantasy, neologism, history, curiosity, epistemology, dress and wigs, and of course, mirrors.

 

Possible topics might include mirrors and mirroring; microscopes and telescopes; Victorian mathematics, science, and science fiction; arts and crafts; illustrations and media adaptations; language; hybridity; history and discovery; new worlds and cultures; travel; empire; Victorian pedagogy; childhood; gender and sexuality; fantasy and play; pseudonyms; biography; photography; music; linguistic play; poetic parody; and others.

The keynote speaker is Jay Clayton, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English, and Director, Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University. http://www.vanderbilt.edu/curbcenter/people/staff/jayclayton/

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/curbcenter/our-vision/

Selected papers from the conference will be refereed for the Victorians Institute Journal annex at NINES.

Limited travel subventions will be available from the Victorians Institute for graduate students whose institutions provide limited or no support.

Please visit www.vcu.edu/vij for information about the conference, the Victorians Institute, and Victorians Institute Journal.

CFP: “Victorian Poetry: Forms and Fashions,” 50th Anniversary of Victorian Poetry (April 2013)

 

Call for Papers

 Victorian Poetry: Forms and Fashions

 

A Conference in Celebration of the 50^th Anniversary of Victorian Poetry

 

19-20 April 2013 at West Virginia University

 

Please send 300-500 word proposals for papers and a 1-page c.v. via email to John.Lamb@mail.wvu.edu by 15 December 2012.

 

Papers on any aspect of Victorian Poetry and Poetics are invited, especially those devoted to: the reconsideration of poetic forms and formal innovations; fashions, trend, and modes in poetry; the publication and commerce of poetry; poetry book history; and Victorian prosody and stanzaic forms.  Papers devoted to the “fashions” of scholarship on Victorian poetry for the last fifty years are also invited.

Keynote address by Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature at Texas Christian University.  Professor Hughes’ books include The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry, Graham R.: Rosamund Mariott Watson, Woman of Letters, and The Manyfaced Glass: Tennyson’s Dramatic Monologues.

Romanticism at MLA 2013

The CUNY Romanticism Group has put together this guide to Romantic panels at the upcoming MLA Convention in Boston (3-6 January 2013).

The full convention program is now online and fully searchable at the MLA Convention site.

CFP: 20th International Thomas Hardy Conference (Dorchester, UK), August 2012

CALL FOR PAPERS

20th International Thomas Hardy Conference and Festival

Dorchester, UK

18-26 August 2012

We are soliciting papers from Hardy scholars around the world for the Twentieth International Thomas Hardy Conference and Festival which will take place in Dorchester, UK from 18-26th August, 2012. Proposals should take the form of an abstract not exceeding 250 words max for papers of 20 minutes duration. These will be delivered in chaired parallel sessions throughout the week as part of the academic program of lectures, seminars, talks and the postgraduate symposium. Proposals may address any aspect of Hardy’s life, work and thought but we are particularly keen to encourage papers focusing on the following areas:

• Hardy and Genre (particularly the short story).
• Hardy and the Visual and/or Plastic Arts.
• Hardy and Intertextuality.
• Hardy and Cultural Heritage.
• Wessex and the wider world.
• Hardy and international politics.
• International responses to the work of Thomas Hardy
• Hardy’s influence on poets, writers and musicians (including popular musicians) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Proposals should be addressed to:

‘Call for Papers’ – ( The Thomas Hardy Society) Dr. Jane Thomas, Department of English University of Hull, East Yorkshire HU6 7RX

Email: j.e.thomas@hull.ac.uk