CFP
NAVSA-Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE)
University of Ottawa
May 30 – June 2, 2015
Deadline: November 15, 2014

"Victorian Materialities"
Victorian studies has long concerned itself with the material world. Asa Briggs’s Victorian Things (1988) and Andrew Miller’s Novels Behind Glass (1995), among many other formative texts, helped us think about how Victorians interacted with, thought about, and were affected by the objects that surrounded them and the industrial and technological transformations of their world. In the years since those early critical studies, questions of materiality have become only more pressing (with books such as Elaine Freedgood’s The Ideas in Things (2006), John Plotz’s Portable Property (2008), and Leah Price’s How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012)), and most recently, have expanded to interrogate the boundaries between subjects and objects, objects and things, and the relationship of affect and sensation to movement and intensity. How has Victorian studies informed the theorization of material culture, and how have changing theorizations of materiality transformed Victorian studies? What do recent developments in material studies (new materialism, affect studies, media studies, book history) have to offer our field? Where will material studies lead next?

This call for papers invites proposals for individual or collaborative papers on the theme of “Victorian Materialities.” Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

• Victorian literature and changing theorizations of materiality: from commodity culture to thing theory to affect studies to object-oriented ontology and beyond
• Affect, senses, sensation
• The novel of sensation; novelistic feeling, affect, or emotion
• Material culture and theory and performance
• Poetry and materiality
• History of the book as a material object
• Print culture, formats, production, circulation, reception
• Science, technology, media
• Victorian posthumanism and/or the animal in Victorian studies
• Space, architecture, design
• Genre and/as materiality
• Form, communication, networks, systems
• Commodity culture, capitalism, money
• Visual culture
• Queer materialities and sexuality studies

Deadline: November 15, 2014

Send 250 word proposals or completed papers for 15-20 minute talks to
Lauren Gillingham (lauren.gillingham@uottawa.ca).