CFP: NAVSA 2016, 'Social Victorians', Phoenix, AZ (2-5 November 2016) [Deadline 1 February 2016]

Social Victorians
November 2-5, 2016
Sheraton Phoenix Downtown Hotel, Phoenix, AZ


Keynote Speakers:
Gowan Dawson, University of Leicester,Caroline Levine, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a panel commemorating the anniversary of Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians

The Conference Committee for the 2016 annual NAVSA conference invites proposals for papers and panels on the subject of Social Victorians.

What does it mean to speak of the social in the Victorian era? In what ways were the Victorians social, antisocial, or both at once? What definitions of sociability circulated during the period, and through which structures? What models of sociability vyed, prevailed, and emerged? Topics might include:

Social frameworks and models
Kinship, familial and personal relationships (e.g., friendship, courtship, marriage)
Religion and the social
Social class/economic class and the mingling of classes
Regional, national, and cosmopolitan concepts of sociability
Comparative, revisionary, and colonial forms of the social

Empire as a social or anti-social force
The social in “other” cultures
The transcultural social
Social traditions, rituals, events, displays, and gatherings

Holidays and birthdays
Illness, death, funerals, and practices of mourning and remembrance
International exhibitions as social and socializing sites
Problematic and contested concepts of the social

Antisocial behaviors (e.g., neglect, abuse)
The criminal, deviant, revolutionary, unladylike/unmanly, and un-English
Paranoia, agoraphobia, xenophobia, and social anxiety
Social networks and organizations

Archiving/digitizing as a social form
Academic, scientific, professional, social clubs, societies, organizations, political parties, and advocacy
Social discipline, control, and punishment

Familial models of empire (e.g., mother country)
Restrictions, modifications, and surveillance of the social (e.g., through government, policing, penal system)
Explicit directions for sociability (e.g., etiquette manuals, signs/notices, finishing schools)
Implicit social instruction (e.g., education, legal system, media)
Bans, erasures, gaps, and silences on alternate social forms
Non-human social relations, interactions, and exchange

Sociable objects (and the human)
Sociable non-human animals (exclusive and inclusive of human animals)
Social spaces (e.g., drawing rooms, ballrooms, parks, hotel lobbies, museums, galleries, exhibitions, lecture halls, advertising, the press)
Social ephemera (e.g., visiting cards, menus, invitations)
Art as a social form

Collaboration, editing, publishing, and marketing
Reading and writing practices
The socializing function of the arts, arts criticism, art displays, and spectating (e.g., exhibitions, performances)
Visual, aural, and literary depictions of socialization and marginalization

The deadline for paper and panel submissions is February 1, 2016. For individual papers, submit 250-word paper proposals, along with a one-page CV. For entire panels, submit the above for each paper, as well as a one-page summary of the panel.

CFP: RSVP 2016 Conference: Bigger, Better, More! (deadline 1 Feb 2016)

CFP: Research Society for Victorian Periodicals
BIGGER, Better, More! — Growth and Expansion in the Victorian Press

University of Missouri-Kansas City, September 9–10, 2016

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals invites proposals for its 2016 conference on the theme of growth and expansion in the Victorian press. We encourage broad interpretation of what “Bigger, Better, More!” means for Victorian newspapers and magazines, with possible topics including:

Proliferation of news events, headline stories, scandals
Serialization, sequels, symposia, rejoinders, recurring columns
Developments in printing technology, formats, editorial vision
Increased readership, population, urban and imperial expansion
Economic growth, profits, investments, windfalls, boom-and-bust cycles
Excess, hyperbole, filler
Malignant growth, plagues, floods, parasites
Natural growth, plants, parks, green spaces
Education, maturation, age, experience, longevity
Emerging taxonomies, catalogs, indexes, censuses
Developing networks, movements, professional and amateur organizations, bureaucracies
Growth of periodical studies, methodologies, pedagogies, archives

RSVP is an interdisciplinary and international organization welcoming all scholars interested in the richly diverse world of the 19th-century British press. Please send a proposal (250 words maximum) and one-page CV to rs4vp2016@gmail.com by February 1, 2016. Individual presentations should be fifteen to twenty minutes, and proposals for panels of three are welcome; be sure to include a brief rationale for the panel along with an abstract and CV for each presenter. A limited number of travel grants will be awarded to graduate students and independent scholars; please indicate in your email if you would like to be considered for one of these grants.

We are pleased to announce that the eighteenth annual Michael Wolff Lecture will be given by James Mussell, Associate Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds and author of Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press (2007) and The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age (2012). The RSVP conference also features the Robert and Vineta Colby Lecture, given by the winner of the Colby Prize for the year’s best book on the Victorian press. This year’s recipient will be announced in spring 2016.

The University of Missouri-Kansas City is a vibrant public research institution located in the heart of the city. It is walking distance to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, built on the estate of a nineteenth-century newspaper tycoon. The museum houses one of the world's largest collections of daguerreotypes. Attendees will find lodging on the Country Club Plaza, an outdoor retail and dining destination, the first of its kind when it was established in 1922. Nearby is historic Westport, site of a Civil War battle and final stop on the way to the Western Frontier, with its many locally owned eateries, live music venues, and funky shops.

For more information, please visit the conference website: rsvp2016-kc.com.

Find RSVP on the web at rs4vp.org and follow us on Twitter @RS4VP, #RSVP2016.

CFP: 2016 AVSA Conference Stream at AHA Conference, Ballarat, 7-9 July 2016 (Deadline 3/2/16)

Call for papers: AVSA 2016, "Victorian Margins",  Ballarat, Victoria, 7-9 July 2016 (Abstracts due 3 Feb 2016)
Keynote speaker:  Prof. Joseph Bristow (UCLA)

In 2016, AVSA will join the Australasian Historical Association conference in Ballarat from 5-8 July, with a stream of AVSA papers and Keynote scheduled on 7-8 July, and a program of local sightseeing on Sat 9 July.  This is a welcome opportunity to connect with Australasian colleagues in history with shared interests in the long 19th century, and for AVSA members to visit one of Australia's finest Victorian cities. The conference will be held in Ballarat's historical precinct.  Delegates may wish to allow time to explore local sites such as the Ballarat Mechanics' Institute's extensive library of 19th-century books, periodicals and newspapers.

AVSA's Keynote Speaker will be Professor Joseph Bristow (UCLA), on “Homosexual Blackmail in the 1890s,” drawing on research for his new study of Oscar Wilde’s two criminal trials.
Papers (20 minutes) or panel proposals (2-3 papers) are invited on the AVSA conference theme ‘Victorian Margins’ – some possible angles include:
• geographic margins (in the UK; in the Empire; elsewhere)
• marginalised groups (marginalised by ethnicity; class; sexuality; region; nationality)
• temporal margins (1830s; fin de siecle)
• marginalised forms of culture
• economic margins (profits and losses; costs and benefits)
• margins as gaps
• margins as liminal spaces
• marginal values
• marginalia
• margins and centres

The AVSA stream committee welcomes papers relating to Victorian Margins from any discipline in the humanities. Proposals consisting of an abstract (400 words), together with a brief author bio/note of affiliation (particularly for postgraduates) , should be submitted to Meg Tasker m.tasker@federation.edu.au by Wednesday 3 February 2016.

Those who would like to have their papers considered for an issue of the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies on the theme, please indicate this with your abstract and aim to have the paper in a suitable form for publication as well as oral delivery by the time of the conference.  Thanks!

The Australian History Association theme is ‘From Boom to Bust.’ AVSA members may offer papers on either theme, or neither, but all paper-givers must be financial members of either AVSA or AHA.  Registration details available early in 2016, and venues will be in Ballarat CBD.

Please note that this joint conference is being organised by the Collaborative Research Centre for Australian History at Federation University, with Dr Jolanta Nowak as Administrative Officer.  General enquiries to:  aha2016@federation.edu.au please.

CFP: Texts and Contexts: The Cultural Legacies of Ada Lovelace (Deadline 28 Aug 2015)

Texts and Contexts: The Cultural Legacies of Ada Lovelace

“That brain of mine is more than merely mortal; as time will show.”

A workshop for graduate students and early career researchers
Tuesday 8th December 2015, Mathematics Institute and St Anne’s College, Oxford

The mathematician Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), daughter of poet Lord Byron, is celebrated as a pioneer of computer science. The notes she added to her translation of Luigi Menabrea’s paper on Charles Babbage’s analytical engine (1843) are considered to contain a prototype computer program. During her short life, Lovelace not only contributed original ideas to the plans for this early computer; she also imagined wider possibilities for the engine, such as its application to music, and meditated on its limitations. Lovelace leaves a legacy not just as a computer scientist, but also as a muse for literary writers, a model to help us understand the role of women in science in the nineteenth century, and an inspiration for neo-Victorian and steampunk traditions.

As part of the University of Oxford’s celebrations to mark the 200th anniversary of Lovelace’s birth, this one-day workshop will bring together graduates and early career researchers to discuss the varied cultural legacies of this extraordinary mathematician. The day will feature an expert panel including graphic novelist Sydney Padua and biographer Richard Holmes.

The day will conclude with a reception and buffet when there will be opportunities to meet with speakers from the Ada Lovelace 200 Symposium, which will also take place in the Mathematics Institute on the following two days (9th-10th December). Researchers from all disciplines are invited to submit proposals for papers on the influences of Lovelace’s work, on topics including, but not limited to, literature, history, mathematics, music, visual art, and computer science. This might include:

Lovelace’s place in the study of the history of science.
Lovelace and women in science in the nineteenth century
Early nineteenth-century scientific networks, including Lovelace’s relationship with such individuals as Charles Babbage and Mary Somerville.
Lovelace and discussions about the role of the imagination in scientific practice in the nineteenth century.
Lovelace as translator and commentator.
Mathematics and music, and the musical possibilities Lovelace envisaged for Babbage’s engine.
Lovelace’s own textual legacies, such as her correspondence, childhood exercises and mathematical notes held in the Bodleian.
Lovelace’s technological legacies, from her seminal work on Babbage’s Analytical Engine to her impact on computer programming today.
Lovelace’s role in the steampunk tradition, from Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine to Sydney Padua’s The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, and neo-Victorian fashion.
Efforts and activities to commemorate and memorialise Lovelace, from the recent Google Doodle to the annual Ada Lovelace Day.

Proposals, not exceeding 250 words, for 15-minute papers should be submitted to adalovelaceworkshop@ell.ox.ac.uk by 5pm, Friday 28th August 2015. Those who are accepted to speak at this graduate workshop will also be offered free registration for the Ada Lovelace 200 Symposium taking place on the following two days. For more information, please visit https://adalovelaceworkshop.wordpress.com.

Conference news: The Arts and Feeling in 19th-Century Literature and Culture, Birkbeck College, 16-18 July 2015

The Arts and Feeling in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Birkbeck College, University of London 16th – 18th July 2015

Keynote Speakers: Caroline Arscott, Tim Barringer, Meaghan Clarke, Kate Flint, Hilary Fraser, Michael Hatt, Lynda Nead, Jonah Siegel, Alison Smith

This conference will explore the ways in which nineteenth-century authors, artists, sculptors and musicians imagined and represented emotion and how writers and critics conceptualised the emotional aspects of aesthetic response. It aims to map the state of the field in this growing area of interest for nineteenth-century scholars by locating recent interdisciplinary work on sentimentality and art and writing and the senses within wider debates
about the relationship between psychology and aesthetics in the long-nineteenth century.

Speakers will investigate the physiology and psychology of aesthetic perception and the mind/body interactions at play in the experience of a wide range of arts. Key questions include: How did Victorian artists represent feeling and how were these feelings aestheticised? What rhetorical strategies did Victorian writers use to figure aesthetic response? What expressive codes and conventions were familiar to the Victorians? Which nineteenth-century scientific developments affected artistic production and what impact did these have on affective reactions? The conference includes a panel discussion on the topic of ‘Curating Feeling’ with speakers Michael Hatt, Lynda Nead and Alison Smith.

To register for the conference, please visit: https://www2.bbk.ac.uk/artsandfeeling

Places are limited.

Please address any questions to Dr. Victoria Mills at artsandfeeling@gmail.com

More information will be available soon at www.artsandfeeling.com

CFP: Special issue of Victorian Network on the Victorian Brain (Deadline: 15 Aug. 2015)

Victorian Network is an open-access, MLA-indexed, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate and early career work across the broad field of Victorian Studies. We are delighted to announce that our eleventh issue (Winter 2015) will be guest edited by Professor Sally Shuttleworth (University of Oxford), on the theme of the Victorian Brain.

In the nineteenth century, the discipline of psychology, or the science of the mind, underwent a profound reorientation: a reorientation which was both fuelled by contemporary literature, and which influenced that literature’s form and content. Investigating the mind’s workings was the joint project of such diverse parties as authors and poets; natural scientists and doctors; but also the public, as citizen scientists. Phrenology and the legibility of physiognomy remained central concerns. Simultaneously, medical research created a counterweight to eighteenth-century folk psychology and pseudoscience. Observation of mentally-ill asylum inmates offered another route into the human psyche. These asylums in turn experienced restructuring, turning from spaces of “[chains], straw, filthy solitude, darkness and starvation” (Dickens) in the eighteenth century, to institutions implementing “moral management” by 1900.

Mid-Victorians discussed the human brain extensively in both popular literature and specialized periodicals, ranging in disciplines from natural and medical sciences to literature and philosophy. The Journal of Mental Science and Dickens’s Household Words are but two examples from different sides of that spectrum. As these widespread discussions destabilized longstanding convictions including the supremacy of the mind and the integrated self, these convictions’ intricate connections to cultural concerns including gender and class grew evident. Investigations in all possible directions proliferated, bringing (especially in the century’s closing decades) rapid disciplinary changes in neuroscience (e.g. through the work of William Richard Gowers), psychology and psychotherapy.

The examination of human consciousness also occurred in the nineteenth-century novel. The period’s novelists had such a significant part in shaping the discourse on the mind not least because, in the words of Karen Chase, they “did not inherit a supple and illuminating picture of the mind, but […] had to construct it for themselves, taking insights where they found them.”

We invite submissions of around 7,000 words on any aspect of the theme. Possible topics include but are by no means limited to:

•    The novel as shaping and shaped by discourses on psychology, the mind, and the brain.
•    Mental science and poetry; the “psychological monologue”.
•    Animal dissection and vivisection.
•    The brain as central organ of the nervous system, mind and body as connected; the concept of the mental faculties; the soul as (no longer) extra-corporeal; religion vs scientific psychology. The senses.
•    The mind as culturally formed; national and international conceptions of psychology.
•    The gendered brain and its implications (gender as a universal taxonomy).
•    The Victorian mind in childhood.
•    The theatrical brain: displaying thought and memory on the Victorian stage; depicting mental illness and madness; character interiority; psychology and actor training.
•    Altered states of mind: drug use; mesmerism, hypnosis and trance; dreams and daydreams; somnambulis.
•    Memory and/or trauma; memory and objects (from diaries to post-mortem photography). Sites and cultures of remembering and forgetting.
•    Different disciplines and disciplinary developments: evolutionary and developmental psychology. Psychoanalysis: pre-Freudian concepts of the psyche.
•    Mental illness: asylums, “moral management”; depression; delusions; puerperal disorders; links between mental and bodily health.
•    Insanity and the law  (criminality, legislation, fitness to stand trial); the development of forensic psychology; insanity and sensation.
•    Automatism and volition: new conceptions of the unconscious (e.g. as possessing agency); the unconscious vs habit and self-discipline: automatism, responsibility and accountability.
•    4e cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted and extended cognition) and Victorian literature and culture.
•     “wound culture”: its roots in the industrial nineteenth century, and the attendant renegotiation of private identity in public terms.
•    Neo-Victorian representations of any issue outlined above.
 
All submissions should conform to MHRA house style and the in-house submission guidelines. Submissions should be received by 15 August 2015. Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com

CFP: 'The Victorians and Memory', AJVS special issue (Deadline: 10 Aug 2015)

AJVS is a refereed multi-disciplinary journal published by the Australasian Victorian Studies Association (AVSA), with articles in Victorian Studies welcome from any disciplinary or cross-disciplinary area of the humanities, particularly from Australasian scholars or on topics relating to the region. While this call is for a special issue, papers on other topics/themes for general issues may also be submitted via the OJS system (see below for link to register, login, and submit).

Special Issue, 'The Victorians and Memory'. Deadline 10 August 2015

Following on from the recent AVSA Conference in Auckland, and inspired by the great range of papers given there, the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies is calling for papers relating to this theme. Topics may include but are not limited to print culture, poetics, museums, science, hauntings, historiography, memory (and forgetting), colonial and post-colonial memory, politics, memorials, biography, memoir, art, film, theatre.  Authors need not have presented at the conference, and any papers that were delivered should be reworked as scholarly articles before submission to the Journal - please see the ‘Author Guidelines’ at the AJVS website.

Papers should be 5-7,000 words in length, be accompanied by an abstract, and use MLA style citations. Please register and submit via the online journal’s website.

Co-editors for this issue will be Professor Joanne Wilkes, University of Auckland j.wilkes@auckland.ac.nz and Assoc. Prof. Meg Tasker, Federation University Australia, m.tasker@federation.edu.au.  If you have any problems with the online registration or submission process, you may email the Journal Manager, Dr Kris Moruzi kristine.moruzi@deakin.edu.au or Meg Tasker as General Editor.  Please note that the Journal will be moving to a new publishing system at the end of the year, so submissions after August may not be able to be lodged online. The new server/host will be announced once confirmed. We expect to use the same software and will continue to operate as a free open-access journal.  All back issues will be preserved.