The 41st Meeting of the Victorians Institute
19-21 October 2012
Virginia Commonwealth University
Please send 300-500 word proposals for papers and a 1-page c.v. via email to dlatane@vcu.edu by 1 May 2012. Papers are invited on any aspect of the rubric, including arts & crafts – the media of the empire – theatre – ekphrasis – the exhibition as medium – illustration and text (extra-illustrated volumes – giftbooks) – hybridity and language – map and mapping – media and genre – medium specificity in the 19th-century – new (digital) media and the Victorians – photography and its relationship to traditional media – poetry of the daily press – the print trade – show and tell (dioramas, panoramas, history, literature) – Victorian new media (typewriting – film) – sound and music – information systems – periodicals, pamphlets, broadsides – representation of media in fiction and poetry, etc.
Because 2012 marks the bicentennial of Robert Browning’s birth, papers which consider his work are especially welcome, whether or not they conform closely to the topic, as a portion of the program will commemorate the occasion.
Keynote address by W. J. T. Mitchell, Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, is editor of Critical Inquiry and his books include What Do Pictures Want?, Art and the Public Sphere, Iconology, and Blake’s Composite Art.
Plenary talk to commemorate the bicentennial of the birth of Robert Browning by Herbert Tucker, John C. Coleman Professor of English at the University of Virginia; his books include Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790-1910, Tennyson and the Doom of Romantcism, and Browning’s Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure.
Selected papers from the conference will be refereed for the Victorians Institute Journal annex at NINES.
Limited travel subventions will be available from the Victorians Institute for graduate students whose institutions provide limited or no support.
Please visit www.vcu.edu/vij for information about the conference, the Victorians Institute, and Victorians Institute Journal.
“Victorian Mixed Media” is sponsored at Virginia Commonwealth University by the College of Humanities and Sciences, Department of English, and the PhD program in Media, Art and Text (MATX).
David Latané, conference organizer. Advisory committee: Nicholas Frankel, Catherine Ingrassia, John Picker (English); Eric Garberson, Catherine Roach (Art History); Nicholas Wolf (History).