Free Online Dickens Conference
Free Online Dickens Conference
On the 7th and 8th of March 2012, Wiley-Blackwell will be hosting a free online conference to celebrate the bicentenary of Charles Dickens.
Features include:
•Video addresses by prominent Dickens scholars
•Free scholarly papers with discussion forum for each
•Reading Room with free articles and book chapters from Wiley-Blackwell
The event provides an opportunity for an international group of scholars to discuss the work of one of the world’s most important authors. The emphasis is on illustrating the many ways in which Dickens influenced, and was influenced by, his contact with other countries. More broadly, we hope the conference will encourage online discussion about the social, cultural and technological milieu in which (and of which) Dickens wrote. Log on to the discussion whenever it suits your schedule, everyone is welcome to participate!
Find out more at http://dickensworld.wordpress.com/
The Victorian Journal of Culture and Literature, Fall 2011
The Victorian Journal of Culture and Literature, Fall 2011
The Victorian Journal of Culture and Literature, Fall 2011 number 120, is a special issue marking Thackeray’s bicentenary, and is now available, featuring the following new scholarship:
From Paris to Punch: William Makepeace Thackeray and a New Era in Social Satire by Clare Horrocks and Gary Simons
“Great and Undeniable Likeness”: Portraiture, Legitimacy, and Realism in Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond by Carolyn Jacobson
Thackeray and India: Re-examining England’s Narrative of its IndianEmpire by Susan Ray
Bildung by Numbers: Serialization, Readership, and Narrative Form in Thackeray’s Pendennis Novels by Alice Crossley
The Green Silk Purse and Little Rawdon’s Shirt: Sartorial Literacy and Domestic Performance in Vanity Fair by Stephanie Womick
“in company let us hope with better qualities”: Invoked Readers in Vanity Fair by Sean P. O’Brien
Furniture and Domesticity in Vanity Fair by Jennifer Sattaur
The Male Body and Heroic Manhood in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero by Nikole King
Vanity Fair’s Ethic of Readerly Emotion by Julia Bninski
’Twas the Night before Waterloo: Narrating the Nation in Vanity Fair by Cheryl Wilson
Book Review by Judith Fisher. Correspondence and Journals of the Thackeray Family, edited by John Aplin
To subscribe, please visit http://www.wku.edu/victorian<;http://www.wku.edu/victorian> or email victorian.newsletter@wku.edu<mailto:victorian.newsletter@wku.edu.
Registration Open: Charles Dickens And The Mid-Victorian Press, 1850–70
Charles Dickens And The Mid-Victorian Press, 1850–70
Wednesday 28th March–Saturday 31st March 2012
Department of English, University of Buckingham, Buckingham MK18 1EG
In conjunction with the Victorian Studies Centre at the University of Leicester, the University of Buckingham is delighted to announce an international Dickens Bicentenary conference on 28-31 March 2012, featuring the launch of the Dickens Journals Online project (www.djo.org.uk). The list of speakers includes: Laurel Brake, Iain Crawford, Judith Flanders, Holly Furneaux, Louis James, Gail Marshall, Robert Patten, Joanne Shattock, Michael Slater, John Sutherland, John Tulloch and Cathy Waters.
Household Words and All the Year Round are key mid-century weekly journals, showcasing the work of over 350 contributors as well as that of their illustrious founder and ‘Conductor.’ Critical analysis of their contents is an increasingly diverse and dynamic field, soon to be assisted by an open-access scholarly online edition (see www.djo.org.uk) based at the University of Buckingham. This international conference aims to position Household Words and All the Year Round within the broader context of nineteenth-century periodical culture, through invited papers and contributions from experts in these and a range of rival publications, and website workshops.
For further information and to book full conference or individual day tickets, please visit:
http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/djo
If you have any queries then please contact John Drew, Ben Winyard or Hazel Mackenzie at djo@buckingham.ac.uk.
CFP: Transforming Objects, Northumbria University, May 2012
Transforming Objects
28-29 May 2012, Northumbria University
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Dr Sarah Haggarty (Newcastle) and Dr John Holmes (Reading)
This two-day conference invites papers that consider the transformation of objects and the transformations effected by objects from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Approaches to this theme are welcomed from established scholars and especially from postgraduate students.
Object theory and discourses of materiality largely engage with objects as stable items of a permanent nature; this conference seeks to address those moments which slip through the gaps of such readings. We wish to explore the method and process of transformation, the between-ness or not fully realised state of an object or discipline, and to consider its effect upon the culture.
The organisers are keen for papers to address particular historical, cultural, or social environments in which transformations take place or are enabled by. The conference aims to provoke discussion about such moments of change and the important role of objects in transformations between period, discipline, location, and sensation, as well as engaging with more broader considerations of bodily transformation and states of metamorphosis.
The organisers hope the action of ‘transforming’ and the term ‘object’ will be engaged with in their widest sense, and therefore welcome proposals which interpret the conference theme in innovative and expansive ways. Topics of particular interest include:
- Psychological transformations, altered states, derangement, and hallucinatory experiences
- Industrial transformation: travel and communication (from railways to cars, the mail coach to the telegraph)
- Visuality: transformations in perceptual modes and methods.
- Intertextuality and the transformation of texts within texts
- Histories of the book, transformations in printing, the effect of technology upon the page
- The growth of digital humanities and transformed ways of encountering the text
- Disciplinarity, categorisation, and periodicity: creating and dismantling boundaries
- Spatial transformations and the experience of movement
- Serial publishing and transforming temporalities of reading
- Remediation and the lifecycle of objects
- Text transformed by objects: experimentalism and additions to the textual page
- The professionalisation of the sciences and medical practices
- Adaptation across genre: text into film, theatre, music, or the visual arts
- It-narratives and the voice of the object
- Experiencing transformation through the body and the senses
- Merchandise: from text to commodity item
Please send abstracts (250 words) for 20-minute papers, along with a brief biographical note, to the conference organisers, Nicole Bush and Anna Hope: transformingobjects@gmail.com
The deadline for abstracts is 4 March 2012.
For further details and updates please see the website: www.transformingobjects.blogspot.com
Supported by the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS)
“Extending Families” Special Issue: Victorian Review, Fall 2013
“Extending Families” Special Issue: Victorian Review, Fall 2013
Submissions are invited for a special issue of Victorian Review mapping out new ideas of the family in the 19th century including:
• adoption and foster care • cultural directives about proper filial behaviour
• romantic marriage • sibling relationships
• perceived threats to the family • family formation in a colonial context
• the effect of changing marriage laws • family unions
• narratives of unusual or idealized families • discourses about primitive families
• primogeniture and inheritance • incest and familial unions
• same-sex and non-normative couples • lateral relations: cousins, uncles, aunts
• domestic fictions • ex-spouses, love triangles, bigamous relations
• families without parents • political/journalistic debates about familial roles
• servants, companions, governesses • in-laws, poor relations, extended family
The aim is to showcase the subjects not usually considered in the nuclear family: the servant, the grandparent, the poor relation, the foster child, the ex-spouse. What does family look like when we see it as a permeable, flexible, shifting configuration? Thus, essays that resist the privileging of the nuclear family and work against the teleological narrative of the (heteronormative) courtship plot are particularly invited.
The deadline is April 1, 2012. Submit essays of not more than 8,000 words (including endnotes), in MLA style to both guest editors by email attachment. Please consult the Victorian Review website (http://web.uvic.ca/victorianreview/submissions.html) for further submission guidelines.
Kelly Hager, Simmons College Talia Schaffer, Queens College and Graduate Center, CUNY
kelly.hager@simmons.edu
talia.schaffer@qc.cuny.edu
New Seminar Series: Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies, 26th January
First Session: Thursday 26 January
Time: 6pm
Location: Keynes Library (Room 114, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD)
Followed by a launch party.
Birkbeck’s Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies is pleased to announce the launch of a new lecture and seminar series, the Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies, to which all are welcome.
The Forum will be inaugurated at 6.00 pm on Thursday 26 January with a lecture on ‘”A Case of Metaphysics”: Counterfactuals, Realism, Great Expectations‘ by Professor Andrew H. Miller, director of the Victorian Studies programme at Indiana University, and co-editor of Victorian Studies
The lecture, which will be held in the Keynes Library (Room 114, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD), will be followed by a party to celebrate the launch of the Forum and an exciting new programme of events in interdisciplinary nineteenth-century studies.
This term’s visiting speakers include, in February, Tom Mole (2 February), Mary A. Favret (9 February), Susan Matthews (16 February), Thomas Dixon (23 February), and in March, Sophie Levie (15 March), and Matt ffytche (19 March).
Look out for announcements about forthcoming Forum events, and meanwhile email <birkbeckforum@gmail.com> to join the mailing list.
Hilary Fraser
Professor Hilary Fraser
Executive Dean of Arts
Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth-Century Studies
Birkbeck, University of London
43 Gordon Square
London WC1H 0PD
CARLYLE CONFERENCE, UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
CARLYLE CONFERENCE, UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
10-12 July, 2012
http://www.lifelong.ed.ac.uk/carlyle/
The 2012 conference will celebrate the publication of 40 volumes of the Duke-Edinburgh edition of ‘The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle’. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2012 (volume 40 forthcoming November).
CALL FOR PAPERS
Papers are invited on Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle and related subjects. They can reflect current research interests in either Carlyle. We would also welcome papers relating the Carlyles to other authors and fields.
HOW TO SUBMIT A PAPER
Email your abstract to Carlyle@ed.ac.uk<mailto:Carlyle@ed.ac.uk> before 1 February 2012.
Abstracts will be reviewed and a decision sent by 1 March 2012.
Dr. Marylu Hill
Director, Villanova Center for Liberal Education
Augustine and Culture Seminar
Graduate Liberal Studies
Rm. 103, Saint Augustine Center
Villanova University
Villanova, Pennsylvania 19085
610-519-6936
JOB VACANCY: Lecturer in English
JOB VACANCY: Lecturer in English
University of Southampton
Location: Avenue Campus
Salary: £27,428 to £33,734
Full Time Fixed Term
Closing Date: Wednesday 25 January 2012
Interview Date: To be confirmed
Reference: 080411F4
The University of Southampton seeks to appoint a full-time, two year fixed term Lecturer in English, specialising in the period 1880-1920. English at Southampton comprises a varied and lively team of people whose teaching and research interests range from the early medieval period to the contemporary, and include film, creative writing, Jewish studies, and book history. The work of individual members of staff crosses period, geographical, disciplinary, and faculty boundaries (including collaborations with law, and the sciences), and we welcome applications from people whose work will expand our ideas of what ‘English’ does in both teaching and research.
You will have a PhD in a relevant topic, and a proven track record of publication. Post-doctoral research is desirable. You will have a strong intellectual grasp of the principal issues affecting late nineteenth-century, empire, and/or the global roots of modernism, and a willingness to make links between English and other disciplines. You will be able to communicate your views enthusiastically to a broad undergraduate and postgraduate student body, engage productively with staff across the discipline, the Faculty and beyond, and help to build Victorian and early twentieth-century studies at Southampton.
The appointment will be made within the Lecturer salary range, depending on qualifications and experience, to begin on 1 May 2012. For specific informal enquiries relating to this post, please contact: Professor Ros King, Head of English via email at R.King@soton.ac.uk
The closing date for this post is 25 January 2012. Please apply through www.jobs.soton.ac.uk or please telephone 023 8059 2750 for an application form. Please quote vacancy reference number 080411F4 on all correspondence.
Please also visit the ‘Job Opportunities’ page of our website http://www.soton.ac.uk/.
London 19th Century Studies Seminar: Schedule for Spring Term
London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar
Spring Term 2012
Room G37 (Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet St., London WC1E 7HU).
The Spring term 2012 series of the London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar at the Institute of English Studies, on Orality and Literacy, is co-convened by James Emmott (Birkbeck) and Tom F. Wright (UEA). For abstracts, speaker profiles, and further information, see the website http://oralityandliteracy.org/.
The series marks the thirtieth anniversary of Walter Ong’s influential Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Over three days in January, February, and March, speakers will explore a range of issues relating to the interactions between voice and text in the Anglo-American long nineteenth century: philology and acoustic nostalgia, melody and poetic form, laughter, and more.
All sessions take place in Room G37 (Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet St., London WC1E 7HU).
All welcome, but please note: these seminars are very popular and the meeting rooms are often very full. Please RSVP to jon.millington@sas.ac.uk if you would like to attend.
Saturday 14 January, 11:00–13:00
Herbert Tucker (Virginia): ‘Unsettled Score: Structure and Play in Browning’s “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”’
William Abberley (Exeter): ‘Voices of Nature: The Oral Past in Victorian Historical Fiction’
Saturday 25 February, 11:00–13:00
Matthew Bevis (Oxford): ‘Poetry for Laughs’
Louise Lee (KCL): ‘Shattered Articulations: Darwin’s Evolutionary Jokes and the Deferral of Cognition’
Saturday 17 March, 11:00–17:00 — extended final day
Session 1
James Mussell (Birmingham): ‘“Scarers in Print”: Literacy and Media Practice from Our Mutual Friend to Friend Me on Facebook’
Bob Nicholson (Manchester): ‘“Goodbye, old fellow, I must skedaddle!”: Reading the American Voice in the Late-Victorian Press’
Session 2
Claire Potter (U Paris Diderot): ‘The Weight of the Voice/The Slant of the Word: Circulations of Melancholia in Hardy’
Roisin Quinn-Lautrefin (U Paris Diderot): ‘Giving Utterance: Mary Barton and the Language of the Working Class’
Mary L. Shannon (KCL): ‘Spoken Word and Printed Page: G. W. M. Reynolds and the London Riots, 1848’
Final Session
Sandra M. Gustafson (Notre Dame): ‘Orality and Literacy in Transatlantic Perspective’
CFP: ‘Viewer, I married him’: Reading (Re)Productions of the Long Nineteenth Century in Period Drama
Call for Papers
‘Viewer, I married him’: Reading (Re)Productions of the Long Nineteenth Century in Period Drama
29 June 2012. Derwent Building, University of Hull
ABSTRACT DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 28, 2012
POSTGRADUATE BURSARY DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 28, 2012
Keynote Speakers:
Dr. Sarah Cardwell, University of Kent: ‘Adaptations and Period Dramas: Questions of Genre and Style’
Professor Mark Llewellyn, Director of Research for the AHRC, invited to lead a postgraduate training session focussed on career development and adapting to an academic career.
‘Period drama’, or remediated historical adaptations for television and film have long been established genres which are traditionally associated with fancy costumes, pseudo-Victorian settings, and romance. This conference invites scholars working in the fields of literature, film, history, music, and cultural and media studies to consider the wider historical and cultural impact of the ‘period drama’, ‘costume drama’, or filmic adaptation. Our objective is to promote interaction between nineteenth-century and contemporary scholars in order to examine how and why the literature, history, and culture of Britain from 1800-1914 is (re)produced in a modern international context. By analysing the processes through which these literatures and histories are translated into film, we hope to acknowledge and assess the continuing importance of period drama in contemporary culture across the world. Potential papers might include:
- TV series, programmes or films
- Direct adaptations of literature (e.g. BBC’s, ITV’s or Roman Polanski’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles)
- Modern retellings of nineteenth-century literature (e.g. Clueless)
- Adaptations derived from Neo-Victorian texts (e.g. Fingersmith)
- Original screen-plays (e.g. Downton Abbey)
- Cross-over period dramas (e.g. Lost in Austen)
- Biopics (e.g. Becoming Jane)
- International adaptations (e.g. Bride and Prejudice)
As this conference is interdisciplinary in its approach, we are also looking for papers which consider themes associated with literary and cultural studies (class, gender, sexuality, religion, race) and/or the contemporary production/adaptation process, the modern audience and critical responses, and how period drama and contemporary culture impact on one another. The following topics are suggested, but are by no means limited to:
- Company of production (e.g. BBC, ITV)
- Costumes, settings, props
- Technology, Musical scores
- Cinematography
- Casting
- Screenplays, Performances
- Intended audience(s), Critical reviews, audience response, media coverage.
Since period drama and adaptations serve as popular entertainment, valuable educational resources and are art forms in their own right, we look forward to expanding study on this rich topic by welcoming abstracts from postgraduate students, as well as early-career researchers and established academics. To submit abstracts, or for any other queries, please email: readingreproductions@gmail.com
Registration Fee
£25 postgraduate early bird registration fee (deadline 30 April)
£35 academic early bird registration fee (deadline 30 April)
£35 postgraduate late registration fee (after 1 May)
£45 academic late registration fee (after 1 May)
Postgraduate Bursary Information
We are pleased to offer ten full registration fee (£25) bursaries for postgraduate students, thanks to the generous sponsorship of BAVS. If you are interested in being considered for a bursary, please send with your abstract a CV and a statement (300 word maximum) explaining why you would benefit from attending this conference.
Allison Neal, Jenny Pearce, Janine Hatter, and Maura Dunst
The Postgraduate Period Drama Conference Team
readingreproductions@gmail.com
Supported by:
The British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS): www.bavs.org
The University of Hull: www.hull.ac.uk
