Reminder: BAVS 2012 Registration Deadline
BAVS 2012
‘Victorian Values: Ethics, Economics, Aesthetics’
University of Sheffield, Thursday 30th August – Saturday 1st September
Issue 8.2 of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies
Issue 8.2 of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies
Issue 8.2 of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies is now available at: www.ncgsjournal.com
This special issue, “Law and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England,” is guest edited by Julia McCord Chavez and Katherine Gilbert. It features the following articles and reviews:
Introduction
Julia McCord Chavez and Katherine Gilbert, “Introduction”
Articles
Christine L. Krueger, “The Queer Heroism of a Man of Law in A Tale of Two Cities”
Catherine Siemann, “Appellate Lawyers in Petticoats: Access to Justice in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady”
Matthew Ingleby, “Bulwer-Lytton, Braddon, and the Bachelorization of Legal Bloomsbury”
Gregory Brennen, “Legal Fictions, Legal Limits: The Noble Patriarch and the Power of Law in Victorian Literature”
Danaya C. Wright, “Policing Sexual Morality: Percy Shelley and the Expansive Scope of the Parens Patriae in the Law of Custody of Children”
Clare McGlynn, “John Stuart Mill on Prostitution: Radical Sentiments, Liberal Proscriptions”
Colleen Fenno, “Testimony, Trauma, and a Space for Victims: Mary Wollsonecraft’s Maria: Or the Wrongs of Woman”
Reviews
Marlene Tromp, “The Case of the Brontës in Law and Fiction.” Review of Ian Ward’s Law and the Brontës.
Elsie B. Michie, “Global Capitalism and Nineteenth-Century Literature.” Review of Ayse Çelikkol’s Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century.
Barbara Leckie, “I Don’t: The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Victorian Novel.” Review of Kelly Hager’s Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: the Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition.
Thad Logan, “Imitations of Life, or Art (and Industry) at Home.” Review of Talia Schaffer’s Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction.
Registration Open: Dickens Day 2012, ‘Dickens and Popular Culture’
Dickens Day
Saturday 13th October 2012
Dickens and Popular Culture
Senate House (South), University of London,
Beveridge Hall and G22/26
Keynote Speaker: Professor Juliet John
Dickens Day, now in its 26th year, is celebrating 2012 with a theme that explores Dickens’s popularity and his engagement with non-elite cultures from his own time to the present. On the evidence of bicentenary Dickens fervour, the author is as popular now as he has ever been. This year has been punctuated by Dickens serials on TV, heartfelt tributes from popular writers, mass-selling biography, collective reading projects, Dickens hip-hop performances, and a global read-a-thon. How can we account for this continuing engagement, across different genres and various cultural contexts? What is it that gives Dickens’s work its particular appeal? What are the political and personal investments in forms of Dickensian popularity? How does this relate to Dickens’s own aspirations, and to the forms in which his work first appeared? These are some of the questions that the day seeks to address.
There will be papers, readings and a panel dedicated to research inspired by the work of the late Sally Ledger, whose book Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination is an important foundation for this event.
Tickets are:
£20 STANDARD
£15 IES MEMBERS/RETIRED/UNWAGED
£10 STUDENTS
To book, and for further information, visit:
http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/events/ies-conferences/DickensDay12
All enquiries to: Jon Millington, Events Officer, Institute of English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU; tel +44 (0) 207 664 4859; Email: IESEvents@sas.ac.uk.
BAVS/NAVSA/AVSA Conference 2013: The Global and The Local
CALL FOR PAPERS
NORTH AMERICAN VICTORIAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION
BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR VICTORIAN STUDIES
AUSTRALASIAN VICTORIAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION
Venice, Italy, 3 June – 6 June 2013
For the first time, the three major conferences on the Victorian period, NAVSA, BAVS, and AVSA, will join forces for a conference in Venice Italy. The conference theme is the local and the global.
Proposals could address such topics as:
Cosmopolitanism
Nationalism/Internationalism/Globalization
Global Circulation
Geopolitical Commodities
Glocal Cities
Imagined Communities and Imaginary Places
Travelling, Tourism, Guide Books and Travel Writing
Trains and Speed, Spatialization and Temporality
Trade, Markets, and Dissemination
Empire and Rebellion
British Reception of Italian Music and Visual Arts
Art Collecting, Museums, Libraries, and Galleries
Dialect Literature
Victorian Roots
Victorians and the “Risorgimento”
Religious Difference
The Perception of Otherness
The Country and the City
The Local Artifact and Digital Networking
Opera
Water
Proposals will be due October 4, 2012.
More details about paper submission and the conference can be found at:
http://glocalvictorians.wordpress.com/
Pilot Study: Participants Needed, ‘Reading Dickens’
Pilot Study: ‘Reading Dickens’
Participants Needed!
Dr Michaela Mahlberg and Dr Kathy Conklin, from the University of Nottingham’s School of English, are currently conducting a study on ‘Reading Dickens’. The study is completely online and anonymous.
There is a prize-draw for taking part – so one lucky participant will be given £25.
If you would like to participate, here is the link to the study.
https://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/nottingham/kcmm
They would be very grateful for the support of BAVS members for this project.
HISTORY AND CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF HUMAN REMAINS
HISTORY AND CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF HUMAN REMAINS
MEDICAL MUSEUMS AND ANATOMICAL COLLECTIONS
Natural History Museum – Toulouse February 4, 2013
ANATOMICAL MODELS
Academy of Medicine – Paris April 4, 2013
EXHIBITING HUMAN REMAINS
Hunterian Museum – London June 4, 2013
This series of 3 interdisciplinary conferences will examine the relationship between anatomical knowledge and practice and their cultural representations so as to offer an overview of the cultural reception of the exhibition of human remains. The conferences are aimed at scholars from a variety of medical humanities disciplines.
MEDICAL MUSEUMS AND ANATOMICAL COLLECTIONS
Natural History Museum – Toulouse February 4, 2013
Although modern anatomy owes a lot to comparative anatomy, the fairly recent separation between natural history museums and medical museums in the mid nineteenth century has tended to obscure this connection. This conference intends to focus on the constitution, rise and evolution of medical museums and the ways in which the constitution of anatomical collections has been represented in literature and the arts. It will look at matters ranging from the use of menageries for anatomical research to the proximity between human and animal remains in medical museums, as well as issues of classification and organisation. The importance of zoological specimens in medical museums and the role played by animal remains in the constitution of private medical collections and pathological museums will be central to this conference, which aims to trace the impact of comparative anatomy on human anatomy and examine the debates raised by anatomists’ methods of investigation, such as those concerning vivisection or the human and humanity, as in the case of criminals or ‘savages’. By analysing the history of this aspect of medical museums together with its reception and popularisation, this conference will focus on the evolution of the representation of humans and animals as objects of medical investigation and look at literature and the arts as significant media playing an active part in the history of medicine.
20-minute papers are invited that engage with, but are not limited to, the following topics:
-medical museums and/as cabinets of curiosities
-medical museums and comparative anatomy
-animals and/in medical research
-collecting, preserving, classifying human and animal remains
-the location and architecture of medical museums
-medical museums, humans and humanity
-anatomical collections and the rise of criminal anthropology
-anatomical collections and the rise of ethnology
-representations of mad collectors/anatomists/surgeons
Please send 300-word proposals (attached as a .doc-file; in French or English), together with a short biographical note to Laurence Talairach-Vielmas (talairac@univ-tlse2.fr) & Rafael Mandressi (rafael.mandressi@damesme.cnrs.fr).
Please write ‘EXPLORA/Medical Museums and Anatomical Collections/Abstract’ as email object.
Deadline for submissions: September 1, 2012. Contributors will be notified that their proposal has been accepted by mid-October 2012.
ANATOMICAL MODELS
Academy of Medicine – ParisApril 4, 2013
The second conference will look at anatomical models, their role in the history of anatomy and their cultural reception and representation. It aims to contextualise the rise of anatomical modelling and collections of wax models, and trace the history of natural anatomies and other media implicated in the teaching of anatomy and in representations of the human body as both aesthetic objects and informational tools. The conference will also illuminate the contrast between anatomical images and 3-D models, as well as between wax models (such as the differences between natural anatomies made from bodily remains and artificial wax models). Furthermore, it will attempt to interrogate the role that women played in this aspect of the history of anatomy, the differences between male and female natural anatomies and wax figures, as well as the audiences that these collections were intended for. This conference will also draw upon the long historical relationship between art and anatomy in order to identify the relationship between the realism of some media and enduring mythic elements, and examine how knowledge, even when giving an impression of immediate access, is fabricated, as typified by the poses or positions and facial attitudes of many a medical Venus. The history of anatomical models will also be studied through their literary representations: the conference will highlight the role that literature played in the popularisation of anatomical tools (from anatomical images to models), how literature and the arts traced their transformations and evolution, participated in the rise or fall of certain media, and pointed to gender or ethical issues related to the making or use of anatomical models.
20-minute papers are invited that engage with, but are not limited to, the following topics:
-anatomical models in medical museums/fairs/shows
-anatomical knowledge, media and body representation
-anatomical knowledge, models and medical education
-the fabrication of anatomical knowledge
-anatomical models, realism and artificiality
-anatomical models and aestheticization
-anatomical models and the macabre
-anatomical models and pathology
-anatomical models and gender representation
-anatomical models and death
-anatomical models and sexuality
-anatomical models and gynecology, midwifery
-anatomical models and legislation
Please send 300-word proposals (attached as a .doc-file; in French or English), together with a short biographical note to Laurence Talairach-Vielmas (talairac@univ-tlse2.fr) & Rafael Mandressi (rafael.mandressi@damesme.cnrs.fr).
Please write ‘EXPLORA/Anatomical Models/Abstract’ as email object. Deadline for submissions: September 1, 2012.
Contributors will be notified that their proposal has been accepted by mid-October 2012.
EXHIBITING HUMAN REMAINS
Hunterian Museum – London June 4, 2013
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the issue of emotional responses related to the dissection and exhibition of human remains was increasingly at the heart of debates related to the constitution (and closing down) of medical museums. This last conference will analyse the reception of medical museums and their exhibited human remains, focusing more particularly on the impact of an increasingly fragmented and commodified human body. The conference will therefore look at the history of and debates around the exhibition of human remains and how these debates were represented in literature and the arts. It will investigate the changes in representation, tracing the evolution from the aestheticized bodies of the Renaissance to the human remains exhibited in nineteenth-century medical museums, and also explore how the exhibition of human remains radically changed ideas about the diffusion of knowledge and the relation between science and nature as well as suggested new epistemological strategies. Using literature and the arts as significant media in the popularisation of a new scopic regime (examining, for instance, literary and artistic representations of embalmed corpses, exhibited skeletons or bottled specimens), the conference will highlight the way in which the artistic field often offered a more humanized or ethically more complex version of the gruesome business of dissection that anatomists and curators were daily trying to make presentable to their audiences. In this way, the conference will probe the links between episteme and transgression, and call attention to the ethical questions that were raised (and still are) by the exhibition (or even trafficking) of human remains.
20-minute papers are invited that engage with, but are not limited to, the following topics:
-the history of the exhibition of human remains in medical essays, journals, manuals of dissection
-the reception of human remains, audiences and gender issues
-the policing of the gaze in medical museums
-audience responses to natural anatomies and artificial models
-the links between human remains and other anatomical tools
-human remains, ethics and medicine
-exhibited human remains and anatomical legislation
-representations of human remains in broadsides, pamphlets, caricatures, advertising and fiction
-representations of the corpse as commodity/anatomical material
-representations of tissue trafficking
-the reception/representation of human remains and the issue of mortality
-the meaning(s) of human remains
-human remains in Gothic/sensation/detective fiction
-representations of anatomists and bodysnatchers in fiction and non-fiction (essays, manuscripts, letters, diaries, etc.)
-stories and testimonies relating supplies of cadavers, the relation between anatomists and grave-robbers, dissection
Please send 300-word proposals (attached as a .doc-file; in English only), together with a short biographical note to Laurence Talairach-Vielmas (talairac@univ-tlse2.fr) & Rafael Mandressi (rafael.mandressi@damesme.cnrs.fr).
Please write ‘EXPLORA/Exhibiting Human Remains/Abstract’ as email object. Deadline for submissions: September 1, 2012. Contributors will be notified that their proposal has been accepted by mid-October 2012.
Deadline Approaching: The Daphne Carrick Memorial Scholarship, 2012
The Daphne Carrick Memorial Scholarship, 2012
Deadline for Applications: 20 September 2012
In memory of the late Daphne Carrick, The Brontë Society will award a grant of up to £2,000 every three years to finance original research in the field of Brontë studies.
For full terms and conditions, and to apply, see http://www.bronte.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=142&Itemid=193
1) Applications
a) Eligibility: The scholarship is open to anyone, with the exception of Trustees of the Brontë Society, employees of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, and their families.
b) Submission: Applicants should submit, in not more than three A4 pages, a description of the research to be undertaken, its importance, an outline of the plan of work and an indication of probable costs.
c) Address: Applications should be sent to The Council Administrator, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, Keighley, BD22 8DR, to arrive by the 30th of September, 2012.
d) Selection: The winner will be selected by the Society’s Publications Committee, who may consult experts in the field, and their decision must be approved by the Council of the Brontë Society. The result will be announced following the December Council meeting.
e) Payment: The timing and method of payment of the award shall be agreed between the Chair of Publications Committee and the successful candidate.
2) Research Guidelines
The following areas are regarded as appropriate for the award of the Scholarship:
a) Documentary: The identification, presentation and evaluation of primary material relevant to Brontë studies: for instance, manuscript documents (including transcription); printed sources of the period (for instance newspapers, pamphlets, books); local records, both civil and parish; and legal papers, including court proceedings.
b) Bibliographical: The listing, cataloguing and indexing of published, unpublished and electronic sources: for instance theses, articles, conference reports, previously unindexed books, library and database resources.
c) Biographical: The identification, assimilation and presentation in accessible form of material relating to the lives of the Brontë family, to people close to or influential on the family and/or to places associated with them.
d) Contextual: Research into the literary, artistic and/or philosophical context of the Brontës’ writing and/or the impact of their work on later artists.
3) Conditions
The winner will be required to sign a legally binding agreement to the following conditions:
a) The research should be completed and written up within two years of the first payment of award money. If the work is not completed in this time, and no explanation satisfactory to the Society is offered, the recipient will be required to return the grant money to the Society.
b) The finished work must be submitted to the Brontë Society, which reserves the right of first publication, including retention of copyright, although permission to republish elsewhere will not be unreasonably withheld.
One-Day Symposium: Victorian Things, Oxford Brookes University, 22nd September 2012
Victorian Things: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Material Culture
One-Day Symposium, Oxford Brookes University
Saturday September 22nd, 2012
Victorian Things: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Material Culture is a one-day symposium which will reflect on, and respond to, the current materialist turn in Victorian Studies and Thing Theory. Nineteenth-century literature is crowded with objects, but traditional methods of interpretation have directed us to focus on characters and plots. Through three thematic sessions, ‘Desirable Things’, ‘Anatomical Things’ and ‘Objects and Memory’, this symposium aims to explore the story of objects as ‘things’ with specific values and meanings in Victorian culture. This exciting day of presentations and discussion will be concluded with a plenary lecture by Professor Isobel Armstrong: ‘“The Thing-Character of the World”: four artefacts in the nineteenth-century novel and four materialisms.’
Delegate fee (including lunch and coffee): £15
Students and unwaged (including lunch and coffee): £10
For bookings and further information contact: Dr. Tatiana Kontou, Dr. Verity Hunt, Dr. Andrew Mangham or Verity Burke:
Please also see our facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/victorianthings) or hashtag #VicThings on twitter.
CFP: Contemporary Aesthetic Education in the UK, Interdisciplinary Workshop, University of York, 10th December 2012
Call for Postgraduate Papers:
Contemporary Aesthetic Education in the UK
University of York
10th December 2012
CFP Deadline: 15th September 2012
The purpose of this inter-disciplinary workshop is to explore the role of aesthetic education in the UK today. The presence of the concept of aesthetic education in the thinking of British cultural critics can be traced to the profound influence of Matthew Arnold, who inherits the notion from its German Enlightenment proponents – Schiller, Herder, and Winckelmann. The tradition holds that instruction in art and literature can bring about real changes in society. In the UK today, however, education in literature and the arts is being increasingly threatened by social change rather than facilitating those changes. In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold prescribed culture as the antidote to a looming threat of ‘anarchy’ which lay chiefly, he suggested, in vulgar monetary concerns. In the fear of the neoliberalisation of the university driving the contemporary proliferation of neohumanist apologies for the arts and humanities, we hear the echoes of Arnold’s fear of vulgar monetarism. Another, contemporary inheritance of this tradition of aesthetic education is a rapidly expanding field of ‘therapeutic’ reading. Here, aesthetic education is not so much a politically decisive aspect of academic activity as a project of popular empowerment carried out at the level of public libraries, charitable education projects and health provision. These are just two of many lines of inheritance in the contemporary UK cultural situation of the Enlightenment tradition of aesthetic education.
The inter-disciplinary workshop will take place at the University of York on the afternoon of Monday 10th December 2012, where discussion will be led by Professor Philip Davis (English, Liverpool) and Dr Nick Jones (Philosophy, York). Two postgraduate speakers will be selected from submissions. We welcome abstracts from postgraduates and early career researchers working in all disciplines across the arts and humanities. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
· The contemporary significance of Matthew Arnold’s cultural education
· Martha Nussbaum’s Not For Profit (2010) and other contemporary interventions
· Elizabeth Prettejohn’s Beauty and Art, 1750-2000 (2005) and the question of why we should care about Beauty in the twenty-first century
· Comparative contexts – Britain and elsewhere, e.g., Jacques Rancière’s notion of aesthetics as a space of political non-domination
· The contemporary significance of morality and ethics for art and narrative
· The social mission of English literature and its twenty-first century legacy
· Therapeutic reading as cure for modern problems
Submissions should consist of an abstract of up to 300 words for a paper of 30 minutes in length, and be emailed as an attachment to Mildrid Bjerke at mhab500@york.ac.uk by 15th September.
Please direct any queries to Rafe McGregor at rdm503@york.ac.uk.
The workshop is being hosted by the Humanities Research Centre at York, and has been funded by the Centre for Modern Studies.
Mildrid Bjerke & Rafe McGregor
University of York
CFP: “Victorian Persistence: Persistence in/of Victorian Literature and Culture”: A one-day postgraduate conference (Université Paris Diderot)
CFP: “Victorian Persistence: Persistence in/of Victorian Literature and Culture”
A one-day postgraduate conference (Université Paris Diderot)
Friday 7 December 2012.
CFP Deadline: October 7th, 2012, for abstract of 300 words along with a brief biographical note, which should not exceed 50 words.
“The life of the past persisting in us, is the business of every thinking man and woman.” (A.S. Byatt)
The present-day globalization of Victorian writing can be traced back to the extraordinary plasticity of its textual and visual forms, as it travels from place to place and media to media. Such temporal, geographical, cultural, intertextual andintermedial persistence is to be the subject of a one-day conference which will consider the different modes of resistance of literature within the nineteenth-century as well as its survival and rebirth in later times.
The aim of this interdisciplinary conference is to allow postgraduates to discuss their research with others and to open out the subject to other centuries and disciplines. We are interested in 20-minute papers approaching the idea of persistence from the point of view of literature, cultural studies, or history. We are also looking for papers onlater or contemporary perceptions of the Victorian age – the modern audience and critical responses, and how period drama and contemporary culture impact on one another.
Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:
- Intertextuality and/or rewritings of Victorian works
- Screen adaptations or original screenplays set in the Victorian age
- Collections and collecting
- Material culture and (re)production
- The Victorian Age and belatedness
- Trace, traces and tracing the past
- Conservative nostalgia, heritage and British identity
- Persistence as symptom: illness and disfunction
- Science and persistence of the scientific idiom
- Circulation of people, ideas and things within and without the 19th century
Abstracts no longer than 300 words should be sent to Estelle Murail (estelle_murail@yahoo.fr) and Róisín Quinn-Lautrefin (roisinql@hotmail.fr) by October 7th, 2012, along with a brief biographical note, which should not exceed 50 words.
The conference will take place at the University of Paris-Diderot on Friday 7 December 2012.
This conference is generously supported by the BAVS (British Association for Victorian Studies) and the LARCA (Laboratoire de Recherches sur les Cultures Anglophones).
