CFP: NVSA 2013

1874

Boston University: April 5-7, 2013

All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee—Robert Browning

NVSA solicits submissions for its annual conference. The topic this year is 1874.
The conference will feature a keynote panel including Isobel Armstrong, Robert J. Richards, and
Herbert Tucker, and a walking tour of Victorian Boston led by Martha Vicinus. ** *
The Northeast Victorian Studies Association calls for papers from all disciplines on any aspect of 1874, the year in which The Way We Live Now was serialized in monthly numbers, John Tyndall delivered his “Belfast Address” on scientific materialism, Benjamin Disraeli was appointed prime minister for the second time, and red became the standard color for pillarboxes of the Royal Mail. We welcome submissions on any topic relevant to 1874, as well as papers that engage with the conceptual and methodological issues raised by taking a single year as a focus for study.
What are the consequences of thinking about Victorian works of art, texts, objects, and events in relation to their specific year in history? How is our perspective on the period—or on periodization itself—altered by this vantage point? What does the close examination of a single year—a year literally picked out of a hat by the program committee rather than chosen for its significance—reveal about the relationship between dates that “matter” in Victorian Studies and dates that do not? Is the calendar year a significant unit of time or useful organizational framework for our exploration of the Victorian period as a whole? How is our understanding of annual publications, commemorations, and other yearly events and forms changed when we concentrate on a single occurrence of each? In 1874 S. O. Beeton’s Christmas annual Jon Duan sold 250,000 copies in three weeks, vastly outperforming Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. Which, then, is the “major” text under the rubric of our conference? How does our sense of the canonical and non-canonical shift as a result of such micro-periodization?

Other texts and events from 1874 worth considering:
Texts
M. E. Braddon’s Lost for Love
William Benjamin Carpenter’s Principles of Mental Physiology
Wilkie Collins’s The Frozen Deep and Other Stories published; The Law and the Lady serialized John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science
Amelia Edwards’s A Night on the Borders of the Black Forest
George Eliot’s The Legend of Jubal, Arion, and A Minor Prophet; first one-volume edition of
Middlemarch
F. W. Farrar’s Life of Christ
John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens, final volume Francis Galton’s English Men of Science
W. S. Gilbert’s Charity
John Richard Green’s Short History of the English People Thomas Huxley’s “On the Hypothesis that Animals are
Automata”
G. H. Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind, Vol. 1
Henry Maudsley’s Responsibility in Mental Disease George Meredith’s Beauchamp’s Career serialized Margaret Oliphant’s A Rose in June and For Love and Life John Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and
Labourers of Great Britain, Vol. 4
Henry Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics
James Sully’s Sensation and Intuition
Albernon Charles Swinburne’s Bothwell: A Tragedy
James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night
Anthony Trollope’s Lady Anna and Phineas Redux published Alfred Russell Wallace’s “A Defence of Modern Spiritualism” Mrs. Henry Wood’s Johnny Ludlow
Events
London School of Medicine for Women founded
Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge founded
Fiji Islands annexed by Britain
Ghana established as a British colony
Shipton-on-Cherwell train crash (and other notable train crashes) David Livingstone’s body returned to England

Victoria Embankment opened Astley Deep Pit disaster
Public Worship Regulation Act Factory Act of 1874
1874 Transit of Venus
Wilkie Collins’s readings in America
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease founded First Impressionist exhibition, Paris

***

Proposals (no more than 500 words) by Oct. 15, 2012 (e-mail submissions only, in Word format):
Professor Tyson Stolte, Chair, NVSA Program Committee (tmstolte@nmsu.edu).
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 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.
To join NVSA, or to renew your membership for 2012-2013, please return the form below to Prof. Joan Dagle at the address indicated on the form.

Suzy Anger, President, NVSA Department of English University of British Columbia 397 - 1873 East Mall (Buchanan Tower)
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1

phone: (604) 822-4539 fax: (604) 822-6906 anger@mail.ubc.ca

NVSA MEMBERSHIP
To: Professor Joan Dagle, Secretary/Treasurer NVSA Arts & Sciences
Rhode Island College
600 Mt. Pleasant Ave.
Providence, RI 02908
I wish to renew my dues or become a member of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association. I have enclosed a check to NVSA for ___ $15 in U.S. dollars (regular membership) or ___$10 (student)
NAME________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________
MAILING ADDRESS___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ EMAIL ADDRESS_____________________________________________________
ACADEMIC AFFILIATION_____________________________________________

Victorian Transnationalism: The Atlantic Legacy in the Long 19th Century, Oct. 11-13, 2012

CALL FOR PAPERS

VISAWUS 2012 Conference

Victorian Transnationalism: 

The Atlantic Legacy in the Long 19th Century

The Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States (VISAWUS) announces its 17th annual conference to be held Oct. 11-13,  2012, during the height of the fall foliage season, on the campus of SUNY Plattsburgh in Plattsburgh, NY, which is situated on beautiful Lake Champlain (across from Burlington, VT), and an hour south of Montreal.

The focus of this year's conference is Victorian Transnationalism, with particular emphasis on the Atlantic legacy in the long 19th century.  As the site of a decisive American victory in the War of 1812, Plattsburgh is a testament to the fraught history of the “special relationships” between Britain and her neighbors across the pond. The town is home to an annual re-enactment of the Battle of Plattsburgh as well as historical sites relevant for scholars of the nineteenth century. We encourage papers across all disciplines exploring various aspects of the relations among and between the UK, Canada, the US, and other nations and regions across the Americas. Possible topics include, but are not limited to the following:

·       Intertextuality across national boundaries ·       Transnational influences in art ·       Concert tours and musical influences ·       Theatrical trends and tours ·       Transnational friendships, famous and infamous ·       Periodical press and public relations ·       Sports and amusements, competitions and crazes ·       Fashion and fads  ·       Celebrity authors and book tours ·       Literary and other piracies ·       Transnational science—synergies and squabbles ·       Expeditions and exploration ·       Migration of religious and spiritual movements ·       The Imperial project in Britain and the Americas ·       Legacies of war (Revolutionary, Napoleonic, War of 1812) ·       Transnational relations during the American Civil War ·       Race, racism, and slavery ·       Transatlantic social reform movements and actors ·       International affiliations and antipathies

·       Transportation, tourism, and travel ·       Expatriots: immigration and emigration ·       Communication technologies (telegraph, e.g.) ·       Transatlantic commerce and commodities ·       Nautical technologies, marine life, aquaria ·       Fishing and whaling ·       Indigenous peoples, real and imagined ·       Wilderness and civilization ·       National symbols, stereotypes, and slurs ·       National identities and ideals ·       Clashing national manners and customs ·       Transnational gender-role differences ·       Ways of speaking: accents in English ·       National tastes in food and drink ·       Cosmopolitanism and provincialism ·       Definitions of class difference and labor issues ·       Contagion and containment, infectious diseases and epidemiology ·       Contact zones, ethnographies, and autoethnographies

By March 5, 2012, email 300-word abstracts and a 1-page CV (name on BOTH) to: Genie Babb at gbabb001@plattsburgh.edu. For further information on the conference, visit VISAWUS.org.

Conference Hotel: Best Western Inn at Smithfield. To make reservations please call the hotel directly at 518-561-7750, dial extension 2 to reach the front desk and ask for the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association to receive the group rate. There is a cut off date of 09/10/2012; rooms will need to be booked on or by this date to receive the group rate. (Group rates available 10/10 through 10/13/2012.)

NAUGHTY JONATHAN

“You shan’t interfere, Mother—and you ought to be on my side—and it’s a great shame—and I don’t care—and you shall interfere—and I won’t have it.”  - Punch June 6, 1861  

NAVSA 2012: Victorian Networks

CALL FOR PAPERS: NAVSA 2012 "Victorian Networks"

The North American Victorian Studies Association Conference for 2012, in Madison, Wisconsin, September 27-30, invites papers on the theme of networks. Keynotes include Amanda Anderson, Adam Phillips, and a visual networks panel with Caroline Arscott, Tim Barringer, Julie Codell, and Mary Roberts.  Participants will also be able to sign up for networks seminars of 15 presenters of  precirculated 5-page position papers on the topic.

March 1, 2012 is the deadline for electronic submissions of proposed papers and panels. We welcome proposals of no more than 500 words for individual papers; for panel proposals, please submit abstracts of 500 words per paper and a panel description of 250 words. Please include a one-page cv and submit all files in .pdf format to english.wisc.edu/navsa.  Conference threads might include:

n Networks of artists, critics, consumers, scholars

n Networks of print (books, chapbooks, newspapers, magazines, letters, pamphlets), including relations among publishers, printers, editors, writers, readers

n Commodity culture networks and the circulation of things and bodies

n Networks of discourse (such as science, religion, nature, politics)

n The science of networks, then and now

n Textual networks (characters, plot, language, intertextuality)

n Networks of influence, production, reception

n Networks of display or exhibition

n Fashioning networks among otherwise unconnected authors and historical figures

n Transnational and other migrations: geographic, cultural, ideological, rhetorical

n Borders and "borders" -- theorizing cultural connection, separation, entanglement

n Diasporic networks: cosmopolitanism, wandering, exile

n Clandestine networks such as spies, secret agents, and detection

n Networking technologies

n Network arts

n Social networks including leisure clubs and professional societies

n Family and kinship networks

n Victorian cities: streets, arcades, parks, or other networks of urban space

n Imperial networks

n Network forms: gossip, blackmail, suspense, serials,, periodicals, or other genres

n Psychic and supernatural networks: seances, spiritualism, mediums

n Digital networks and twenty-first century reading practices

n Networked periodization: romantic/victorian/modernist

n Networks of resistance: feminist, ecological, queer

n Networks of iteration and translation (between image, text, adaptation)