CFP: (Re)Reading John Addington Symonds
A BAVS-supported one-day conference at Keele University, Saturday 11 September 2010
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 18 June 2010
Plenary Speakers: Howard J. Booth (Manchester) and Hilary Fraser (Birkbeck)
Interest in John Addington Symonds has revived in recent years due to the 1984 publication of his Memoirs (edited by Phyllis Grosskurth), a unique and important record of Victorian homosexuality. He has since become an important figure for historians of sexuality and queer criticism. Despite this resurgence, Symonds has remained a marginalised figure; his participation across multiple academic and creative disciplines is largely excluded from the canon of nineteenth century cultural criticism. This has prompted John Pemble to write: ‘[Symonds’s contemporary readership] kept his reputation alive and most of his books in print until the 1930s; but his prestige faded as they aged and died off.’
Interest in Symonds has grown and diversified during the 2000s. This one-day conference will provide a forum within which to assimilate and evaluate this new and emerging work; it will offer a wide ranging re-assessment of Symonds, exploring his contribution to multiple disciplines and his significance for current fields of academic study.
Papers might address (but are not limited to):
- Symonds and art/art history
- Symonds and Hellenism
- Symonds as ‘man of letters’; literary critic; historian; poet; essayist; translator
- Symonds and nineteenth-century science; sexology; evolution
- Symonds and life writing
- Symonds and travel writing
- Symonds in collaboration
- Symonds and his contemporaries
- Symonds and his critics/advocates
- Symonds and publication; textuality; book history
- Symonds’s reception, reputation and ‘afterlife’
- Symonds and gender/sexuality
Abstracts for 15 to 20 minute papers (c. 250 words) should be emailed to a.k.regis@engl.keele.ac.uk by 18 June 2010.
Informal enquiries should be addressed to the conference organisers: David Amigoni (d.amigoni@engl.keele.ac.uk) and Amber K. Regis (a.k.regis@engl.keele.ac.uk). Further information is available on the conference website.
VPFA Study Day, 22 May, 3pm
To be held at the Institute of English Studies, Senate House, University of London, Gower Street, WC1E 7HU, Room G35.
This study day will feature presentations by Janice Allan (University of Salford) on ‘Pianos and “pernicious literature”: class and infanticide in Ellen Wood’s Parkwater’, and Andrew Mangham (University of Reading) on ’Anatomical Sketches by Boz’.
Download the flyer here.
Goldsmiths Postgraduate History Workshop – ‘An Education’ 17 June
17 June 2010 (call for papers 1 May)
What constitutes ‘an education’? Learning? Teaching? Knowledge? 140 years ago the Elementary Education Act was passed in an attempt to provide free and universal schooling for all five to ten year olds. This workshop wants to reexamine the effects such an Act had on society as a whole. The event is hosted by Goldsmiths’ Department of History but papers are welcome from all disciplines, whether rooted in academic research or personal experience.
Abstracts or proposals of 200 words maximum by 1 May 2010 to hs701il@gold.ac.uk
http://www.gold.ac.uk/history/news-events/eventtitle,19326,en.php
Ruth Scurr on Carlyle, TLS
Ruth Scurr’s essay on Thomas Carlyle makes for stimulating reading…
(Times Literary Supplement April 14, 2010)
Thomas Carlyle at the barricades
The bold imaginative engagement and troubled path to completion of Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution
Inaugural Meeting of the London Gaskell Reading Group
Tuesday 27 April 2010, 6-8pm, Roehampton University
Convenors: Alison Lundie (Roehampton) and Louise Lee (King’s College London).
The convenors write: ‘This exciting new interdisciplinary reading group unites Gaskell enthusiasts, undergraduates, postgraduates and academics from across London and the south east to discuss and celebrate one of the most distinctive voices in nineteenth-century fiction. In the bicentenary of Gaskell’s birth, we shall be reading a range of her work from major novels to some of the lesser-known short stories, considering such themes as place, work, material culture, story-telling, affect, industrial life, female writing, the woman question, science and empire.
Meetings will be held alternately at Roehampton University and King’s College London. Please join us for a glass of wine and some lively discussion.’
Prof. Barbara Hardy will introduce the first meeting with a paper entitled “Forms of Feeling in North and South.”
Designated Reading: North and South (1855)
* If you are interested in attending, please email one of the organisers, Alison Lundie (alisonlundie@tiscali.co.uk) or Louise Lee (louise.lee@kcl.ac.uk).
Venue: Roehampton University, Roehampton Lane, London SW15.
Terrace Room Howard 001/002
*Nearest BR station is Barnes, a ten-minute walk from Roehampton’s main campus. Access Barnes station from Waterloo or Clapham Junction BR stations.
Paul White on The Emotional Economy of Science
‘Darwin’s Emotions: The Scientific Self and the Sentiment of Objectivity’
An introduction to a focus collection in December’s Isis. White makes a compelling argument for considering the function of objectivity and feeling in science, and the way we write histories of science.
Isis. 100 (December 2009): 811–826
Pre-Raphaelite Art and Literature: Connections and Influences, 26 June
This day school is organised by the Pre-Raphaelite Society, with the University of Birmingham, to explore links between the PRB and the literature of the nineteenth century.
Speakers include: Barrie Bullen, John Holmes, Franny Moyle, Leonee Ormond and Tony Pinkney. Chair: Serena Trowbridge. The fee for the day is £34.
For more details and to register, visit http://www.pre-raphaelitesociety.org/news.htm
University of Hull Centre for Victorian Studies Inaugural Annual Lecture, 21 April
Professor Elaine Showalter, ‘Nordic Women and New Women’, Wednesday 21 April 2010, 6pm, Middleton Hall, The University of Hull.
Elaine Showalter is Professor Emeritus of English and Avalon Professor of the Humanities at Princeton, where she received the President’s award for Distinguished Teaching in 2003. Academic honours include a Guggenheim fellowship and a Rockefeller Humanities fellowship.
Admission free – all invited. For further details contact Ann Heilmann (a.heilmann@hull.ac.uk). A full programme of research events at Hull is available here.
The Leeds Nineteenth Century Reading Group ‘Special Session’ 27th April
The Leeds Nineteenth Century Reading Group meets once a month to discuss a variety of texts written during the Nineteenth Century. There next meeting will be on Tuesday 27th April, at 5.15pm in the School of English (Seminar Room 5). This will be a ‘special session’ of the normal reading group in which David Ibitson and Dr. Beth Palmer, will present papers. There will be a combined Q&A/Reading group discussion afterwards. The group suggests some relevant reading for the papers below, although this is not mandatory.
David Ibitson will be talking on ‘Jerome K. Jerome and Imperial Parody’, focusing on Three Men in a Boat. This text is available in the library and in most bookshops. It is also available for free in e-text form here http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/308 and here http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=title:three%20men%20in%20a%20boat%20AND%20mediatype:texts and as a free audio download here: http://librivox.org/three-men-in-a-boat-by-jerome-k-jerome/
Beth Palmer will be talking on the subject of ‘Being ‘Dickensy’ in the Victorian periodical press’. Some of the criticism discussed can be found by following these links:
Dickens, ‘A Flight’, Household Words, 3 (August 1851), pp. 529-533.
http://0-britishperiodicals.chadwyck.co.uk.wam.leeds.ac.uk/articles/displayItemFromId.do?QueryType=articles&ItemID=x164-1851-003-75-000369
Collins ‘The Unknown Public’, Household Words, 18 (1858), 217-22.
http://0-britishperiodicals.chadwyck.co.uk.wam.leeds.ac.uk/articles/displayItemFromId.do?QueryType=articles&ItemID=x164-1858-018-39-000393
Sala, ‘The Cant of Modern Criticism’, Belgravia 4 (November 1867), 45-55
http://0-britishperiodicals.chadwyck.co.uk.wam.leeds.ac.uk/articles/displayItemFromId.do?QueryType=articles&ItemID=e502-1867-004-00-000162
These links are accessible with a University password. If this does not work for you, please let the organisers know in order to make alternative arrangements. For those requiring a map, click on the map on the following URL. The School is number 76. http://www.leeds.ac.uk/campus_map/
If anyone has a query, please email one of the organisers: Owen Clayton (engotc@leeds.ac.uk), Alice Crossley (eng5acc@leeds.ac.uk), and Louisa Hodgson (eng2ljch@leeds.ac.uk)
Louis Menand on ‘The PhD Problem’
The Ph.D. Problem
On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal.
An extract from Louis Menand’s new book, The Ideas Marketplace. Menand is a brilliant commentator on the state of current academic training – if you’ve ever had a moment of unease about how doctoral programs operate, the rhetoric of professionalization, or the seemingly unmanageable gulf between far-reaching creative work and the demands of academic life, this is essential reading (AW).
http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/11/professionalization-in-academy
