Charles Dickens and the Mid-Victorian Press

Event: Charles Dickens and the Mid-Victorian Press
Date: March 28 – 31
Location: University of Buckingham
Further Details:

With papers from Laurel Brake, Iain Crawford, Judith Flanders, Holly Furneaux, Louis James, Gail Marshall, Robert Patten, Joanne Shattock, Michael Slater, John Sutherland, John Tulloch and Cathy Waters. Please visit the conference pages (linked below) for more information.

Link to full details: Charles Dickens and the Mid-Victorian Press

VSC Spring Seminar Series

Event: Victorian Studies Centre Lecture Series
Date: Spring Seminar Series 2012
Location: University of Leeds, 5.15pm on Wednesdays in Rm. 1315
Further Details:

7 March Professor Laurel Brake (BBK), ‘Walter Pater’s American Afterlife: The Mosher Editions’

21 March Dr Sadiah Qureshi (Birmingham), ‘“A Peep at the Natives”: Displayed Peoples, Exhibitions and the Natural History of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain’

9 May Professor Adrian Poole (Cam), ‘Henry James, Lionel Trilling and the Imagination of Disaster’

23 May Dr Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Ox), ‘The Beauties of Charles Dickens’

Link to full details: VSC Spring Seminar Series

Moving Dangerously: Women and Travel, 1850-1950

Event: Moving Dangerously: Women and Travel, 1850-1950
Date: April 13-14
Location: Newcastly University
Further Details:

A two-day international and interdisciplinary conference exploring the changing relationship of women and travel across key moments in modernity, such the First World War and its effects on women’s independence, the developments in British Imperial activity, and the boom in rail, air and sea travel. The conference aims to stimulate academic discussion on a range of topics relating to women and travel in the period ranging from 1850-1950. These topics include representations of women and travel in fiction and film, non-fictional portrayals and documentations, as well as archival work on first-hand accounts of women travellers. As such, we welcome papers from those working in the fields of Literature, History, Geography, Film and Media, Modern Languages, Gender/Women’s Studies, and Politics.

Link to full details: Moving Dangerously

Thinking Feeling: Critical Theory, Culture, Feeling.

Event: Thinking Feeling: Critical Theory, Culture, Feeling.
Date: May 18 – 19
Location: Univeristy of Sussex
Further Details:

“As the recent UK riots indicate, there is no escaping the fact that economics provokes, amongst other things, strong feelings. Whether we like it or not, a neoliberal language of economics now pervades and colours our inner ‘private’ emotional lives; the government’s emerging plans to compile a ‘happiness index’ is a clear example of how a rhetoric of ‘feeling’ can be co-opted by capital. More than ever, then, it is important we do not simply accept ‘feeling’ as a spontaneous or natural phenomenon, but instead subject it to genuinely critical scrutiny. Are some feelings static, essential and ahistorical, or can we trace their genealogies? Are feelings entirely subjective and individual, or are they actually objective and social? If they are social, whose feelings are they?…”

Link to full details: Thinking Feeling

Politics, Performance and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Event: Politics, Performance and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain.
Date: April 19-20
Location: University of Birmingham
Further Details:

“In what ways might popular culture have defined politics? How might ‘performance’ be addressed as a concept by which better to understand crowd behaviour, whether for example at hustings or in protest? How did politicians and others conceptualise their audience? If, as Patrick Joyce argues, the late-Victorian audience in a context of political reform were ‘rightful heirs to the democracy of pleasure’ (Visions of the People, 1994, p. 309), how can we define the relationship between audience, politics and pleasure? Can we identify a discursive relationship between political and performance culture?…”

Link to full details: Politics, Performance and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain.

Art Versus Industry?

Event: Art Versus Industry?
Date: March 23 – 24
Location: Leeds City Museum
Further Details:

This two-day international and transdisciplinary conference aims to re-evaluate the intersections between the visual arts and industry in Britain during the long nineteenth century, with speakers including Dr Lara Kriegel (Indiana University), Dr Tom Gretton (University College London), Dr Colin Trodd (University of Manchester) and Dr Steve Edwards (Open University).

Booking is open until Friday 9 March 2012.

Link to full details: Art Versus Industry?

Book Cultures, Book Events

Event: Book Cultures, Book Events
Date: March 23-24
Location: University of Sterling
Further Details:

“A significant development in the environment of literature and the book at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries has been the growth of literary festivals and book towns. As part of the literary marketing mix, book festivals and towns offer publishers the opportunity to promote their authors and sell their products. Such locations also provide physical and sociological spaces in which readers encounter writers and literature, and become book consumers. Book festivals and towns have clear links to regional economies, and are heavily used in the promotion of tourist destinations, as testified by the strategic partnerships and sponsorship arrangements with a variety of agencies. As part of this process, concepts of cultural identity are forged and commodified, conjoining literature to cultural heritage, the creative industries and political ideology…”

Link to full details: Book Cultures Conference

The Nineteenth-Century Memory: Approaches and Appropriations

Event: The Nineteenth-Century Memory: Approaches and Appropriations
Date: March 3
Location: Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies
Further Details:

“Registration is now open for this interdisciplinary postgraduate conference, which brings together scholars from three strands of Victorian studies, to facilitate and inspire discussion about all aspects of the nineteenth-century relationship with the issue of memory…”

Link to full details: Approaches and Appropriations

The Popular Imagination and the Dawn of Modernism, Middlebrow Writing 1890-1930

Event: The Popular Imagination and the Dawn of Modernism, Middlebrow Writing 1890-1930 International Conference
Date: Sept 15th – 17th, 2011
Location: Institute of English Studies, London
Further Details:

“This conference seeks to examine the emergence of modernism outside elitist, avant-garde notions, particularly focussing on middlebrow literature in its relation to these socio-cultural developments. We assume that, even though middlebrow fiction usually adheres to conspicuously affirmative structures of plot development in order to meet genre expectations and publishers’ requirements, this narrative framework is often in a disintegrative state, in form and subject. Such narratives raise disturbing issues concerning the crumbling Empire, collapsing class structures and the deterioration of the Victorian family ideal. For women, in particular, the middlebrow novel provided a space for the negotiation of and experimentation with alternative social and gender roles. In this sense, middlebrow writing can be regarded as a domestication of modernist themes also prevalent at the time; allowing unsettling issues to be raised while maintaining at least a superficial impression of (narrative) stability and security…”

Link to full details: Middlebrow Writing

Travel in the 19th Century Conference

Organisation: University of Lincoln
Theme: Travel in the Nineteenth Century: Narratives, Histories and Collections
Date: July 13 – 15
Location: University of Leeds
Further Details:

“In the nineteenth century, railways made distant locations ever more accessible, the Grand Tour became more and more a pastime of the middle classes and British imperial expansion brought exotic locales and non-Western cultures ever closer to home. New ways of thinking about and communicating experiences of travel and of interactions with other cultures held a significant influence in various areas of nineteenth-century culture. This period saw an enormous expansion in museums and popular exhibition culture, technological innovations such as photography and film, as well as the vast growth of a popular press that served to deliver these experiences, images and objects to an increasingly literate public. This public in turn seemed to possess an insatiable appetite for travel narratives, shows and exhibitions, both fictional and factual.

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the divergent and complex ways in which travel was understood and communicated in the nineteenth century.”

Link: Travel in the Nineteenth Century