Australasian Victorian Studies Association Annual Conference
‘Victorian Transport’
Hong Kong 10-12 July 2014
The Victorian Age is one of mobility and of transportation: goods, people and money were transported within Great Britain, across Europe, and to the far reaches of Empire. Ideas – whether economic, political, educational, religious or philosophical – were imported and exported. And far from being unemotional, the Victorians were also regularly ‘transported’ by emotions which doctors, scientists and psychologists tried to theorise.
This conference seeks to redefine the parameters of transport through inter-disciplinary approaches to material, metaphorical and metaphysical journeys during the Victorian era. Papers on global crossings are particularly welcome.
Keynote speakers:
Stephen Davies (Hong Kong Maritime Museum)
Josephine McDonagh (King’s College, London)
Peter McNeil (University of Technology, Sydney)
Topics might include but are not limited to:
- Transporting people, transporting goods
- Modes of Transportation
- Intellectual transport
- Trade and trafficking
- Penal colonies
- Theorising ‘transport’
- Theories of the emotions
- Women and transport
- Transport, its politics and policies
- Transatlantic and Transpacific transportation
- Transference and the subconscious
- Dreams and Telepathy
- Transporting and translating literature abroad
- Transport hubs/ urban development
- Speed
- Transportive music
- Landscape and environment
- Immobility
- Time Travel
- Neo-Victorian Transport
A special section of the conference calls for papers on Victorian Transport related to China and the ‘China-West’ axis. Please signal in your application whether you would like your paper to be considered for inclusion in any of these ‘China’ or ‘China-West’ panels.
Five postgraduate/ SWIF travel bursaries will be awarded by the Conference Committee, on the basis of need and merit. Please include a short covering letter and cv in your application for such funding.
Abstracts of up to 300 words, together with your biodata (ca. 100-150 words), should be sent to: avsa2014@hku.hk.
Deadline for Abstracts: 30 November 2013. Notification by end-January 2014.