Event: 1820-1840 Seminar Series, Durham University
The following British Academy-funded seminar series may be of interest to Victorianists:
‘Making a Darkness Visible: 1820-1840′, Durham University
Fri 24 May – Dr Gregory Dart (UCL): ‘Cockney Adventures and Early Dickens’
Responses from Prof Simon James (Durham University) and Dr Meiko O’Halloran (Newcastle University)
5.00pm, Birley Room, Hatfield College, Durham
Mon 10 Jun – Prof John Plotz (Brandeis University): ‘From Tale to Sketch and Story: Short Fiction in Transition, 1820-40’
Response from Dr Penny Fielding (University of Edinburgh)
5.00pm, Williams Library, St Chad’s College, Durham
Please contact peter.garratt@durham.ac.uk or david.stewart@northumbria.ac.uk for further details of upcoming events in the series.
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
Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Culture Forum
The new “Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Culture Forum” is starting in Oxford this month. Enthusiasts from all different universities are invited to come along, and get involved.
The Interdisciplinary C19 Culture Forum welcomes all scholars, at all stages, in all disciplines, who share a common interest in nineteenthcentury culture.
Convenors: Hannah Sikstrom (Brasenose, Oxford) and Eloise Moss (Magdalen, Oxford)Contact: nineteenthcenturyculture@hotmail.co.uk
Programme:
Week 1 (14 October): FILM NIGHT. Screening of From Hell (2001), Magdalen, Old Law Library, 7 p.m. Drinks and snacks provided!
Week 2 (21 October): READING WEEK. Discussion of extracts from Mary Shelley’s F rankenstein (1818). Platnauer Room, Brasenose, 12- 1:30.
Email for extracts at address above.
Week 3 (26 October): MUSEUM TRIP. We will meet at the Museum of the History of Science, Broad Street, at 1 pm. (Admission Free)
Week 4 (4 November): SEMINAR. William Kelley (St. John’s) will speak on the topic of “‘God Educating Man’: History, Natural History, and Revelation in the work of Charles Kingsley”. Platnauer Room, Brasenose College, 12-1:30.
Week 5 (9 November): MUSEUM TRIP. We will meet at the Oxford Museum of Natural History, Parks Rd., at 1 pm. (Admission Free)
Week 6 (18 November): SEMINAR. Caitlin Meagher (New) will speak on the topic of “‘The Way to Lose Money’: A History of Rail in C19 Japan”. Platnauer Room, Brasenose, 12- 1:30.
Week 7 (23 November): L ONDON TRIP. We will be visiting the Old Operating Theatre, the Sherlock Holmes Museum, and going on a Jack the Ripper Walk. Signup for this outing will be inWeek 2.
Week 8 (2 December): SEMINAR. Maan Barua (Brasenose) will speak on the topic of “Elephants, Empire and Empiricism: Rethinking Colonial Science at/from the Margins”. Platnauer Room, Brasenose, 12- 1: 30.
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/
CFP: “Strange New Today”: Victorians, Crisis and Response
Postgraduate Conference
17 September 2011
Devon and Exeter Institution
Centre for Victorian Studies (Exeter) in collaboration with the Reader Organisation
Keynote speakers: Professor Regenia Gagnier (University of Exeter)
Professor Philip Davis (University of Liverpool)
Plenary: “The Reading Cure”, Presented by The Reader Organisation
Proposals Due: 27 May 2011
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.
Lord Asa Briggs: A Celebration
Thursday 19 May 2011
Wolfson/Pollard, Institute of Historical Research
Senate House, University of London
Lord Asa Briggs, one of the country’s most distinguished living historians, turns ninety this year, and he and his remarkable contribution to academic history, to the development of Victorian studies, the history of communication and his role in the growth of modern universities are considered and assessed in this one-day colloquium co-hosted with the British Association for Victorian Studies.
Confirmed participants:
* Asa Briggs
* David Cannadine (Princeton)
* Francesca Carnevali (University of Birmingham)
* Malcolm Chase (University of Leeds)
* Matthew Cragoe (University of Sussex)
* Martin Hewitt (Manchester Metropolitan University)
* Frank Buongiorno (Menzies Centre for Australian Studies/King’s College London)
* Sian Nicholas (Aberystwyth)
* Jean Seaton (University of Westminster)
* Robert Seatter (BBC)
* James Thompson (Bristol)
* David Vincent (Open University)
For more information and registration:
http://www.history.ac.uk/asa-briggs
CFP: ‘Crossroads’, Toulouse June 2012
Crossroads: an International Conference
Toulouse, France – 7-8 June 2012
Deadline for proposals: 6 January 2011
Great things are done when men and mountains meet;
This is not done by jostling in the street.
William Blake, MS Note-Book.
“Stimulating though these lines may be, one may wonder why – or indeed if – Blake is right. This conference will explore sites (whether virtual or real) where different elements come into contact, where ideas, people, and objects circulate and where transformations occur. This call for papers invites scholars in every field of English Studies to contribute papers to a conference on the theme of Crossroads.
The members of the Toulouse-based research centre Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes (CAS) welcome responses of every kind to the question of what happens when minds or ideas meet, materially or immaterially. What strange alchemy of space and time makes some meetings momentous, and others not?”
Responses will be in the form of 20 minute papers. It is strongly recommended that these be in English, but papers in French will be considered. 150-word propositions should be sent by January 6, 2011, to the organizers of the conference:
- Philippe Birgy birgy@univ-tlse2.fr
- Helen Goethals helen.goethals@orange.fr
- Wendy Harding harding@univ-tlse2.fr
