“Victorian Vocabularies”
Australasian Victorian Studies Association (AVSA) Conference
Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia
11th-14th April 2012
Keynote speakers include: Helen Groth (University of New South Wales), Andrew H. Miller (Indiana) and Cathy Waters (Kent)
Victorians needed names for new things, novel practices, and emergent techniques. Cumulatively, these formed vocabularies, some by deliberation and design, others aggregating over time. The era abounds in private and specialised languages, modish slangs, and technical terms used in craft, industry, medicine, law, the arts, and sciences. These vocabularies circulated through small networks or made the leap to the public realm where they could be considered in new lights and put to unfamiliar uses. We invite you to think about Victorian vocabularies across British, colonial, and global contexts. Papers might address vocabulary-making, transmission, and re-purposing. They might consider the vocabulary as pedagogic tool or as potent metaphor. Possible topics include:
-Specialist and technical vocabularies
-Narratives of vocabulary-making
-Educational vocabularies
-Political vocabularies
-Vocabularies of the body
-Emotional vocabularies
-Commercial and legal vocabularies
-Vocabularies and globalisation
-Representations of vocabularies
-Colonial and military vocabularies
-Vocabularies and mass culture
-Visual culture and vocabularies
-Animal vocabularies
-Sexual vocabularies
-Neo-Victorian vocabularies
-Religious vocabularies
Please send paper proposals (of approx 150-250 words) for 20 minute papers to d.ellison@griffith.edu.au no later than September 30th 2011. Any queries regarding the conference can be directed to the same address.
Postgraduate Travel Scholarships available
http://www.avsa.unimelb.edu.au/AVSA%20News.htm