Small Worlds: Connections, Collaborations and Conflicts
Australasian Victorian Studies Association Conference
Monash University, Melbourne
17-19 June 2020
Keynote speakers: Associate Professor Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Professor Lisa Surridge (University of Victoria, Canada)
Technological advances, imperial expansion, emigration to the colonies and beyond, and an increase in leisure travel made the nineteenth-century world seem smaller. Fuelled by industrialisation, the population of cities boomed, putting masses of people in closer proximity than ever before. The development of transportation, particularly the railways and steamship, meant culture could be disseminated more widely. The various ways in which ideas and people moved aided by technology such as the telegraph enabled new connections, cultures, and ideas to flourish. However, encounters with the unfamiliar and challenges to accepted ways of being provoked anxieties, injustices, and outright conflict.
The conference invites papers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds including Literature, History, Music, and Art History that interpret any aspect of the nineteenth century in relation to the conference theme of “Small Worlds”.
Proposals might address such topics as the following:
- Travelling, tourism and travel writing
- Urbanisation and the city
- Emigration
- Empires, nationalism, colonialism
- Race, ethnicity, indigeneity
- Literature and the periodical press
- Scientific and medical advancement
- Intellectual, artistic, and political communities
- Religion and missionary work
- The Victorian city
- Collaborative research within Victorian Studies
Paper proposals should comprise a one-paragraph abstract of 200-250-words with a title plus a 100-word biographical note. Please avoid the use of in-text references. Proposals should be emailed to conference convenors Dr Michelle Smith and Associate Professor Paul Watt and at michelle.smith@monash.edu<mailto:michelle.smith@monash.edu> by 20 January 2020.
All those giving a paper at the AVSA conference are required to be members of the Association.
AVSA aims to promote the activities and research of scholars in Victorian literary, history, and cultural studies and since 1973 has provided a meeting place for Victorian Studies scholars in the southern hemisphere. To find out more about AVSA, visit its website at http://www.avsa.unimelb.edu.au/