Draft Programme: AVSA 2017 Conference, 14-16 June, Melbourne, Australia

Draft AVSA programme – Victorian Materialities 14-16 June 2017

Deakin University, Deakin Downtown, Level 12, Tower 2, 727 Collins Street

DAY 1 – JUNE 14
9-9:30	Registration
9:30-10:45	Keynote speech Alexis Easley
10:45 – 12:15	1A. COLLECTIONS AND COLLECTING	1B. POPULAR FICTION
12:15 – 1:15	Lunch
1:15 – 2:45	2A. LIVES AND BIOGRAPHIES	2B. VICTORIAN PRESS: PAST AND PRESENT
2:45 – 3:15	Afternoon tea
3:15 - 4:45	3A. SCIENCE AND SPIRITUALITY	3B. EMOTIONS AND THINGS

DAY 2 – JUNE 15
9:30-11:00	Plenary session 4A. MAKING AND SELLING THE COLONIAL BOOK
11:00 - 11:30	Morning tea
11:30 - 1:00	5A. RECORDING AND MEMORIALISING	5B: MATERIALITY OF THE BOOK
1:00 - 2:00	Lunch
2:00 - 3:30	6A. LITERARY OBJECTS	6B. DOMESTIC INTERIOR
	Afternoon activity: TBD
7:00	Conference dinner: Melba's, Langham Hotel

DAY 3 – JUNE 16
9:30-11:00	7A. ART AND CULTURE	7B. CHILDHOOD
11:00-11:30	Morning tea
11:30-1:00	8A. VISUAL ART	8B. CLOTHING AND BODIES
1:00 – 2:00	Lunch
2:00 - 3:00	Conference close and AVSA AGM

PANELS

1A: Collections and Collecting
George Isaacs’ Collection
Anne Black
Browning’s Curiosities
Jennifer McDonell
Iron, China, and Art:  Production, Consumption, Exhibition, and the Imperial Project
Dianna Vitanza

1B: Popular Fiction
‘The Inevitable White Man’: Slavery and Indenture in Jack London’s South Sea Tales
Mandy Treagus
Recalcitrant Particulars and the Probabilistic Form of the Sherlock Holmes Stories
Adam Grener
Men Blowing Hot Air: Wonder Woman: Amazonia, Feminism and Steampunk
Matthew Thompson

2A: Lives and Biographies
The Unwitting Life of Things: Reactions in Melbourne to Tolstoy’s Reading of Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata
Suzanne Robinson
‘Inlaid and Extended’: The Material Forms of Victorian Biography
Lucy Whitehead
Uncertain Provenance: Pseudo-relics and Life Writing in Serena Partridge’s ‘Accessories’ and Brontë Biographical Fiction
Amber Pouliot

2B: The Victorian Press: Past and Present
The strange case of the Queen’s etchings and the commodification of ‘intimate’ information
Ainslie Robinson
A Writer with a View:  Louise Mack on Florence, the Italian Gazette, and the English-speaking community that supported it.
Meg Tasker
Contextualising the production of the Dickensian periodical for today’s digital serial.
Susannah Oddi

3A: Science and Spirituality
Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887) and The Value of Brains
Sara Lyons
The Materiality of Poetic Form and Catholic Ritual: Challenging the Social Order in the Works of Adelaide Procter and Alice Meynell
Lesa Scholl
The Devil and the Table-Spirits: A Mid-Victorian Controversy
Sarah Bartels
3B: The Emotion of Things
Setting sail into the midnight: Branwell Bronte’s Dunedin Fragment
Grace Moore and Tom McLean
‘Heavy with watching and weeping’: The eyes and emotions of The Old Curiosity Shop
Megan Nash
“The little daisy … knew that if she were torn out she would die”: Environmental
Empathy in English Versions of Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tale Literature
Victoria Tedeschi
4A: Making and Selling the Colonial Book
‘Marvellous Melbourne’ and its Publishers
Lucy Sussex
E.W. Cole: Cosmopolitan things and thoughts
Tanja Luckins
Negotiating the (im)material: Editorial Practice in Nineteenth-Century Australia
Jocelyn Hargrave
5A: Recording and Memorialising
Keeping Records on Women: Prisoner Registers in the Victorian Colony
Vicky Nagy
Where the Dead Men Lie: A Case Study of a Rural Community's Commemorative Response
Lynne Dore
Soldiers of the Queen: Remembering and Forgetting
Bronwyn Hughes

5B: The Materiality of the Book
Victorian Madurai Illustrated: The Cultural Logic and Commodity of Victorian India
Divya Athmanathan
'Chaste and Rich': Gender and the Victorian Material Book
Maura Ives
The Owner Bound Volume: Collector’s Album, Family Artefact or Cultural Object?
Clare Gleeson
 6A: Literary Objects
Isabel Archer acquires an expatriate husband: objects, acculturation and marriage in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady
Claire Thomas
Squirreling heart-beats and leather-clad books: the materiality of George Eliot’s Middlemarch and contemporary speculative realism
Susan Pyke
Intimacy and Exchange: Affective Objects in George Eliot’s Middlemarch
Francesca Kavanagh
Thomas Carlyle and the Significance in Things: Victorian Materiality and the Romance of the Real
Lowell T. Frye

6B: The Domestic Interior
A Queen Made Material: The Powerful Place of Queen Victoria's Image in the Nineteenth-Century Australian Domestic Interior
Kim Clayton-Greene
‘Investigation: Travels in the Boudoir: Permeable Boundaries of a Material World’
Judith Johnston
"To touch for a moment, the lustrous past": household objects, furnishings and space, and the Victorian country house servant.
Ellen O’Brien

7A: Art and Culture
Seeing, Reading, Understanding: The Role of Art in Victorian Literature
Elizabeth J. Deis
Stretched on an ottoman’: Representations of Turquerie in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
Ann Erskine
British Goths and British Romans at Beijing’s Summer Palace
Chris Murray

7B: Childhood
'Teaching by things rather than words': China in Victorian Children's Games, Toy Collections, and Picture Books
Shih-Wen Sue Chen
Thomas Barnardo, Children and Material Culture
Kristine Moruzi
The Doll Protagonist in 19th Century Literature
Fiona McDonald

8A: Visual art
“A gigantic botanical postage-stamp album”:  The Marianne North Gallery
Shale Preston
Objects Conceptualized: Reflections on James Whistler’s “Gentle Art” of Anti-Materialism
Yi-Ching Teng
Otago Ceramics in Victorian New Zealand
Moira White

8B: Clothing and Bodies
Material Maternity: The Clothes, Bodies, and 'Things' of Victorian Mothers
Catriona Fisk
“Not Always an Obvious Analogy”: Sartorial Materialities and Narratives of Illicit Sexuality in George Moore’s A Drama in Muslin
Madeleine C. Seys
Bound in the Narratives of the Past: Intersections of Transgression and Purity in H. Rider Haggard's She
Charlotte Kelso

CFP: AVSA 2017 Conference, "Victorian Materialities", Deakin University, Australia (Deadline extended: 27 Feb 2017)

Call for Papers
Victorian Materialities, AVSA Conference 
Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
14-16 June 2017
Keynote speaker: Alexis Easley (University of St Thomas)
Deadline now extended to 27 February 2017.

In The Buried Life of Things: How Objects Made History in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2014), Simon Goldhill observes that the profusion of objects inhabiting a Victorian drawing room “speaks insistently not simply of a history of taste, but also of the interconnected forces of the industrial revolution, which changes the modes of the production of things, and the imperial project, which changes the modes of circulation of material objects and their owners”. This interdisciplinary conference on “Victorian Materialities” takes up the “material turn” in Victorian Studies to examine the cultural meanings and significance attached to material objects by contemporaries. It aims to explore how objects both produced and reflected Victorian culture. In an era in which the industrial revolution rapidly urbanised Britain and escalated the production and consumption of goods, “things” came to have an increasingly intimate, and sometimes porous, relationship with human experience since the material world was almost always open to self fashioning. A critical focus on material objects can reveal a wealth of information about their users.

We invite papers that explore any aspect of Victorian material culture. Possible topics include:
- The expansion of commodity culture and department stores

- The circulation of goods throughout the British Empire

- Colonialism and “portable property”

- Displays and practices of collecting

- The Great Exhibition

- Periodicals and advertising

- The book as material object

- Cosmetics, clothing and bodies

- Dirt, cleanliness, and sanitation

- The Victorian household and domestic objects

- Visual culture (photographs, paintings, illustrations)

- Representation of objects in literature

- The Victorians and industry
- Space, architecture and design
- Science and technology

- Material culture and gender

- Affect, emotion and sensation

Please send abstracts of 250 words to Michelle Smith michelle.s@deakin.edu.au  along with a brief biographical note of approximately 100 words.