Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States
2016 Conference: Transgressions
September 29-October 1, 2016
Austin, Texas USA
The Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States invites papers on transgressions of established boundaries, ways of seeing transgression, those who transgressed, and behaviors or beliefs that were seen as transgressive in the nineteenth century. Papers may address the following (though participants do not have to restrict their proposals to these suggestions):
- Aesthetic transgressions
- Social class transgressions
- Socio-political transgressions
- Cross-dressing
- Forgeries
- Criminality
- Shoplifting
- The New Woman
- Nabobs in India
- Degeneracy
- Debtors’ prison
- Fallenness
- Deportation to the colonies
- Greed
- Cruelty
- Pornography
- Unfashionable dress
- Minority religions
- The Prince of Wales in France
- Gambling/drinking/drugs
- Marrying beneath one’s class
- Faux pas in etiquette, fashion, conversation
- The outré
- Exhibitionism
- Iconoclasm
The Keynote Speaker will be Dennis Denisoff (Ryerson University).
Dennis Denisoff’s current monograph project, tentatively entitled Eco-Pagan Politics in British Literature and Culture: 1850-1920, explores the intersections of Victorian ecology, animality, and desire in pagan works by Florence Farr, Vernon Lee, Walter Pater, Simeon Solomon, R. L. Stevenson, and others. His books include Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film, and the novels Dog Years and Winter Gardeners. He has edited Queeries: An Anthology of Gay Male Prose and The Nineteenth Century Child and Consumer Culture, and co-edited Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence and the ongoing dh project The Yellow Nineties Online.
To submit email a 300-word abstract and 1-page CV (name on both) to visawus2016@gmail.com by March 15, 2016.
Each year, VISAWUS awards the William H. Scheuerle Graduate Student Paper Award ($600.00) to the best graduate student paper presented at the conference. All graduate students presenting at the conference are eligible for the William H. Scheuerle Graduate Student Paper Award.