VPFA: Research Day – Wilkie Collins
Victorian Popular Fiction Association Research Day – 9th November 2013
Wilkie Collins: New Directions and Readings
The VPFA is pleased to announce a Study Day devoted to the work of Wilkie Collins. Confirmed speakers include Tara MacDonald (University of Amsterdam), Anne-Marie Beller (Loughborough University), Tabitha Sparks (McGill University) and Joanne Ella Parsons (Bath Spa University). In addition to these speakers, we would like to solicit three further papers of 20 minutes duration on any aspect of Collins’s novels, short stories, and plays. Please send a 250 word abstract to Janice Allan (j.m.allan@salford.ac.uk) and Joanne Parsons (Joanne.parsons@live.uwe.ac.uk) by the 31st May 2013.
CFP: Women and Political Theory in the 19th and First Half of the 20th Century: Vernon Lee and Radical Circles
CFP: Women and Political Theory in the 19th and First Half of the 20th Century: Vernon Lee and Radical Circles
“Vernon Lee” (Violet Paget, 1856-1935) is well-known for her remarkable erudition, her sharp analyses of arts, music, and literature, her travel accounts uncovering the mysterious presence of the genius loci, her studies on aesthetic contemplation hinging on the central notion of empathy, her fiction (novels and short stories), her theatre work, and even her involvement in the defence of the city centre of Florence.
But little is known about Vernon Lee as a campaigner against war, against imperialism, and as a free woman striving for an ideal society based on equal rights and universal brotherhood, whose voice grew louder and louder in her fight for peace in Europe and the world.
Indeed, as Phyllis F. Mannocchi declared in her Florence paper, 28 Sept. 2012 : “In the scholarship on Vernon Lee, not much attention has been paid to the fact that as she approached late middle age, Vernon Lee seemed to discover her voice as a political ‘radical,’ a supporter of women’s suffrage a participant in the anti-war movement, and an expert in international relations. Vernon Lee’s ‘radical’ politics were ‘natural’ to her. After all, she was a ‘born internationalist,’ who had lived in France, Germany, Switzerland, England, and Italy, and was multi-lingual. After expressing her opposition to the Boer War (1899 – 1902), Vernon Lee began to write more often on social, political, and international issues. WHY is it that so little is known of her writing on these issues during this later period of her life?” (Phyllis Mannochi, International Conference Violet del Palmerino: Vernon Lee’s Cosmopolitan Salon, 1889-1935, Florence, 27-28 Sept. 2012. Accessible: thesibylblog.com)
This conference will aim to further the knowledge on Vernon Lee’s and other women’s radical theories in the 19th and first half of the 20th century, in relation to contemporaneous British, Italian, French, Swiss, and German radical circles.
We invite contributions on: Alice Abadam, Annie Besant, Clementina Black, Irene Forbes-Mosse, Isabella and Emily Ford, Mathilde Hecht, Emily Hobhouse, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Clémence Royer
Favoured topics will include:
Vernon Lee and (Fabian) Socialism
Vernon Lee and Anti-Semitism
Vernon Lee and Fascism
Vernon Lee and Nazism
Vernon Lee and Bolshevism
Vernon Lee and India (Gandhi)
Vernon Lee and International Relations
Vernon Lee and women’s suffrage
Vernon Lee and women’s role in society
Vernon Lee and the relations between men and women Vernon Lee’s pacifism: the Boer War; WWI; the coming of WWII Vernon Lee and vivisection Vernon Lee and the UDC (Union of Democratic Control) Vernon Lee and the concert of nations (League of Nations) Vernon Lee and economics Vernon Lee and Europe Vernon Lee and the Dreyfus affaire Vernon Lee’s philanthropy
Please send your abstracts (title + about 450 words) before 31st May 2013 To Michel Prum prum.michel@wanadoo.fr Sophie Geoffroy geoffroysophie974@gmail.com
Comité scientifique/ Scientific Board: Françoise BARRET-DUCROCQ (Paris Diderot) Florence BINARD (Paris Diderot) Sophie GEOFFROY (Université de La Réunion) Guyonne LEDUC (Lille 3) Phyllis MANNOCCHI (Colby University) Michel PRUM (Paris Diderot) Shafquat TOWHEED (London Open University)
CFP: Legacy: Mythology and Authenticity in the Humanities
CFP: Legacy: Mythology and Authenticity in the Humanities
This conference focuses on the influence of cultural ‘legacies’ within current humanities research. By highlighting the work of postgraduates and early career researchers, this interdisciplinary conference will examine the various ways in which ‘legacies’ are created, restructured, perpetuated and even rejected. It will also question whether newer disciplines respond to cultural mythologies by establishing their own ‘legacy’ as a means of achieving academic authentication.
The recent confirmed identity of Richard the III, Faber’s choice of cover illustration for its anniversary issue of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and the recent film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit are just a few of the numerous examples that demonstrate how cultural legacies evolve within academic research and the public forum.
These inherited cultural legacies are continually being redefined, rebranded and reevaluated, creating a cyclical pattern that challenges the ways in which we approach and define them. This brings into question the social and political significance of ‘legacy’ and its relevance within the humanities, both as a research theme and as a lens by which to view the progression of our respective disciplines.
The conference will conclude with a roundtable discussion with Professor Dominic Shellard the Vice-Chancellor of De Montfort University, Dr Will Buckingham of the School of Humanities at De Montfort University, and Mr Sam Causer of the Leicester School of Architecture.
We invite 20 –minute papers from early career academics, post-doctoral researchers and doctoral students which might address, though not limited to, the following areas:
- Folkloric ‘legends’ and the academic ‘legacy’
- The creation of oral and written legends
- National identity and institutional ‘legacies’
- The development of individual, theoretical, and collective ‘legacies’
- ‘Legacy’ and institutional validation
- Obedience and Iconoclasm towards ‘legacy’ in contemporary humanities studies
- ‘Legacy’ and the curated archive
Please email abstracts, of not more than 200 words, along with a short biographical statement to Anna Blackwell and Elizabeth Penner by 29 April 2013.
Email: dmulegacyconference@gmail.com
Official Website: http://dmulegacyconference.wordpress.com
Conference Date: 28 June 2013
Conference Fee: £15 including lunch and refreshments
Centre for Adaptations Centre
Centre for Textual Studies
De Montfort University
The Gateway
Leicester, UK, LE1 9BH
CfP: ’1845-1945: A Century in Motion’, Birmingham
Interdisciplinary postgraduate conference – call for papers
1845-1945: A Century in Motion
University of Birmingham, 27th June 2013
Keynote speaker – Dr Matthew Rubery, Queen Mary University of London
How did the rapid period of industrialisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries help to shape societies and lifestyles in the West? What types of social changes, movements and developments characterise this time period? This interdisciplinary postgraduate conference, in affiliation with the Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity and hosted by the College of Arts and Law, seeks to explore the various ways in which this century was one of ‘motion’, in every sense of the word. The conference title seeks to encapsulate both the uncertainty and upheaval of this period as well as the physical and cultural movements that occurred at this time. We invite papers addressing these themes from postgraduate researchers and early-career academics working on this period from a variety of backgrounds.
Topics could include, but are not limited to:
Cultural or social movements
- political movements
- the Women’s Movement
- arts movements (musical, artistic, literary)
- religious and philosophical
- popular cultural trends (food, fashion, advertising)
Physical movements
- mass movement of people (mobilisation of soldiers, migration from towns to cities)
- transatlantic and inter-continental travel (including emigration and immigration)
- leisure and tourism
- transport
- changing landscapes
Development and progress
- media (cinema, audio technology and radio, print media)
- scientific and medical advances
- technology
- economic growth and/or recession
- development of nationhood
These headings are suggestions only; we welcome proposals exploring crossovers between these topics, or addressing them from interdisciplinary perspectives. Abstracts of 250-300 words for 20 minute papers along with a short biographical note of no more than 50 words should be sent to pgculturalmodernity@contacts.bham.ac.uk by the 17th May 2013. We welcome any questions that you may have; please do not hesitate to contact us at the above address.
See the website or follow on twitter @pgculturalmod
CALL FOR PAPERS – Social Fabrics: Utopias and Dystopias in relation to the Work of William Morris and H. G. Wells
CALL FOR PAPERS – Social Fabrics: Utopias and Dystopias in relation to the Work of William Morris and H. G. Wells
A Conference Jointly Run by the H.G. Wells Society and the William Morris Society.
Saturday 14 September 2013, The Coach House, Kelmscott House, London, UK
10.00am-4.30pm
We are delighted to invite papers on the full range of topics indicated by the title of the conference.
Please email abstracts of 500 words to Emelyne Godfrey emelynegodfrey@yahoo.com, Helen Elletson, curator@williammorrissociety.org.uk, Patrick Parrinder, j.parrinder064@btinternet.com and Sylvia Hardy sylviahardy@btinternet.com.
Deadline for Paper Proposals: 15 May 2013
Location of Conference: Kelmscott House, 26 Upper Mall, Hammersmith, W6 9TA
Nearest tube stations: Ravenscourt Park (10-minute walk) and Hammersmith (15-minute walk).
EXTENDED DEADLINE: 10th MAY – CFA: Victorians and the Law
EXTENDED DEADLINE: 10th MAY
Call for Papers: Victorians and the Law
Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed online journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies.
The eighth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Cathrine Frank (University of New England), will take a fresh look at the interfaces between literature and legal cultures in the Victorian period. From the Reform Acts through the growth of colonial law to the establishment of divorce courts, nineteenth-century legislature shaped and responded to the same cultural developments – the rise of the middle class, industrialisation, imperial expansion, and shifting ideas about gender, to name but a few – that were also eagerly debated by literary writers. The politics and aesthetics of many nineteenth-century novelists, poets and playwrights were informed by a sustained engagement with legal debates and practices. Their works often reflected on, and sometimes challenged, the law’s construction of civic, social and gender identities, while also casting a critical (or appraising) eye over the bureaucratic apparatus on which legal practice was built.
We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words. Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to, the following:
- wills, trusts and guardianship accounts: the materiality of the legal archive
- Victorian trials, sensation and theatricality
- criminal law, lawlessness, realist epistemologies and the detective plot
- Victorian law and gender
- the reaches of the law: imperialism and the legal & literary creation of colonial identities
- intersections between genres of legal and literary writing
- “brought up a barrister”: nineteenth-century authors, legal training, professionalization and the bar
- radical politics, social change and the working class in Victorian literature and the law
- debates about rights to intellectual and literary property
- the spaces and cultural venues of legal practice
All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. The deadline for submissions to the next issue is 10th May, 2013. Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com
CFP: Special Issue on Nineteenth-Century Australian and New Zealand Girls’ Culture
CFP: Special Issue on Nineteenth-Century Australian and New Zealand Girls’ Culture
Wanted: 2-3 additional essays for a special issue of Women’s Writing on Nineteenth-Century Australian and New Zealand Girls’ Culture
Colonial girls’ culture is receiving growing critical attention, prompting us to rethink its significance for women’s writing. The journal Women’s Writing invites original papers for a special issue dedicated to the colonial girl and her literature in nineteenth-century Australia.
What was it like to be a girl at “the antipodes” in the nineteenth century? How was the colonial girl constructed, both “back home” and throughout the British Empire, and how did she view and represent herself? Was there a distinctly “antipodal,” Australian, or New Zealand girls’ culture and in what ways did it parallel, overlap with, influence, and in turn, become influenced by constructions of girlhood in other parts of the Empire? How did antipodal girls’ culture harness and redefine imperialist ideologies and their malleable relationship to domesticity? In what ways did their literary representation not only mould imperialist representations, but help to shape nineteenth-century literature in English in general, including children’s and especially popular girls’ fiction, which was emerging as a distinct genre in the course of the century? These are some of the questions that individual articles will be addressing. The colonial girl’s changing depiction in Victorian culture at the same time raises larger issues about the representation of the antipodes in British and colonial texts. A new look at colonial girlhood constructively draws into question the still dominating discourses on male mateship, for example. In addition, it helps us to reassess the wide range of genres that constituted nineteenth-century Australian and New Zealand literature and read them in tandem with similar cultural formations.
This special issue aims to create a forum for a more encompassing approach to nineteenth-century Australian and New Zealand literature, while providing new insight into Victorian representations of girlhood and how the figure of the colonial girl helped change these representations.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
- Colonial girlhood and its literary representation
- The construction of colonial girls’ culture
- Australian girls’ magazines and periodicals
- “The antipodes” in both British and colonial girls’ publications
- Colonial children’s literature and writing for girls
- Individual authors and their works
- Comparative approaches
Please submit papers for consideration between 4000-7000 words to Tamara S. Wagner at tswagner_at_ntu.edu.sg, by 1 May 2013.
Contributors should follow the journal’s house style details of which are to be found on the Women’s Writing web site http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/09699082.asp
This is the new MLA. Please note that instead of footnotes, we use endnotes with NO bibliography. All bibliographical information is included in the endnotes. For example, we require place of publication, publisher and date of publication in brackets after a book is cited for the first time.
Please also include an abstract, a brief biographical blurb (approximately 100 words), and a key of 6 words suitable for indexing and abstracting services.
CFP: “Contact and Connections”: Travel and Mobility Studies Symposium
“Contact and Connections”: Travel and Mobility Studies Symposium
Thursday 27th June 2013, University of Warwick
Keynote speakers:
Dr Cathy Waters (University of Kent)
Professor Tim Youngs (Nottingham Trent University)
Call for papers:
Submissions are invited for the first annual symposium of the University of Warwick Travel and Mobility Studies Research Network, on the theme of “Contact and Connections”.
The symposium aims to address the various connections and forms of contact produced through different forms and representations of travel practice. How does travel connect cultures? What new cultural formations are produced through the process of travel? What are the implications of connection across local, national and global mobile networks? How does travel connect people to the spaces around them and through which they move? What new theoretical connections are produced through the intersections of travel and mobility theory with other disciplines?
Proposals are welcome from researchers working across the arts, humanities and social sciences, including such subjects as travel literature (fiction and non-fiction), the visual arts, tourism studies, migration and migrants, commodity circulation, transnationality, philosophies of travel, and mobility theory in any historical period and within any global context.
Topics might include:
- Cultural connections forged through travel
- Contact zones in colonial contexts
- Intra-national and local networks of mobility
- Global networks and transnationality
- Connections within and between literature, visual arts, and other cultural modes
- Circulation of people, commodities, texts
- Connections between people and places
- Theoretical connections within travel studies
- Touristic connections with spaces of travel
- Meeting points and places of contact
Please send abstracts of 300 words for a 15-20 minute paper by 26th April 2013; acceptance will be confirmed by 3rd May.
Email: Dr Charlotte Mathieson c.e.mathieson@warwick.ac.uk or Dr Tara Puri T.Puri@warwick.ac.uk
For more information on the Network visit: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/travelstudies
CFP: ‘Collaborators: The Role of Collectors, Critics, Curators in Artistic Practice’
Call for Papers
Collaborators: The Role of Collectors, Critics, Curators in Artistic Practice c. 1780-1914
26 June 2013, Humanities Research Centre, University of York
In May 1884 the art critic Marion Harry Spielmann wrote in defence of the often criticised profession of art criticism: ‘The critic – (I am not now referring to the mere notice writer of daily journalism) – spends his life in devotion not only to art but to artists: and, so far as public recognition is concerned, he reaps his reward in sneers and ‘chaff’: sneers from painters, thoughtless and irresponsible, like Mr Whistler; indifference from others less splenetic and querulous.’ Spielmann, a prolific author, editor and arts administrator, was an advocate for and close friend of numerous contemporary artists. Along with the collectors and curators whom he frequently worked with and wrote about, he was an active and influential participant in contemporary art practice in late-Victorian London.
Relationships between artists, collectors, critics and curators are often considered in isolation but rarely in tandem. Drawing upon a diverse range of case studies, covering a variety of local and global contexts, this one day post-graduate workshop aims to unpick consistencies, changes and crossovers in the sometimes fraught but often productive relationships between artists, collectors, critics and curators in the long nineteenth century. By bringing together students, early-career researchers and established academics, we hope the workshop will provide an informal but stimulating forum for conversation, debate and interdisciplinary exchange about the nineteenth-century art world and its constituents.
We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers from postgraduate students, early career researchers and established academics. Papers might explore, but are not limited to, the following topics:
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The advent of professional art critics and curators and its impact on artistic practice
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Patronage and collecting in the long nineteenth century
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Artists as collectors, critics and curators
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The fabrication and decoration of Museum buildings
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Curating contemporary art in the long nineteenth century
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The art press and art publishing
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The Grand Tour/tourists as collectors, critics and curators
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Conversations/collaborations in the studio
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Collectors, critics, curators and local/regional/national identities
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Agency and authorship in artistic practice in the long nineteenth century
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Documents: catalogues, contracts and correspondence
Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to Charlotte Drew (
This event is generously supported by the Centre for Modern Studies, University of York
For more information about the centre see: http://www.york.ac.uk/modernstudies/
