Of Victorian Interest

Subscribe via Email

Of Victorian Interest

To submit items for Of Victorian Interest or Member Publications, please email felluga@purdue.edu

CFP: BAVS 2017: “Victorians Unbound: Connections and Intersections” (3/31/2017; 8/22-24/2017)

"Victorians Unbound: Connections and Intersections"
BAVS Annual Conference 2017
Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, UK
22-24 August 2017

Keynote Speakers:
Professor Kate Flint, University of Southern California, Dana & David Dornsife College
Professor Mike Huggins, University of Cumbria
Professor Sir Christopher Ricks, Boston University

Opening Roundtable Speakers:
Edwina Ehrman, Victoria and Albert Museum
Dr Kate Hill, University of Lincoln
Professor Francesco Marroni, University of G. d’ Annunzio, Chieti-Pescara

Organised by:
Dr Claudia Capancioni, Bishop Grosseteste University
Dr Alice Crossley, University of Lincoln

The Victorian age has been conceived as a period characterised by advancement, progress, innovation, and the challenging of established order. Simultaneously it has emerged as an era which found stability and refuge in forms of organisation, structures, hierarchies, and modes of regulation. While these positions could appear incompatible, scholarship has revealed them to be interconnected, productive, and reciprocally enlightening.

This conference will respond to both the dissonance and synchronicity of the codifying impulse of classification, definition, and normalisation, which coexisted with the ambitions of modernity, creativity, exploration, and the pursuit of knowledge. The ability to define, circumscribe, and classify exhibited by the Victorians enabled a Promethean drive to accomplish, challenge, and expand. This conference promotes and furthers dialogue about how the Victorians constructed, challenged, or redefined boundaries: it will explore what happens when the Victorians are ‘unbound’.

The organisers welcome proposals for individual papers, and encourage proposals for panels (3-paper sessions), on, but not limited to, the following topics:

  • Architecture and the built environment, the rural and sub/urban
  • Mobility, travel, and empire
  • Communication, transmission, and legacy
  • Networks and intersections
  • New forms of literature, art, music, commerce and entertainment
  • Theoretical and artistic movements
  • Inclusivity, diversity, and disability
  • Modernity, history, periodisation
  • Multiplicity and experimentation
  • New technologies, sciences, medicine, and new types of scholarly pursuit
  • Criminality, the legal and penitentiary systems, public policy, hierarchical structures
  • Discoveries and explorations; new forms of knowledge
  • Forms of endeavour and discovery, pioneer
  • Victorians on the Edge: fringe, liminality, transgression and alienation
  • Revising & reimagining gender, class, age, sexuality, race, belief
  • Cataloguing, displaying, collecting, conserving, and restoring
  • Cosmopolitanism & internationalism
  • Communities, Transnationalism & transatlanticism
  • Mapping & globalisation
  • Intercultural transfers and media
  • Ecology and ethics
  • The human, non-human, and post-human
  • The boundaries between life and death; the natural, supernatural, and spiritual
  • Neo-Victorianism, ‘popular’ Victorians, adaptation.
  • Voices of dissent and resistance; political activism
  • Myths, dreams, and utopian futures & dystopian visions
  • Please submit an individual proposal of 250-300 words OR a 3-4 page outline for a 3 paper panel proposal (including panel title, abstracts with titles, affiliations and all contact details, identifying the panel chair), to BAVS2017@bishopg.ac.uk by 31 March 2017. Papers will be limited to 20 minutes. All proposals should include your name, academic affiliation (if applicable) and email address.

    Tagged as: