How to recognise Vampires….
Toby Lichtig and the TLS on all things Dracularian
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Edited by Roger Luckhurst); Dracula’s Guest: a connoisseur’s collection of Victorian vampire stories (Ed. Michael Sims); Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film (Ed. Eric Butler); and Dracula’s Precursors (Ed. David Annwn).
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7174496.ece
CFP: Intertexts Postgraduate Conference
CFP: InterTexts – a one-day conference on interdisciplinarity
Durham University, Durham, UK
Friday, 23rd September 2011
Proposals Due: 10th June 2011
“The tradition of working across disciplinary boundaries has a long history: literature and visual arts, literature and philosophy, literature and psychology, all feature prominently in the field of literary studies. At present, when humanities face escalating funding challenges and a constant requirement to justify and validate the research carried out, literary scholars increasingly look at other disciplines, expanding their field of inquiry and contributing to a proliferation of research in areas such as literature and law, literature and science, literature and medicine, literature and ecology.
This conference aims to give postgraduate and early career researchers working on interdisciplinary projects an opportunity to present their work and contribute to the discussion on the developments of interdisciplinary research within literary studies. Alongside traditional panels, we will be offering workshops that deal with practical issues, resources and challenges of conducting interdisciplinary research within one of the five interdisciplinary fields at the core of the conference (Literature and Law, Literature and Science, Medical Humanities, Literature and Visual Arts and Literature and Music).
We also welcome proposals discussing challenges and demands of conducting interdisciplinary research. These could include, but are not limited to: proliferation of interdisciplinary research, the value of interdisciplinarity, the future of interdisciplinarity, traditional humanities vs. interdisciplinary research, implications of interdisciplinarity for literary scholarship, traditional methodologies and interdisciplinary research, interdisciplinarity and canonisation or how, if at all, do we define canons within interdisciplinary fields.
Authors of selected proposals will be invited to submit an extended version of their paper for consideration by the editorial board of Durham’s Postgraduate English journal. The papers will be considered for publication in the special issue of the journal focusing on interdisciplinarity, celebrating ten years of the journal, and coinciding with the launch of its new website.”
Please send 250-300 word abstracts proposing 20 minute papers to Kaja Marczewska (kaja.marczewska@durham.ac.uk) by 10th June 2011.
Notifications of acceptance, together with more information about Postgraduate English publication opportunities will be sent by 17th June 2011.
Enquiries: kaja.marczewska@durham.ac.uk
Website: https://intertexts.wordpress.com
Save Conan Doyle’s House ‘Undershaw’
A campaign to save ‘Undershaw’, from OScholars.
“May I interest you in the campaign to save Conan Doyle’s house http://www.saveundershaw.com?
Undershaw is a Grade II Listed Building commissioned to his own designs by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1897. After Conan Doyle sold it thirty years later, it became an hotel, until bought by ‘developers’ in 2004. The house has been empty ever since and is being allowed to deteriorate subject to planning permission to develop the site into a terrace of three houses. This permission has been granted by the local authority by a 7-1 vote, apparently in the belief that the house has no actual or potential cultural significance, and on appeal we must convince them otherwise. It is extraordinary that the fate of Undershaw should be decided by six borough councillors favouring a ‘development’ plan put together by a two-man company based in the British Virgin Islands! What I am hoping for is something on the lines of a Conan Doyle Centre for British and Irish Crime Writing, with a library, conference facilities and perhaps a writer in residence. This has the official support of the British Association for Victorian Studies and the Journal of NeoVictorian Studies, and has been endorsed by the North American Victorian Studies Association and the London 19th Century Seminar, as well as a growing number of literary societies.”
To add your own name or a message of support visit:
http://www.saveundershaw.com/2010/09/leave-your-feedback/
Videos of the house, which dates to 1897, can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/user/SaveUndershaw.”
Bursaries for BAVS Annual Conference 2011
BAVS Postgraduate and Post-doctoral Conference Bursaries
BAVS offers 12 bursaries worth £100 each to help post-graduate students or post-doctoral scholars who are either UK-based or members of BAVS to meet the costs of attending the annual conference at the University of Birmingham in 2011. There are usually 2 bursaries for observers who will report on the conference for the BAVS newsletter, and around 10 bursaries for postgraduate or post-doctoral paper presenters.
Post-doctoral bursaries are available to those who have recently submitted doctoral theses, but do not hold an academic post. Observer bursaries are open to all postgraduate or post-doctoral students including those who are not giving a paper.
Application is via letter, brief CV of no more than 2 pages, and (for paper presenters) the title of your conference paper abstract. Applications are assessed by a panel that includes member(s) of the BAVS Executive Committee and usually member(s) of the conference organising committee.
If you want to be an observer, your letter of application should say what interests you about the conference and what makes you a suitable observer. If you want to apply to give a paper, your letter of application should explain how your paper relates to your research and to the conference theme, and why attendance at the conference will be of benefit to you. The criteria for selection are the relevance of your proposal to the conference theme, the originality of your ideas, the presentation of your argument, and the benefits likely from your attendance at the conference.
Bursary-holders will be expected to pay all registration and other fees for the conference in advance, and will receive their bursary cheques at the conference.
Applicants should send their applications electronically to the conference committee (conference email). The deadline for applications is 16th June 2011.
Preference will be given to those who have not previously held a BAVS conference bursary. Applicants will be informed of the outcome of the competition by the end of June 2011.
Travelling Identities Symposium 18 June – Registration Open
Registration is now open for ‘Travelling Identities’, a half-day symposium at Birkbeck, University of London.
Saturday 18th June, 2011
Keynes Library
43 Gordon Square, Birkbeck, London WCIH
12 noon to 6pm
The keynote speaker will be Dr. David James of the University of Nottingham, author of Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception. This interdisciplinary event will address issues of self-discovery and self-fashioning through travel and travel writing, the contentious relationship of travel to tourism, and the cultural significance of the traveller. A range of speakers will present papers on topics including Quixotism and the politics of travel, the self-invention of Henry Morton Stanley, the travels of the lower middle classes in British fiction, and the literal and figurative American journeys of Christopher McCandless.
Registration is free, but space is limited so if you would like to attend please email Alan McNee alan.mcnee1@btinternet.com<mailto:alan.mcnee1@btinternet.com> to reserve a place.
Strange New Today – Interdisciplinary Conference for Victorianists
University of Exeter
Saturday 17 September 2011
Proposals Due: 27 May 2011
“This English Nation, will it ever get to know the meaning of its strange new Today?” (Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present)
Chartists storm the Westgate Hotel in Newport, South Wales, 1839.
The University of Exeter’s Centre for Victorian Studies will be holding a conference for postgraduates and early-career researchers on Saturday 17th September 2011. The conference will take place in the historic setting of the Devon and Exeter Institution, which was founded in 1813 as a private library.
Keynote speakers:
Professor Regenia Gagnier (University of Exeter)
Professor Philip Davis (University of Liverpool)
Plenary:
Prof. Davis will be joined by Jane Davis and Dr Josie Billington from The Reader Organisation for a discussion on crisis, Victorian literature and “the reading cure”.
Call for Papers:
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.
http://strangenewtoday.wordpress.com/
10 Literary Cities We Wish Were Real…
The Shire? The Emerald City? Narnia (although more of a place than a city, non?)
Not strictly of the nineteenth century but a curious distraction:
http://www.accreditedonlinecolleges.com/blog/2011/10-literary-cities-we-wish-were-real
Which does prompt questions about which nineteenth-century rendered city I’d like to find myself in (Dickensian Southwark? Mary Lamb’s London? Balzac’s Paris….? Pushkin’s Moscow?…)
Histories of Crime in the Digital Age – Symposium 25 June
A one-day symposium at the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, Senate House, University of London
Saturday 25 June 2011, 10am – 4.30pm
Bringing together social and cultural history •combining qualitative and quantitative methods • using digital and traditional archives • record linkage • datamining and large-scale data analysis • cultural discourses and their reach • image and text • life grids and whole-life analysis
Speakers include: Tim Hitchcock, Heather Shore, Meg Arnot, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Helen Rogers, Dave Cox, Barry Godfrey, Trevor Dean, Peter King, Louise Jackson and Garthine Walker
Registration: £40 (£20 postgrad) includes lunch and refreshments.
Click here to register
For further information contact Julia.Noyce@roehampton.ac.uk
Poster: PDF
Program: PDF
CFP. Station to Station: Colloque Nomade UHA Mulhouse
An International & Nomadic Conference
Organized by the research groups ILLE and CRESAT (UHA, Mulhouse)
and the international doctoral programme Cultural Studies in Literary Interzones (coord. Bergamo, Italy).
1-3 December 2011
CALL FOR PAPERS
Proposals Due: 15 June 2011
“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my life, or whether that station
Will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Are we entirely ourselves or entirely somebody else as we take our seat on a train or stroll into the station? Don’t these actions and environments produce in us a feeling of artificiality brought about by the overconsumption of worn-out romantic and modernist myths? These places, relatively tight and stable spaces, tend to exist because they are out of time though would be senseless without the speed and trajectories crossing through them and which carry them along. Do they have a singular power over individual’s behaviour and imagination? A short epistemological examination would doubtlessly permit philosophers and historians to position—or question the positioning of—such spaces in urban life. In more general terms, this is about considering the value of witness, of urban trace, but also of studying the immaterial heritage they help construct. Are the station, the wagon, and the train architectonic?
Leaving aside a little of the seriousness that weighs us down, be that in current high tech virtual reality, David Bowie’s songs, or the pre-mechanical age (didn’t Milton say “The planets in their station list’ning stood.”? Paradise Lost, VII, 563), the station like the train is an invitation to decelerate. It becomes a place of flux and transit, of memory and forgetting, point of flight from or point of entry into the city, place of displacement—that of individuals, merchandise, and populations—an archive, traces of our fleeting rages.
Eminently European (?) or Occidental (?) phenomena—the debate remains largely open for historians—the station and the railroad, constitutive of our cultures as economic, architectural, political and aesthetic phenomena, are also invitations to immobile but endless voyages, which perhaps do not lead to a destination, towards the end of our desires or that of the night. Therefore, we would like first and foremost in this Humanities conference to reconsider the station and the wagon as what they are, inter-zones, enclosed spaces without really being that, borderless places or places with shifting and unstable borders, where law and society suspend their particular rules, where a game of entirely artificial indifferences gets established, sometimes obscenely because of the exacerbated intimacy created in such close quarters. The station can in fact be a space of disorder, of heterogeneity, but also of cross-fertilization and communication. The station is first of all, within the city, an enclave; and the wagon, in our lives, a fantasy of annihilation of the Other.
On the occasion of the TGV line Mulhouse-Gare Centrale arriving this winter, we invite our future conference speakers to study the station and the wagon (in literature, history, the visual arts and why not even by taking to the tracks of philosophy) as cultural and artistic vectors of the programmed obsolescence of technological innovation. For historians, this may be an occasion to consider stations and railways’ predominant role in the evolution of urban development.
Finally, to join act and speech, this conference will be nomadic, thus privilege the selection of propositions which may be interpreted as “university performances”. Apart from a few talks which will take place within the elegant walls of the Société Industrielle de Mulhouse (a few feet from the Mulhouse Gare) most of the workshops will take place on a moving train. We will be forced to take to the stations, platforms and stops, without any particular itinerary, just an uncertain destination in search of ourselves on a perpetual round-trip voyage. Mulhouse Terminus, but no one gets off!
For more information on sending proposals or booking a place:
http://station2stationcolloquenomade.blogspot.com/2011/05/station-to-station-call-for-papers.html
CFP: Victorian Network
CFP: Production and Consumption in Victorian Literature and Culture
Victorian Network Journal
Proposals Due: 1 July 2011
The fifth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Ella Dzelzainis (Newcastle University), is dedicated to a reassessment of nineteenth-century investments in concepts of productivity and consumption. Accelerating industrialisation, the growth of consumer culture, economic debates about the perils of overconsumption as well as emerging cultural discourses about industriousness, work ethic and the uses of free time radically altered the ways in which Victorians thought about practices of production and consumption. Literary authors intervened directly in these economic and social debates while also negotiating analogous developments within a literary marketplace transformed by new forms of writing, distributing and consuming literature. We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words. Possible topics include but are by no means limited to the following:
• Productivist and consumerist ideologies and the politics of social class
• Victorian (global) spaces of production, forms and practices of consumption
• Changing concepts of literary production, authorship and the reading audience
• Biological and physiological models of productivity, attrition and idleness
• New agents in the literary marketplace: publishers, editors, book sellers
• Economic theory and nineteenth-century literature
• Reassessing Marxist perspectives on Victorian literature and culture
• Idleness, spare time and other modes of ‘unproductiveness’
• The effects of industrialisation: mechanization, work routine and ‘human motors’
All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. The deadline for submissions to our next issue is 1 July, 2011.
Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com
