PhD Studentships in Victorian Studies
Leeds Trinity have announced two new PhD studentships in Victorian Studies:
Appropriations of the Past/Victorian Historical Cultures
&
Writing of the period 1880-1900 with particular reference to George Gissing
See Leeds Trinity University College website for further details:
http://www.leedstrinity.ac.uk/research/Pages/PhDStudentships.aspx
Closing date for applications is 14 June 2010.
Literature, Classics and Class: A Performance Event at the British Academy
5.00pm to 7.30pm, followed by a reception
Thursday, 1 July 2010
The Royal Society, 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1
From the Academy’s Event Notice:
‘On the evening of July 1st, Peggy Reynolds, Reader in English Literature at Queen Mary University of London and presenter of BBC Radio 4′s ‘Adventures in Poetry’ will chair a special event featuring an unprecedented programme of poetry and prose which vividly brings to life the role of the Greek and Roman Classics in the history of class consciousness. Tony Harrison, last year awarded the inaugural Pen/Pinter prize for his ‘unmistakable and passionate voice’, is a classically educated poet who has never forgotten his working-class roots and has used classical authors to forge an inclusive public poetry. He will read selected poems from The School of Eloquence, Loiners, Under the Clock, and The Gaze of the Gorgon and extracts from his translations, plays and films, including The Oresteia, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus and Prometheus.
In part two, actors Alice Barclay and Simon Muller from ‘Live Canon’, a touring ensemble which performs poetry in the English Language, along with the storyteller and blogger Stephe Harrop, will perform extracts from works by the ‘Chartist Rhymer’ Ernest Jones, the Abolitionist Poet Edward Rushton, the ‘milkmaid of Bristol’ Anne Yearsley, Robert Burns, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hardy, Siegfried Sassoon, Kenneth Burke, Bertolt Brecht, Anne Stevenson, Louis MacNeice, W.H. Auden and Iain Crichton Smith.’
Entry is free but registration is required.
http://www.britac.ac.uk/events/2010/classicsandclass/index.cfm
Projecting Desire: Sex, Psychoanalysis and Cinema
I know… it’s not strictly C19th stuff, but for anyone who is interested in theories of desire (and wants that rare thing for a Victorianist, the opportunity to watch films in the name of research) this might just be what’s needed.
Projecting Desire: Sex, Psychoanalysis and Cinema
Tate Modern
Led by Lucy Scholes and Richard Martin
Saturdays 5 June – 10 July 2010
Films, readings, literary and psychoanalytic theory, discussions and more
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/coursesworkshops/21573.htm
New Issue of ’19′ on Dickens and Science
The new issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century is now available:
www.19.bbk.ac.uk
Guest edited by Holly Furneaux and Ben Winyard, this issue considers ‘Dickens and Science’ and features a range of papers from Dickens Day 2009.
Under consideration are Dickens’s myriad engagements with science, including medicine, psychology, forensics, evolutionary thought, paleontology, ecology, and contested practices such as mesmerism. Participating in the lively revision of earlier accounts of Dickens’s failure to understand and respond to science, this issue places Dickens at the heart of a peculiarly Victorian, deeply literary, appreciation of the imaginative potential of scientific discovery.
***
‘Commodities in Motion’ Workshop July 2010
The Leverhulme funded research network ‘Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World 1851-1914′ have announced details of their first workshop, to be held 5-7 July 2010.
http://www.commoditiesandculture.org/events/workshop-1-commodities-in-motion-5-7-july-2010.html
Three postgraduate bursaries have also been announced, comprising a waiver of
the registration fee, 2 nights accommodation in London and meals during
the workshop.
Postgraduate students wishing to apply should send 300 words outlining their
research and its relevance to the network, and also send a CV. Please email
these to Josephine McDonagh and Sarah Easterby-Smith at
commculture@kcl.ac.uk
The deadline for applications is 28 May 2010. Further details are available at: http://www.commoditiesandculture.org/home.html
Call for Papers: Dickens Day 2010
‘Mr Popular Sentiment’: Dickens and Feeling
Saturday 16 October, Senate House, London
Deadline for Proposals 4 June
Jointly organised by Birkbeck, Leicester University and the Dickens Fellowship
‘Whilst Trollope sought to dismiss Dickens as ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’, Robert Louis Stevenson embraced the emotional affect of Dickens’s fiction, writing of the Christmas books that he had cried his eyes out, ‘but oh, dear God, they are good – and I feel so good after them.’ From the first readers who wept convulsively at the death of Little Nell, to Oscar Wilde who, famously, could not read it without laughing, Dickens’s work has elicited strong and divided emotional responses. The term sentimental, a word frequently associated with Dickens, can be used to denigrate his writing but a wealth of recent thinking is challenging the negative connotations surrounding this categorisation. Often criticised as dishonest, manipulative and ‘cheap’ emotion, sentimentality is being reconfigured as the legitimate, rather than bastard, offspring of the eighteenth-century philosophy of sensibility and as a literary manoeuvre capable of reforming both the reader and reading practices.
Taking Trollope’s parodic description as its point of departure, this one-day conference, jointly run by Birkbeck, Leicester University and the Dickens Fellowship, will explore the complex relationships between Dickens’s works and the diverse feelings they both represent and engender. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of the theme and warmly encourage postgraduate students to apply.’
Topics could include but are not limited to:
Historical and theoretical understandings of sentiment, emotion, passion, affection and affect
The eighteenth-century legacy, including Dickens’s responses to Mackenzie, Sterne and Richardson
Nineteenth-century sciences of emotion: physiognomy, phrenology, psychology and evolutionary biology
Form and feeling: emotions, mode and aesthetics
Radical and political uses and experiences of emotion
Staged feeling: melodrama, adaptation and Dickens’s public readings
Men and women of feeling: gender, sexuality and affect
Dickens’s writing of/for children
Grief, loss, mourning and memorialisation
Religion, faith and doubt
Tears, laughter, blushing; the body and emotion
Festive feeling and Christmas writings
Please send proposals (maximum 500 words), together with details of your institutional affiliation (if any) to Holly Furneaux, Ben Winyard and Bethan Carney, at hf35@le.ac.uk, b.winyard@english.bbk.ac.uk and jcarn02@students.bbk.ac.uk. The deadline for paper proposals is 4 June 2010.
http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/2010/DickensDay10/index.htm
Oxford Literature and Science Seminars, May 12 and 28
Two events coming up that may be of interest:
Professor Bruno Latour (Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Paris)
‘A Compositionist Manifesto’
Wednesday 12 May 2010, 5.30pm.
English Faculty, St Cross Building, Lecture Theatre 2.
Graduate Forum
Stella Pratt-Smith (University of Oxford)
‘Mind over Matter: From Sensation to Precision in Nineteenth-Century Representations of Electricity’
Will Tattersdill (King’s College, London)
‘Two Sides of the Same Page: Science and Fiction in the Late Victorian Periodical’
Friday 28 May 2010, 2pm.
English Faculty, St Cross Building, Room 10.
