Use of Religion Conference

You are invited to attend "The Uses of 'Religion' in 19th-Century Studies" Conference at Baylor University, which will be held in the Armstrong Browning Library from March 16-19, 2016. A list of panels, speakers, and presentations is below.

The conference features an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars who will participate in a variety of panels to examine how the category "religion" was constructed and deployed in nineteenth-century literature and culture, and to reflect self-critically on how scholarship invokes that category now. The conference will feature presentations by literary scholars, historians, art historians, and scholars of religion and theology that will extend our understanding of the uses of "religion" as a category and inform future academic conversation.

"The Uses of 'Religion' in 19th-Century Studies" Conference, including a special conference concert on Friday, is free to all who wish to attend. Registration is only required for those who are not on the program and plan to eat meals on Thursday and/or Friday (March 17 and/or March 18). The registration fees are $90 for meals on both days and $50 for meals on one day. Conference registration is now open and can be accessed from the conference website atbrowninglibrary.org/ablrel2016.

If you plan to stay overnight in Waco during the conference, a block of rooms has been set aside at the Holiday Inn Express and Suites, which is just a few minutes from campus by car, for $109 per night. To register a room, please use the special link provided on the conference website (browninglibrary.or/ablrel2016) or call (254) 732-1038 and indicate that you would like a room in the Uses of Religion Block. To ensure you obtain a space, please make your reservation before February 16, 2016.

We look forward to seeing you here at Baylor in March 2016. For more information about "The Uses of 'Religion' in 19th-Century Studies" Conference, please visit browninglibrary.org/ablrel2016, email ablconferences@baylor.edu, or call Christi Klempnauer at (254) 710-4968.

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Panels, Speakers, and Presentations

The following presentations were selected out of a highly competitive field of proposals:

1. Concepts of Religion(s)

• "'We are not the only people who have a Bible.' The Impact of Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East Series on the Conceptualization of 'Religion'" -- Prof. Arie Molendijk, University of Groningen, Netherlands
• "Religion and Empire: Loisy’s Use of 'Religion' Prior to his Correspondence with Cumont" -- Dr. Jeffrey L. Morrow, Seton Hall University
• "Conjunctive Religion, or, How Keshub Chunder Sen Rewrote the Grammar of Modern Theology" -- Dr. J. Barton Scott, University of Toronto, Canada

2. Religion, the Secular and Reform

• "Karl Marx and the Invention of the Secular" -- Dr. Dominic Erdozain, Visiting Scholar, Emory University
• "'Little Liberty on Earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven' (Robert Ingersoll). Nineteenth-Century Secularists in Britain and America and Implications of Constructing 'Religion' as Anachronistic Repressor" -- Prof. David Nash, Oxford Brookes University, UK
• "God's Insurrection: Politics and Faith in the Revolutionary Sermons of J.R. Stephens" -- Dr. Mike Sanders, University of Manchester, UK

3. Mediums and Practices of Religion

• "From Treasure to Trash, or, the Uses of Nineteenth-Century 'Family Bibles'" -- Dr. Mary Wilson Carpenter, Queen's University, Canada
• "Dye, Ink and Paint: Manufacturing 'Religion' in Victorian Britain" -- Prof. Dominic Janes, Keele University, UK
• "Wilde's Uses of Religion (De Profundis)" -- Dr. Mark Knight, University of Lancaster, UK

4. Reframing Religion and the Body

• "The New Woman of New Faith: Narratives of Doubt and Refashioned Faith in New Woman Novels" -- Dr. Shuhita Bhattacharjee, Presidency University, India
• "Finding the Frame: Religion, Science, and Sexual Dissidence in Late-Victorian Britain" -- Dr. Joy Dixon, University of British Columbia, Canada
• "Embodied Theology: Disability and Illness in Mid-Victorian Christian Periodicals" -- Dr. Kylee-Anne Hingston, University of Victoria, Canada

5. Forms of Conversion and Sanctity

• "Thinking with Saints in Nineteenth-Century Britain" -- Dr. Gareth Atkins, Cambridge University, UK
• "Converting Towards or Away: The Case of George Eliot and Modern Ethics" -- Dr. Ilana Blumberg, Bar Ilan University, Israel
• "Psalms, Sonnets and Conversionary Poetics in Nineteenth-Century England" -- Dr. Cynthia Scheinberg, Mills College

6. Reframing Religion and Literature

• "Hybridous Monsters: Constructing 'Religion' and 'the Novel' in the Early Nineteenth Century" -- Prof. Miriam Burstein, SUNY, College of Brockport
• "Everybody Expects the Spanish Inquisition: Restoring Surprise to Nineteenth-Century British Catholicism" -- Dr. Patrick R. O'Malley, Georgetown University
• "Memories, Dreams and Selections: Airbrushing Nineteenth-Century Religion" -- Prof. Stephen Prickett, Kent University, UK

7. Reading Religion

• "Jewish Women’s Writing as a New Category of Affect" -- Dr. Richa Dwor, Douglas College, Canada
• "Reading Queen Victoria's Religion" -- Dr. Michael Ledger-Lomas, King's College, London, UK
• "The Importance of Being Ezra: Canons and Conversion in The Moonstone" -- Dr. William R. McKelvy, Washington University in St. Louis

8. Faith in Poetry

• "Nineteenth-Century Faith in Poetry--Blake, Rossetti, Hopkins, Tennyson" -- Dr. Michael D. Hurley, Cambridge University, UK
• "Post-secular English Studies and Romantic Cults of Authorship" -- Dr. Charles LaPorte, University of Washington
• "William Blake, the Secularization of Religious Categories, and the History of Imagination" -- Prof. Peter Otto, University of Melbourne, Australia

Graduate Student Travel Award Recipients

• Amy Coté, University of Toronto, Canada
• Charles McCrary, Florida State University
• David Reagles, Drew University
• James Van Wyck, Fordham University
• Mimi Winick, Rutgers University 

Conference Archivist

Dr. Winter Jade Werner, Wheaton College, MA