Literature and Mathematics in the Long Nineteenth Century
A COLLOQUIUM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW
16-18 MAY 2011
Wolfson Building, University of Glasgow, Glasgow
Marilyn Gaull, The Editorial Institute at Boston University: ‘Euclid Alone’
Nigel Leask, Glasgow: ‘’Snatched from the Sickle and the Plough, To Gauge Ale-Firkins’: Robert Burns and the Excise’
Sessions include:
CFP “Global Cities: A Literary Atlas of Nineteenth-Century Urban Cultures”
A Symposium at the Institute of English Studies, University of London
Hosted by the London Nineteenth-Century Seminar Series
Saturday 25th June 2011
10-4pm
Proposals Due: 5 May 2011
With Elleke Boehmer (Oxford), Isabel Hofmeyr (Witwatersrand) Andrew McCann (Dartmouth) and Jeremy Tambling (Manchester)
The nineteenth century was the century of the cosmopolitan city. In London, New York, Paris, Madrid, Kolkata, Cape Town, and Melbourne, urban cultures emerged in which inhabitants adopted the modes and mores of sophisticated city living. 
Shaped by global flows of capital, the bureaucracy of empires, the displacement of peoples, and a frenetic traffic in goods and print, cities were hubs in an international maelstrom that produced new ways of living, new social affiliations, and new forms of suffering. Traditionally, studies of one or other European metropolis have dominated Anglophone scholarship on nineteenth-century urban culture. But recent scholarship, not least by postcolonial critics and historians, has shifted this paradigm, showing that non-European cities were not simply distant outposts of imperial centres, but complex cultures in their own right, appropriating, adapting and resisting the metropolitan cultures of empires. The atlas of nineteenth-century urban cultures is more complex, more variegated, and more diverse than previously assumed.
This one-day symposium organised by the London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar proposes to explore non-European urban cultures, examining them as sites of exchange or encounter shaped by local histories and geographies, in addition to imperial ones. We are particularly interested in the role of print in the production of global urban cultures. As European publishers set up houses in far flung cities, and travellers brought books to new places, printed texts were one commodity among many that transformed city lives, and inserted city subjects into international networks of information, power and feeling. Yet print itself was subject to local factors, such as the existing networks of readers and writers, who read and wrote works in diverse genres, languages, and scripts. If European urban modernity is characterised by the cacophony of print that literally plastered the exterior walls of buildings, what is to be said of the more intense cacophony of print in a city of many and more diverse languages and cultures? How do we understand the diversity yet interconnectedness of urban cultures? We are interested in building a fuller picture of global urban cultures in the nineteenth century. We are interested in papers that deal with the particularities of urban culture, especially in relation to print, in any non-European city, or with the methodological and conceptual questions that this project raises.
If you are interested in offering a 20 minute paper on these topics please send a c.200 word abstract to M.Beaumont@ucl.ac.uk or Josephine.mcdonagh@kcl.ac.uk by 5th May 2011.
Researching the Colonial Archive: a Training Day
A Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Training Day
Monday 27 June 2011
Victoria and Albert Museum, Kensington
With Isabel Hofmeyr (Witwatersrand), Satish Padiyar (Courtauld), Josephine McDonagh (King’s), Chris Breward (V&A), Anna Jackson (V&A), Sue Stronge (V&A) and Rosemary Crill (V&A)
This intensive event offers researchers working in eighteenth and nineteenth century subjects training in archival analysis and research methods. Designed around the excellent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum the programme focuses on textual history, visual culture, and the methodological issues collection based research might raise: it also includes collection visits and experience with archival materials.
Refreshments and lunch will be provided; there will also be a small amount of preparatory reading required.
Applications to participate in the programme should include:
• a 300 word outline of your research (highlighting its relevance to the Commodities and Culture network research strands)
• a CV
and be sent to Alison Wood at commculture@kcl.ac.uk by 5 May 2011.
A small number of bursaries for travel within the UK are available: if you would like to be considered, please say so in your application.
(N.B. Early Career Researchers should be within 3 years of receiving the PhD.)
Dickens and Medicine Symposium 15 June 2011
Royal Society of Medicine
Wednesday 15 June 2011
Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, London, WC1N 1AZ and the Gordon Museum, Guys Medical School
Dickens and Doctors
Professor Andrew Sanders, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Durham, Past President of the Dickens Fellowship
Dickens and the Foundling Museum
Ms Jane King, The Foundling Museum
Dickens, disease and disability
Mrs Thelma Grove, Retired Speech Therapist, Honorary Life Member and former Joint Honorary General Secretary of The Dickens Fellowship
‘Your very good health: Medical matters in Dickens’s journals’
Dr Tony Williams, Associate Editor of The Dickensian, Honorary Research Fellow in Humanities at the University of Buckingham
With readings, walking tours of Bloomsbury and Southwark, and a tour of the Foundling Museum.
http://www.rsm.ac.uk/academ/hsb07.php
CFP: “Strange New Today”: Victorians, Crisis and Response
Postgraduate Conference
17 September 2011
Devon and Exeter Institution
Centre for Victorian Studies (Exeter) in collaboration with the Reader Organisation
Keynote speakers: Professor Regenia Gagnier (University of Exeter)
Professor Philip Davis (University of Liverpool)
Plenary: “The Reading Cure”, Presented by The Reader Organisation
Proposals Due: 27 May 2011
In Past and Present, Thomas Carlyle conceives of modern crisis as a deadly riddle posed by the Sphinx – with a viable future or social collapse contingent upon the answer: “This English Nation, will it get to know the meaning of its strange new Today?” This conference is intended to elicit papers that respond to the generative effects of the perception of crisis in the Victorian period. Awareness of crisis stimulated intellectual enquiry in new disciplinary directions: in history and historiography, archaeology and classicism, evolutionary biology, economic and social theory, in literary expressions of cultural critique, and in personal and psychological narratives. Such intellectual productivity – and the insistence upon circulating the new analyses of crisis within a public realm of discussion – constitutes a response that we might wish to draw upon in our own times of perceived crisis.
The commemorations of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and the returns to Marx for explanations of the current economic crisis exemplify a revival of interest in how thought from the Victorian period lives on in the contemporary world. This conference is an opportunity to investigate the productive and prolific nature of the Victorians’ response to the idea of cultural and personal crisis – as theorists or as writers whose literary works could help us grasp the meaning of our “strange new Today”.
Please send proposals (of approx. 250 words) for 15 – 20 minute papers to southwestvictorianists@exeter.ac.uk no later than Friday the 27th of May. Any queries regarding the conference can be directed to the same address.
