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
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:
-
The advent of professional art critics and curators and its impact on artistic practice
-
Patronage and collecting in the long nineteenth century
-
Artists as collectors, critics and curators
-
The fabrication and decoration of Museum buildings
-
Curating contemporary art in the long nineteenth century
-
The art press and art publishing
-
The Grand Tour/tourists as collectors, critics and curators
-
Conversations/collaborations in the studio
-
Collectors, critics, curators and local/regional/national identities
-
Agency and authorship in artistic practice in the long nineteenth century
-
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/
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 16 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
CFA/CFP: Critical Anthology of Period Drama since the 1970s
CFA/CFP: Critical Anthology of Period Drama since the 1970s
The recent popular success of “Downton Abbey” calls for a renewed examination of such earlier BBC/ITV/Masterpiece Theatre serialized period dramas as “Upstairs Downstairs,” “The Pallisers,”and “The Forsyte Saga,” among others that have aired (and have been repeated) since the 1970s. We also want to examine how more recent dramas like “Downton Abbey” engage with these earlier productions in terms of style, thematic content, and programming.
We are seeking essays for a critical anthology that addresses such topics (but are not limited to) as the following:
*How the small screen period drama interrogates past and present gender/ class/race relations and notions of historical “authenticity”
*Transatlantic reception /interpretations
*How these TV serials fulfill and/or disrupt notions of “quality television”
*The afterlife of the serialized period drama on video/DVD
*The role of fans in shaping the content/reception of these dramas (message boards, role playing, Facebook and other social media sites that connect fans, etc)
*The relationship between history, heritage, and the costume drama
*Adaptation and the translation from historical novel to the TV miniseries
*How history and culture are commodified for popular audiences
*The feminization of history via the costume drama
*The relationship between these series and wider developments in TV or popular culture more generally
*How these programs have engaged with, or been received in relation to, ideas of region and regional difference
*How the development of the genre been bound up with technological changes, such as the use of video, widescreen and (more recently) HD
Please submit a 500 word abstract and brief CV by April 15 to the editors,
Julie Anne Taddeo, University of Maryland, USA
taddeo@umd.edu <mailto:taddeo@umd.edu> And
James Leggott, Northumbria University, UK
james.leggott@northumbria.ac.uk <mailto:james.leggott@northumbria.ac.uk>
If accepted, the first draft of essays (approx. 7000 words) will be due Sept. 15, 2013 (guidelines from press will follow).
*Please note: Individual authors are responsible for permissions for any images reproduced in their essays*.
Expressions of Interest: Popular entertainments in times of war.
Expressions of Interest: Popular entertainments in times of war.
“Popular Entertainment Studies” an international peer-reviewed online journal, intends to publish the March 2014 issue (Vol.5, no.1) with the special focus of: Popular entertainments in times of war.
This topic may be of interest to all Victorianists in that it encompasses the long nineteenth century from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the outbreak of World War One. We would welcome expressions of interests in the topic and suggestions for what might be included.
In the first instance please contact:
Victor Emeljanow,
General Editor,
Popular Entertainment Studies.
CFA/CFP Deadline Approaching: Victorians and the Law
CFA/CFP Deadline Approaching: 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 our next issue is 1 April, 2013. Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com
CFP: London Nineteenth-Century Studies postgraduate day
CFP: London Nineteenth-Century Studies postgraduate day
The London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar will hold a one-day postgraduate conference on Saturday 20 April at Senate House, University of London.
The purpose of the day is to enable graduate students across London who are working on topics in the long nineteenth century to meet each other, learn more about each other’s work, and discover shared interests in a friendly and collegial setting.
We invite proposals from postgraduate research students registered at any of the Colleges and Institutes of the University of London, for short (ten-minute) papers which present an overview of your PhD project. (We welcome papers which focus primarily on a particular aspect, so long as that aspect is contextualized to some extent by the framework of an overall project.)
Please send 200-word proposals to the organizing committee, c/o James Emmott (Birkbeck) <james@emmott.org> by Monday 25 March.
We will confirm your inclusion in the programme shortly afterwards.
2013 Postgraduate Day Organizing Committee:
Alice Conde (Goldsmiths)
Eliza Cubitt (UCL)
Melissa Dickson (KCL)
James Emmott (Birkbeck), Chair
Angharad Eyre (QMUL)
Jessica Hindes (RHUL)
Ana Parejo Vadillo (Birkbeck)
Chair, London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar <a.parejovadillo@bbk.ac.uk>
CFP/CFA – Queer Relations: Revising the Victorian Family (proposal deadline: 1 April. 2013)
Queer Relations: Revising the Victorian Family (proposal deadline: 1 April. 2013)
Dr Duc Dau, University of Western Australia and Dr Shale Preston, Macquarie Universitycontact email: duc.dau@uwa.edu.au and shale.preston@mq.edu.au
We invite contributions for an upcoming volume of essays which examine the Victorian family through a queer lens.
The Victorian family can be taken to mean the nineteenth-century nuclear or extended family, or the family of texts associated with the Victorian period (e.g. nineteenth-century and neo-Victorian texts). We are looking for exciting interrogations into the discourse of the Victorian family. These interrogations can focus on untraditional familial arrangements, non-normative relationships, polyamorous attachments, queer families in disparate communities/locations (e.g. circuses, theaters, brothels, homes for fallen women, monasteries, convents, hospitals, schools, ships, military units, thieving fraternities), homosexual/homosocial utopias, erotic fantasy worlds (e.g. fairy, goblin), etc.
Alternatively, the interrogations can examine queer 20th and 21st century texts/domains/mediums that allude to or mash-up the Victorian family of texts (canonical or otherwise) or seek to revise traditional notions of the Victorian family. Focus areas can include but are not limited to the novel, poetry, film, television, theater, auto/biography, periodicals, the internet, steampunk etc.
Please send 300 word proposals and a two-page CV to the editors Dr Duc Dau at duc.dau@uwa.edu.au and Dr Shale Preston at shale.preston@mq.edu.au by 1 April 2013.
Completed chapters of 6,000 – 8,000 words will be due by 1 February 2014.
