Our panelists include Lori Branch of the University of Iowa, author of Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth, Colin Jager of Rutgers University, author of The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era, and Janet Larson of Rutgers University-Newark, author of Dickens and the Broken Scripture. Mark Knight of the University of Toronto, co-author of Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature, will serve as our keynote. For the complete list of participants, please see the program below.
There is no charge for attendance, and visitors will be welcome. Scholars planning to attend are asked to contact the conference organizer, Richard Gibson richard.gibson@wheaton.edu, to ensure that proper space is provided. Directions will be sent by email.
Program:
8:50-9:00: Welcome and Introductions
9:00-10:40: Panel 1, The Romantic Period
Colin Jager, Rutgers University, “Coleridge and the Invention of Religion”
Jasper Cragwall, Loyola University, “Some Reflections on the History of Enthusiasm in the Long Eighteenth Century"
Natasha Duquette, Biola University, “Psalmic Sublimity in Joanna Baillie and Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck”
Jeffrey Galbraith, Wheaton College, “‘My Chains Fell Off’: Charles Wesley and the Politics of Hymn Writing”
11:00-12:15: Panel 2, Victorian Period, I
Janet Larson, Rutgers University-Newark, “Reading Nightingale Writing Egypt”
Joshua King, Baylor University, “Frederick Denison Maurice’s Protestant Britain: National Spiritual Community in a Sectarian Print Culture”
Karen Dieleman, Trinity Christian College, “A Politics of Just Memory: Reading the Church Fathers in the Nineteenth Century”
12:15-2:00: Lunch
2:00-3:15: Panel 3, Victorian Period, II
Lori Branch, University of Iowa, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Remains of Religion in Modernity”
Christine Colón, Wheaton College, “Searching for ‘rare exceptions’: Anne Bronte and the Role of Orphan in the Tenant of Wildfell Hall”
Richard Gibson, Wheaton College, “Erasure and Emplotment: The Narrativity of Forgiveness in the Victorian Period”
3:30-4:15: Roundtable on Religion and Literature and the Long Nineteenth Century
7:30-9:00 Keynote: Mark Knight, University of Toronto, “Vanity Fair and the Burden of Evangelical Reading”