CFP: AVSA 2020, "Small Worlds", Monash University, Melbourne (due 20 Jan 20)

"Small Worlds: Connections, Collaborations, and Conflicts"
Australasian Victorian Studies Association Conference
17-19 June 2020
Monash University, Melbourne

Keynote speakers: Associate Professor Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Professor Lisa Surridge (University of Victoria, Canada)

Technological advances, imperial expansion, emigration to the colonies and beyond, and an increase in leisure travel made the nineteenth-century world seem smaller. Fuelled by industrialisation, the population of cities boomed, putting masses of people in closer proximity than ever before. The development of transportation, particularly the railways and steamship, meant culture could be disseminated more widely. The various ways in which ideas and people moved aided by technology such as the telegraph enabled new connections, cultures, and ideas to flourish. However, encounters with the unfamiliar and challenges to accepted ways of being provoked anxieties, injustices, and outright conflict.

We invite papers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds including Literature, History, Music, and Art History that interpret any aspect of the nineteenth century in relation to the conference theme of “Small Worlds”. 

Proposals might address such topics as the following:

·      Travelling, tourism and travel writing

·      Urbanisation and the city

·      Emigration

·      Empires, nationalism, colonialism

·      Race, ethnicity, indigeneity

·      Literature and the periodical press

·      Scientific and medical advancement

·      Intellectual, artistic, and political communities

·      Religion and missionary work

·      The Victorian city

·      Collaborative research within Victorian Studies

Paper proposals should comprise a one-paragraph abstract of 200-250-words with a title plus a 100-word biographical note. Please avoid the use of in-text references. Proposals should be emailed to conference convenors Dr Michelle Smith and Associate Professor Paul Watt and at michelle.smith@monash.edu by 20 January 2020.

All those giving a paper at the AVSA conference are required to be members of the Association.

AVSA aims to promote the activities and research of scholars in Victorian literary, history, and cultural studies and since 1973 has provided a meeting place for Victorian Studies scholars in the southern hemisphere. To find out more about AVSA, visit its website at www.avsa.unimelb.edu.au

Call for Papers: Antipodean George Eliot, 13-14 Feb. 2020, University of Sydney

Call for Papers: Antipodean George Eliot
13-14 February 2020
University of Sydney

‘Antipodean George Eliot’ provides the opportunity to examine George Eliot’s legacy from any and every angle. The conference theme plays on the dual senses of ‘antipodean’ as ‘Australasian’ and ‘in opposition to’, with the goal of stimulating original thinking on all aspects of George Eliot’s achievement, and the various contexts in which her work is pertinent.

In addition to George Eliot’s writings in all genres, possible topics include:
• how, where, and by whom has George Eliot been read?
• discussions of her magisterial range of intellectual interests: philosophy, science broadly
conceived, especially physiology and psychology, and religion
• writers and thinkers who influenced or were influenced by her

Proposals of 250-300 words for papers of 20 minutes duration, together with a brief
biographical note of no more than 100 words, should be submitted by email attachment to
antipodeanGE@gmail.com by Monday 31 July 2019.

Proposals for panels of 3-4 speakers are also welcome (600-750 words, with a biographical
note for each speaker).

In addition, we invite proposals of 100-150 words for ‘lightning talks’ of 5-7 minutes; this may be of particular interest to graduate students.

Confirmed speakers include:
Fionnuala Dillane (University College Dublin), author of Before George Eliot: Marian Evans
and the Periodical Press (2013); Tim Dolin (Curtin University); Moira Gatens (Philosophy,
University of Sydney); Helen Groth (University of New South Wales); Joanne Wilkes (University of Auckland).

Under the aegis of the School of Literature, Art and Media, The University of Sydney, and
the Australasian Victorian Studies Association

Conference organisers: Matthew Sussman and Margaret Harris. Enquiries to Margaret Harris: margaret.harris@sydney.edu.au

CFP: AVSA 2019, 25-29 September, Otago University (deadline 1 April)

The University of Otago was founded in 1869. This was a year in which many scientific, political, commercial, cultural and medical milestones were also recorded, including the first issue of Nature, the opening of the Suez Canal, the publication of the Periodic Table, Paul Langerhans’s discovery of pancreatic islets and the appearance of “The Subjection of Women” by John Stuart Mill.

The Centre for Research on Colonial Culture and the Australasian Victorian Studies Association warmly invite you to join them in critically reflecting on these various approaches to knowledge creation and production during the 1860s and beyond, and across disciplines as well as cultures in all areas of human endeavour. Confirmed keynote speakers include Professor Marion Thain (King’s College London) and Megan Potiki (University of Otago), alongside invited speakers Dr Tina Makereti (Massey University), Lisa Chatfield (Producer, The Luminaries) and Professor Liam McIlvanney (University of Otago), with more to be announced!

The conference will combine a traditional academic programme with a range of public heritage festival events, special forums and social  engagements. We invite paper, panel and poster proposals from researchers, policy makers, industry and anyone with an 1869-related story to tell that addresses the conference theme from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Cross-disciplinary panels would be particularly welcomed.

Topics linked to the legacies of Victorian scientific and cultural production include:
• Indigenous knowledges;
• Literary production;
• Colonialism and its legacies;
• Museums, archives and collecting;
• Medical innovation;
• Ecology and the environment;
• Migration, movement, and mobilities;
• Artefacts and archaeological records;
• Mass tourism and popularisation of leisure;
• Scientific advancements;
• Commercial and economic development;
• Art, fashion and design;
• Architecture and built environments;
• Conflict, contestation and resistance;
• Crime and sensation.

Papers: 250-300 word abstract, up to 5 keywords and 50-word biographical statement.
Panels: Panel proposals for three linked papers are encouraged to include presenters from more than one disciplinary background, and from different career stages. 250-300 word individual abstracts, 50-word biographical statements for each presenter, accompanied by a 200 word summary of the overarching theme(s) of the panel.
Posters:
Posters will be on display for the duration of the conference and there will be a timetabled slot for contributors to stand by their  posters so that participants can come and discuss the research.
250-300 word abstract, up to 5 keywords and 50-word biographical statement

Please submit proposals as Word attachments to the conference email address: 1869@otago.ac.nz by 1 April 2019.
Decisions on acceptance will be made by early May, with registration opening in June.

Keep up to date with the latest news and announcements via our Twitter account: @Otago1869

CFP: Visual Theology II, Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, 22-22 September 2019

Visual Theology II:

Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites: Sacre Conversazioni

St Michael and All Angels Chapel, Marlborough College

21- 22nd September 2019
https://www.visualtheology.org.uk

‘All great art is praise’ John Ruskin

This conference aims to celebrate the life and work of John Ruskin during his bicentenary. This two day event will create a space for theologically engaged conversations about Ruskin, religion and the arts. We seek to focus on Ruskin’s religious and aesthetic writings informed by his relationship with Christianity, as well as examine his influence on those within the Victorian art world, specifically the Pre-Raphaelites.

Whilst Ruskin can be said to be a major proponent of Victorian art writing, with religion underling his mode of approach to many areas of nineteenth century public life and thought, in the twenty-first century we have somewhat of a reversal: our interpretation of religion in the arts challenges the very competencies of disciplines such as art history. Resisting attempts to historically confine Ruskin’s religious aesthetics to the nineteenth century alone, this conference suggests that Ruskin’s voice offers clear and often prophetic insight into many facets of modern image interpretation. Ruskin’s formulations, albeit many faceted, provide not only a means of examining nineteenth century religious dialogues about accessing the divine, modes of prayer, and about public art and public spaces, but also offer a linguistic opportunity for us to take Ruskin into growing scholarship studies such as biblical reception, and into contemporary art practice that draws on the spirituality he invested in visual media.

Approaches are sought that analyse specific Ruskinian or Pre-Raphaelite pictorial representations as they relate to modes of Ruskinian religious art writing and / or theological engagement. We encourage critical questions of the Sacre Conversazioni held between Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites: how did they collectively or individually respond to and reshape religious imagery, what is the significance of their chosen media, what new covenants of image interpretation did they seek and successfully employ, and how critical and conversational were they? Furthermore, we seek to discuss the transference of religious symbols and threads of Catholicism from Italy to Britain, via Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites who helped make Venice and Florence a ville toute anglaises. We also ask how best to curate Ruskin’s contribution to the nineteenth century, and in what sense we or other artists receive its Christian perspective as significant?

With this in mind, we anticipate a wide and varied body of visual and theological conversations about sacred art with Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites at the core. Proposals might include, but are not limited to:

Divine Designs: art writing in relation to God, faith, and unbelief; seeking truth through representation and naturalism, as well as architecture; explorations of biblical symbols and the iconographic, e.g. Pre-Raphaelitism’s engagement with devotional art.

Responding to and Reshaping Religion: aesthetically confronting theological fluctuations; locating new representations of the faithful and the ‘faithless’; churchmanship and liturgical contexts for visual engagement.

Curating Ruskin, Curating Religion: negotiating desires to neutralise visual representations of the divine in public spaces; Ruskin from the perspective of ‘post-secular’ image practice and criticism; making Ruskin accessible and deconstructing his understanding of divinity for the next generation.

From the Sacred to the Secular: Visualising Discord: the visual record of discordant faith; identifying evocations of spirituality without a faith – e.g. the numinous light filled work of J.M.W. Turner; interpreting anxieties through symbology or biblical reception.

Media Hermeneutics: Ruskin on daguerreotypes, painting, stained glass, etc.; media positioning and their implied or explicit morality; pictorial naturalism and theologies of realism.

Institutional Theologies; exploring frameworks of institutional platforms such as state commissioning of religious art, church commissioning of stained glass, the acceleration of church building, and conscious formulation of national collections.

Conversing with Italy; locating the inheritance of European religious imagery amidst the Ruskinian and Pre-Raphaelite lexicon; extracting Catholic and / or Protestant liminality in symbology, architecture and fresco.

AVSA Conference 2019: 25-29th September, University of Otago, New Zealand

Advance notice that AVSA 2019 will be hosted at the University of Otago (Dunedin) in collaboration with the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture as part of the "1869 Conference and Heritage Festival". Professor Marion Thain (King's College, London), Dr Tina Makareti (Massey University) and Megan Potiki (University of Otago) confirmed as invited speakers.