Two PhD Opportunities at Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions
MEDICINE, EMOTION AND DISEASE IN HISTORY
This three-year studentship comprises part of a five-year Wellcome Trust Enhancement Award in the History of Medicine to fund a research project – ‘Medicine, Emotion and Disease in History’ – which investigates how theories, experiences, and expressions of passions and emotions have developed in medical contexts since the sixteenth century. The studentship is fully funded, providing a maintenance grant at the rate paid by the Wellcome Trust (starting at £21,629 during 2011-2). Fees are also covered by the Wellcome Trust, at the rate for home students.
Further details available on our funding page:
http://www.qmul.ac.uk/emotions/funding.html
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EMOTIONS AND THE HOME IN MODERN BRITAIN
This studentship will cover fees and maintenance (at the AHRC rate, which is currently £15,590) from 2011-2014, starting in September 2011. The project will be co-supervised by staff in the School of Geography (Professor Alison Blunt or Dr Alastair Owens), School of History (Dr Thomas Dixon, Dr Rhodri Hayward, or Professor Amanda Vickery) and the Geffrye Museum (Eleanor John). An appropriate supervisory team will be appointed based on the successful candidate’s exact topic.
Further details available on our funding page:
http://www.qmul.ac.uk/emotions/funding.html
CFP: Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century
Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century
Birmingham City University
A one-day conference on Friday 13th May 2011
Proposals due: 25 March
I always had a desire to know asylum life more thoroughly – a desire to be convinced that the most helpless of God’s creatures, the insane, were cared for kindly and properly. Nellie Bly
“And Something’s odd – within -
That person that I was -
And this One – do not feel the same -
Could it be Madness – this?” Emily DickinsonThe place where optimism flourishes most is the lunatic asylum. (Havelock Ellis)
This interdisciplinary conference will address a range of issues concerning the perception of insanity and madness in the nineteenth century, its manifestations and treatments, and the patients themselves. The conference will take place on Friday 13th May, 2011, in the chapel of the Birmingham Lunatic Asylum, an impressive building used to restrain and treat patients from 1862 until 1964.
We invite papers on a range of subjects related to this theme. Please submit an abstract of 350 words to serena.trowbridge@bcu.ac.uk by 25th March, 2011. Subjects covered might include:
- The life of patients in lunatic asylums
- The literary treatment of madness and lunatic asylums
- Early psychiatry in the asylum
- The architecture and physical space of the lunatic asylum
- Artists and writers and insanity
- Poetry and madness
- Insanity and/or the asylum in the nineteenth-century novel
CFP: Mastering the Emotions: Control, Contagion and Chaos, 1800 to the Present Day
Mastering the Emotions: Control, Contagion and Chaos, 1800 to the Present Day
Queen Mary, University of London
16th-17th June 2011
Proposals Due: 14 February
Keynote Speakers:
Sally Shuttleworth, St Anne’s College, Oxford University, UK
Allan Young, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
What does it mean to master one’s emotions?
Since the modern category of ‘the emotions’ emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century, much medical knowledge about and scientific research into this elusive phenomenon has been concerned with its potentially involuntary nature, and with the ability and inability of humans to exert control over their emotions.
From the nineteenth century’s preoccupation with the nature of impulse and involuntary expression, to our own concerns about emotional literacy and regulation, the problem of constricting emotions and producing them on demand has troubled psychologists, physicians, philosophers, scientists, writers and artists alike.
Constructed as both irrational, yet within the bounds of rational control, separate from, yet the product of bodily processes, the emotions have historically proved a key site of medical and cultural debate. At the same time, the exercise of too much control has also been pathologised, and both theatricalised and repressed emotions have historically called into question prevailing notions of ‘authenticity’ and emotional truth.
Papers are invited which explore the management, control or manipulation of the emotions between 1800 and the present day. Possible themes might include, but are not limited to:
- Pathologisation (e.g. of absence and excess of emotion, emotional impulses)
- Regulation (e.g. medical or psychological intervention, medically directed self-regulation, emotions and public policy)
- Manipulation and Performativity (e.g. theatre, malingering)
- Trauma and Repression (e.g. emotion and the subconscious, emotional release as therapeutic, the production of emotional states through drugs and hypnosis)
Please send abstract proposals of 300 words, or panel proposals (2 or4 abstracts, and a panel rationale of 300 words) by email to Tiffany Watt-Smith t.k.watt-smith@qmul.ac.uk by 14th February 2011. All speakers will be notified by 28th February 2011.
CFP and Post Graduate Prizes: Research Society for Victorian Periodicals
Work and Leisure: 43rd Annual Conference
Canterbury Christ Church University, UK, 22-23 July 2011
Proposals due: 1st February 2011
“As the deadline looms for the Call for Papers for the 43rd Annual Conference of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, the Programme Committee would like to draw your attention to FIVE exciting funding opportunities that are available for postgraduates. There are three Ashgate/RSVP prizes available in memory of Barbara Quinn Schmidt and Josef Altholz, each worth $200. BAVS (British Association for Victorian Studies) are offering two travel awards of £200 to cover registration costs and contribute to travel arrangements. One prize will be awarded to a student from outside Europe and one for a student from within Europe (including Britain).
Each prize winner will be expected to submit a short report (one side of A4) following the event. These will be made available on the RSVP website and the winners of the BAVS prizes will send a copy of their work to the Secretary of BAVS for the Association’s records and possible inclusion in the BAVS Newsletter. All reports should cover details on the nature of the event and how their sponsorship contributed to the conference experience.
To apply for any of these prizes please attach a letter of application to your proposal and CV (those who have already sent in their proposals should still feel free to contact Dr Clare Horrocks if they wish to be considered for one of these prizes).
We are also pleased to announce that the Michael Wolff Keynote speaker this year will be: Dr John Drew (University of Buckingham), Director of the pioneering digitisation project “Dickens Journals Online”.
Full details of the Call for Papers are now available on the conference website:
Suggested themes include but are not limited to:
• Technologies and economies of production, distribution and use
• The cultural work of the Victorian press
• Trade and professional publications
• The nature and locations of labour and leisure
• The culture industries, including travel, theatre, concerts, exhibitions, sport
• Holiday Supplements
As always, the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals invites proposals for papers that address any aspect of nineteenth-century British magazines or newspapers, although those dealing with the conference theme are particularly welcome. Panels looking at digitisation and teaching and learning with periodicals and newspapers are particularly welcomed. Please e-mail two-page (maximum) proposals for individual presentations or panels of three to Dr Clare Horrocks (C.L.Horrocks@ljmu.ac.uk) and Dr Andrew King (andrew.king@canterbury.ac.uk).
CFP: The Popular Imagination and the Dawn of Modernism: Middlebrow Writing 1890-1930
Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London
15-16 September 2011
Keynote speakers: Professor Ann Ardis (University of Delaware, USA)
Professor Adina Ciugureanu (Ovidius University Constanta, Romania)
Proposals Due: 31 January 2011
“The increase in modernist and avant-garde cultural manifestations in the early years of the twentieth century displaced realist and traditional literary works from, in Bourdieu’s sense, “legitimate” culture. The former came to represent “highbrow”, with a concomitant exclusion of all that highbrow was not. Even influential and critically acclaimed writers, such as H. G. Wells, were derided for maintaining their realist style as well as for catering to popular taste. Retrospectively, the conception of modernism has been expanded in order to be able to accommodate less obviously avant-garde works, but this expansion may not be continued indefinitely. Lines of demarcation between high, low, mass, and middle, in their varying media and forms, need to be identified to enable a more nuanced understanding of the evolution of literary and other cultural forms in this period, and the contemporary reception of the texts and ideas expressed therein.
This conference seeks to examine the emergence of modernism outside elitist, avant-garde notions, particularly focusing on middlebrow literature in its relation to these socio-cultural developments. We assume that, even though middlebrow fiction usually adheres to conspicuously affirmative structures of plot development in order to meet genre expectations and publishers’ requirements, this narrative framework is often in a disintegrative state, in form and subject. Such narratives raise disturbing issues concerning the crumbling Empire, collapsing class structures and the deterioration of the Victorian family ideal. For women, in particular, the middlebrow novel provided a space for the negotiation of and experimentation with alternative social and gender roles. In this sense, middlebrow writing can be regarded as a domestication of modernist themes also prevalent at the time; allowing unsettling issues to be raised while maintaining at least a superficial impression of (narrative) stability and security. Based on the assumption that such works reached a far wider audience than those of the avant-garde, by exploring such issues of stability and disintegration this conference aims to advance research on the production, dissemination and reception of middlebrow and popular fiction between 1890-1930.”
Papers are invited which address these themes, and those linked to them, with the common factors being the study of textual works produced during the period 1890-1930, in the “British” world.
The conference is organised by Professor Christoph Ehland (University of Paderborn) and Dr Kate Macdonald (University of Ghent). Please send proposals to kate.macdonald@ugent.be and to cornelia.waechter@uni-paderborn.de by 31 January 2011.
See the IES website for more information.
Dickens and the Nightwalking Tradition
Birkbeck College’s School of Arts has come together to investigate and illustrate London’s dark side through a series of seminars and talks entitled, The Night Shift. Roger Luckhurst heads The Night Shift committee; the next event, ‘Nightwalking: Dickens and the London Night walking Tradition’ is with Matthew Beaumont (6pm, Friday 21 January 2010 at 43 Gordon Square, room B03). Entry is free to all.
Tony Judt ‘Bring Back the Rails’ (Part II)
Part II of Judt’s essay published in the New York Review of Books
(January 13, 2011 • Volume 58, Number 1)
“The future of railways, a morbidly grim topic until very recently, is of more than passing interest. It is also quite promising. The aesthetic insecurities of the first post–World War II decades—the “New Brutalism” that favored and helped expedite the destruction of many of the greatest achievements of nineteenth-century public architecture and town planning—have passed. We are no longer embarrassed by the rococo or neo-Gothic or Beaux Arts excesses of the great railway stations of the industrial age and can see such edifices instead as their designers and contemporaries saw them: as the cathedrals of their age, to be preserved for their sake and for ours. The Gare du Nord and the Gare d’Orsay in Paris; Grand Central Station in New York and Union Station in St. Louis; St. Pancras in London; Keleti Station in Budapest; and dozens of others have all been preserved and even enhanced: some in their original function, others in a mixed role as travel and commercial centers, others still as civic monuments and cultural mementoes….”
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/bring-back-rails/
CFP: Modes of Transport: Travel Writing and Form, 1780-1914
King’s College London, 26 & 27 May 2011
Keynote speakers: Mary Beard (Cambridge), Dane Kennedy (George Washington University), and Dea Birkett (The Guardian)
Proposals Due: 18 February 2011
“There has always been a certain amount of unease and anxiety about how best to mould the quotidian, often repetitious, experience of travel into a digestible, literary narrative. The travel writer cannibalises other modes of literary, geographical and scientific writing, while simultaneously forging experimental, innovative and dynamic forms in the struggle to represent the heterogeneous and often chaotic experience of travel. It is the aim of this two-day conference to bring academic researchers and travel writers together in order to explore the relationship between travel writing and formal innovation in a variety of media across the long-nineteenth century. As Franco Moretti has suggested, ‘new space gives rise to a new form’, and the period 1780-1914 saw the rise of both new technologies of movement and new categories of traveller. We are specifically interested in how the new perspectives, networks, and markets enabled by these developments impacted upon literary and media form and how these narratives in turn affected the ways in which people travelled.”
See http://travelconference.blogspot.com/ for suggested topics and submission guidelines.
Supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Institute (KCL) and the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group
London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar
Institute of English Studies
Saturday 15 January 2011, 11.00am-1pm
John Stokes (Emeritus Professor of Modern English Literature, KCL): ‘Oscar Wilde’s “A Note on Some Modern Poets” (1888)’;
Sally Newman (King’s College London): ‘”Bizarre Love Triangle”: The erotics of pedagogy in the letters of Mary Robinson Duclaux, Vernon Lee and John Addington Symonds’
Room G22/26 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/seminars/19C/index.htm
CFP: Colloquium, Leeds Centre for Victorian Studiesu
One Day Colloquium on 19 November 2011
The Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies
Leeds Trinity University College
“We welcome offers of interdisciplinary papers on any aspects of Victorian globalization, which we consider to be the growth of a global economy, subsuming in some way other regions by the development of trade, technology, and transport and communications networks. The artistic, literary, and other cultural and political exchanges, hegemonies and homogenisation, and social migrations, interactions, and integration, are among the many developments which we wish to explore. We particularly welcome papers which consider:
- the economic, commercial, technological, and socio-cultural dynamics which engendered Victorian globalization
- studies of acculturation, transculturation, biculturation, cultural appropriation and cultural imperialism
- anti-global and anti-imperialist responses and reactions in Britain and the global community
- the experience of immigration and emigration within the British Empire and the global community
- the experience of teaching the history, culture, and literature of Victorian imperialism/globalization within the HE sector
- the experience of representing within a heritage or popular cultural context the history, culture, and literature of Victorian imperialism/globalization
- the relevance of the Victorian experience of globalization to twentieth-first-century politics and culture.
Please send a brief abstract of 250-300 words to the colloquium convenor, Di Drummond, at d.drummond@leedstrinity.ac.uk by 15 March 2011. Ideally, all papers will be published in a Leeds Working Papers volume in advance of the colloquium, and will need to be submitted by 1st August 2011.
