CFP: Dickens Day 2011
25th Anniversary DICKENS DAY
‘Republics of the Imagination: Dickens and Travel’
Saturday 15th October 2011, Senate House, London
Proposals due: 31st May 2011
From stagecoaches to railways, sailing ships to steam ships, travel changed forever over the nineteenth century as new modes of transport enabled people to go faster and further than ever before. Dickens wrote from the heart of this travelling revolution. When he visited America Dickens chose the fastest and most modern form of transatlantic transport – the paddle-steamer. He was keenly aware of the way ‘railway mania’ was changing the face of the country, and of the opportunities (and dangers) created by the new railways. Yet nostalgic depictions of stagecoach travel also run through much of his fiction. Dickens’s trips to America, Italy, France and Switzerland are immortalised in his writing – as is Australia which he visited only in his imagination. The exotic worlds of The Arabian Nights and The Tales of the Genii from his childhood reading are revisited again and again in his works.
This one-day conference will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of Dickens Day. Jointly run by Birkbeck, University of Leicester and the Dickens Fellowship, it will explore Dickens’s travels and travels in Dickens. Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers on any aspect of the theme and postgraduate students are warmly encouraged to apply.
Topics could include but are not limited to:
- Carriages, steamships, trains: nineteenth-century modes of travel
- The Grand Tour: travel, class and education in the nineteenth century
- Sentimental journeys: Dickens, travel writing and affect
- The literary heritage: responses to Smollett, Sterne and eighteenth-century travel writing
- Dealings with the firm of Dombey and Son: Dickens, empire and trade
- Telling American tales: Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope, Harriet Martineau, and Captain Marryat
- Pictures from Italy and travels in France and Switzerland
- Dickens’s travels in the imagination: Australia, India, Africa
- Exotic literary travels: The Arabian Nights and The Tales of the Genii
- The Uncommercial Traveller: travels in human interest
- Town and country: from the metropolitan to the provincial in Dickens
- Romances of the high seas: ships, ports and sea yarns
- That magic lantern: Dickens’s travels in London; night walks and rookeries
- The reluctant traveller: Dickens, travel and domesticity
- Place, space and otherness in Dickens’s work
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, benwinyard@hotmail.com and jcarn02@students.bbk.ac.uk. The deadline for paper proposals is 31 May 2011.
CFP: ‘Conquest and Expansionism’
CONQUEST AND EXPANSIONISM
5th Annual Conference of the York History Research Society
Friday 8 July 2011
University of York
“Conquest and expansionism are themes that pervade all historical eras. Individuals and societies have always sought to advance themselves, be it politically, socially or economically. Such ambition can manifest itself in peaceful endeavours, but it can also engender conflict. This important topic will be the subject of the 5th Annual Conference of the York History Research Society. We hope to bring together postgraduates from all aspects of history to join us in a stimulating debate on these issues.”
If you would like to present a paper, please send a short abstract of no more than 300 words to Tom Wright (tjw507@york.ac.uk) by Friday 13 May 2011. Papers should be designed to last no more than 20 minutes.
Suggested themes for papers might include, but are not limited to:
- Development of nation
- Expansionism and the military
- Trade and mercantile interests
- Dissemination of ideas, technologies and practice
- Assimilation
- Religious or irreligious expansion
- Political conquest
- Experiences and representation of conquest
- Failed conquests and expansion
- Protection rackets and tribute culture
This is a postgraduate-run conference which aims to foster collaborative engagement between research students. The event, including lunch, refreshments and a drinks reception, will be free of charge. All are welcome.
For any further information please contact one of the organisers: Laura Chesworth ljc528@york.ac.uk, Andrew Stead ais503@york.ac.uk, Jenny Tomlinson jst508@york.ac.uk, Tom Wright tjw507@york.ac.uk.
Reminder: Call for Editorial Assistants, JVC
Journal of Victorian Culture
Editorial Assistant(s) and Postgraduate Publication Opportunities
Applications due 31 May 2011
The Editorial Board of the Journal of Victorian Culture (JVC) is pleased to invite applications from doctoral or recent postdoctoral researchers in the field of Victorian Studies for the position of Editorial Assistant(s) to the JVC Online.
See the Journal’s blog for more details.http://myblogs.informa.com/jvc/2011/02/01/now-accepting-applications-for-the-position-of-editorial-assistants-to-jvc-online-doctoral-students-and-recent-ph-d-s/
Lord Asa Briggs: A Celebration
Thursday 19 May 2011
Wolfson/Pollard, Institute of Historical Research
Senate House, University of London
Lord Asa Briggs, one of the country’s most distinguished living historians, turns ninety this year, and he and his remarkable contribution to academic history, to the development of Victorian studies, the history of communication and his role in the growth of modern universities are considered and assessed in this one-day colloquium co-hosted with the British Association for Victorian Studies.
Confirmed participants:
* Asa Briggs
* David Cannadine (Princeton)
* Francesca Carnevali (University of Birmingham)
* Malcolm Chase (University of Leeds)
* Matthew Cragoe (University of Sussex)
* Martin Hewitt (Manchester Metropolitan University)
* Frank Buongiorno (Menzies Centre for Australian Studies/King’s College London)
* Sian Nicholas (Aberystwyth)
* Jean Seaton (University of Westminster)
* Robert Seatter (BBC)
* James Thompson (Bristol)
* David Vincent (Open University)
For more information and registration:
http://www.history.ac.uk/asa-briggs
CFP: Critical Survey “Sporting Victorians” Issue
Proposals Due: 16 May 2011
In the light of the forthcoming 2012 London Olympics, the journal Critical Survey seeks proposals for 4,000-6,000 word articles discussing some of the cultural, national, social and political issues that sport encompassed in Britain in the years 1800-1914. The nineteenth century saw the rise of professionalism in sport and the emergence of women as participants. The topic of sport also engaged a wide range of novelists, poets, dramatists, painters and journalists – both as commentators and participants – from Byron’s swimming to J.M. Barrie’s cricket team. It is hoped that the topic’s multi-disciplinary appeal will be apparent in some of the submissions. Subjects might include but are not limited to the following:
- sport and literature
- sporting writers
- sport and gender
- sport and nation
- sport and the theatre
- empire
- the professionalization of sport
- sport and the countryside (including hunting)
- sport and the city
- sporting heroes
- sport and entertainment (including gambling)
- sport and crime
- sport and the body (including `Muscular Christianity’)
- Hellenism
- sport and ethnicity
- sport and health
Please email proposals (of approximately 500 words) by 16 May 2011 to:
Andrew Maunder
Editor, Critical Survey
a.c.maunder@herts.ac.uk
http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/cs/
Final essays will be due in by 31 December 2011 and the journal issue will be published in spring 2012.
CFP: Travelling Identities
Symposium
12-6pm, Saturday 18th June
Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square
Birkbeck College
Proposals Due: 10 April 2011
The traveller is a liminal figure who, in transcending boundaries in space, also challenges ideas of territory and identity.
From Grand Tourists and Victorian explorers to gap-year backpackers and eco-tourists in our own time, the identity and cultural signification of the traveller has proved contentious. “Travel”, declares James Buzard, “acquires its special value by virtue of its differential relation with tourism”, a binary whose boundaries have been both created and policed by the travellers and travel writers whose identity is defined through travel. Yet while the transgressive potential of wilderness journeys and nomadism has long been celebrated, the notion of a ‘pure’ travel experience is problematised by the ideological and historical nexus in which the traveller is inevitably ensnared.
Nonetheless, travel continues to be associated with the possibilities of self-discovery and self-fashioning: the traveller’s outward physical journey has always had an important corollary in the journey inward. By considering the mapping of subjectivity onto the topography of a text, we open up questions about the relationship between self and space.
Travelling Identities is an interdisciplinary symposium which aims to address these issues through the examination of a broad range of historical periods, geographical areas and travel practices. We welcome papers addressing – but not restricted to – the following themes:
- Nomadism in the transnational age
- Travel writing and psychogeography
- Acculturation and cosmopolitanism
- Self-fashioning and the travelling subject
- Imaginative landscapes and the poetics of space
- The author as exile
- The backpacker and postcolonial ‘baggage’
- Ex-centricity: travel and non-conformity
- The ethical traveller and eco-criticism
- Authenticity, ‘finding yourself’ and the Western traveller
- Gendered travel practices
- The tourist, the traveller and class identity
- Postmodern travel and the uncanny
- Displaced persons: the migrant as traveller
- Borders and the traveller’s ability to transgress them
Please send an abstract of 200-250 words to bianca.leggett@gmail.com or alan.mcnee1@btinternet.com for April 10th. Papers should last approximately 15 minutes.
Empires and Humanitarianism: 20 May, University of Bristol
University of Bristol, 20th May 2011, 11 am – 6 pm.
A one-day workshop, hosted by the University of Bristol Centre for the Study of Colonial and Post-colonial Societies.
The workshop offers fresh interpretations of the relationship between empires and humanitarian action. It discusses the extent to which empires have been constitutive of humanitarian efforts from antislavery to the present day. It also addresses how far humanitarian efforts shaped the ways in which colonisers viewed their empires, and themselves. The workshop will address key questions surrounding the role of humanitarian groups within empires: should they be viewed as agents of empire, or a moral check upon imperial expansion? Conversely, were empires regarded as incidental to humanitarian action? Did imperial infrastructures simply enable the enactment of pre-established humanitarian concerns? The workshop seeks not only to address the practices and ideals of humanitarian actors, but also to explore the agency and subjectivity of the objects of their concern.
Three panels will consider Humanitarian Action and Formal Empire, the Legacies of Empire in International Humanitarian Action and Humanitarian Geographies: The Imperial as Transnational? The day will conclude with an open discussion, at which all attendees are invited to share and discuss issues raised throughout the day and within their own research.
The day includes papers from Professor Clare Midgley, Professor Alan Lester, Dr Rob Skinner, Dr Rebecca Gill and Dr Richard Huzzey.
The cost of attendance will be £10, though postgraduate bursaries may be available. Please contact Emily.Baughan@bristol.ac.uk; Rob.Skinner@bristol.ac.uk
19th C Open Day at Westminster Archives
In partnership with Strandlines (King’s College London’s interdisciplinary project, bringing together the stories of the Strand’s residents and workers: www.strandlines.net), enjoy a day of behind the scenes tours, talks and demonstrations; view archival treasures relating to the Strand and its history.
Date: 19th March 2011
Time: 11am-4pm
Venue: Westminster Archives, 10 St Ann’s Street: http://www.westminster.gov.uk/services/libraries/archives/visitor-information/contact/
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/place?client=safari&rls=en&oe=UTF-8&redir_esc=&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=westminster+archives&fb=1&gl=uk&hq=archives&hnear=Westminster,+Greater+London&cid=3292361573692553822
The day will feature two talks:
At 11:30 Dr Ruth Richardson will be giving a paper entitled ‘Dickens and the Workhouse’. Ruth has been a key activator in recent attempts to prevent the demolition of the Strand Union Workhouse, on Cleveland Street; she has provided evidence to show that this was the workhouse that inspired possibly the most famous workhouse in the world: that in Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist.
At 2:00 Professor Rosemary Ashton, will be giving a talk entitled ’142 Strand in the 1850s’. She will be discussing her recent award winning book on John Chapman’s publishing house on the Strand: a radical address which brought together famous names such as Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Mill, Mazzini, and Emerson.
If you would like to attend please RSVP to archives@westminster.gov.uk or telephone 020 7641 5180.
See also: http://strandlines.org/content/westminster-city-archives-open-day-19th-march
CFP – Haunted Men: Masculinity in the Ghost Stories of the Victorian and Edwardian Eras
5 September 2011
University College Falmouth
Keynote Speaker: Professor William Hughes, Bath Spa University
Proposals Due: 29 April 2011
The ghost story is often cited in contemporary commentary as a female genre. It is however a genre which follows the growing agitation for women’s rights throughout the period; the rise of the New Woman, the suffragette movement and numerous political and legal changes. Diana Wallace argued that: ‘The ghost story as a form has allowed women writers special kinds of freedom, not merely to include the fantastic and supernatural, but also to offer critiques of male power and sexuality which are often more radical than those in more realistic genres’ (Gothic Studies 6.1 May 2004). This symposium will examine what happens to representations of men and masculinity in the ghost stories produced by both men and women in the face of growing criticism and change. Jennifer Uglow in the introduction to the Virago Book of Ghost Stories posits the idea that the men who see ghosts in these stories are pushed ‘into conventional female roles: timid, nervous, helpless’ (xvii). However, while sometimes ghosts and those men who see them are queered, manliness remains evident in some stories and in others muscular Christianity comes into play. Elsewhere rationality as well as religion is tested to its limits.
We invite 250-500 word proposals for 20 minute papers to be submitted by 29th April 2011 to ruth.heholt@falmouth.ac.uk
The remit is wide, although there are some suggestions for topics/areas of discussion below:
- Haunted Patriarchs
- Ghosts in the Closet
- Manly/Effeminate Ghosts
- Ghosts in the domestic sphere
- Sporting Ghosts (hunting, shooting, fishing etc)
- Ghost-hunting
- Ghosts and authorship/readership
- Haunting and performance
- Haunting and technology
CFP: Motion and Space: Postgraduate Conference, King’s College London
English Department Postgraduate Conference
King’s College London
23 May 2011
Keynote by Andrew Thacker, De Montfort University
Proposals Due 21 March 2011
“Any person, brought into the presence of Foucault’s Pendulum, stops for a few moments and remains pensive and silent; and then generally leaves, carrying with him forever a sharper, keener sense of our incessant motion through space.” – Léon Foucault
The OED defines motion as:
- agitation, violent movement, excitement or perturbation;
- voluntary, practiced and regulated, or reflexive movement in a body or its parts, change of position;
- the process or course of life, time, and fate;
- a desire or inclination, a stirring of the soul, an emotion and passion;
- an application made at a court or to a judge.
We hope that this theme will encourage an exciting range of papers that address space and motion in literature throughout English.
For more information and submission details see:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/depts/english/events/postgraduateconference.html.
Organised by Philippe Roesle and Hannah Crummé.
