VISAWUS 2020
Reno, Nevada
October 15-17, 2020
Keynote Speaker: Jolene Zigarovich, University of Northern Iowa
The Silver Legacy Resort/Circus Circus
The Victorian Era was one of transitions. Victorian Britain transitioned from a rural to urban society. It transitioned from an emergent empire to the dominant imperial power. It transitioned from a walking, water, wind, and animal-based transportation system to a steam-powered transportation system. It transitioned from a regional to national and then imperial culture.
Our scholarly and pedagogical engagements with the era have also undergone a number of transitions. How do we and can we understand the word transitions as it applies to the Victorian era, its people, its art, its popular culture, and the scholarship and pedagogy engaged with them? How does the emergence of TRANS studies change the way we think about the Victorian and our own scholarly and pedagogical approaches to the era? How has the wider public’s understanding of and engagement with the Victorian era undergone transitions?
The organizers encourage papers across all disciplines, including (but not restricted to) art history, literature, gender, history of science, history, material culture, political science, performance, life writing, journalism, photography, popular culture, and economics.
The organizers welcome panels or papers on any of the above or the following topics:
Transitions in and through:
- Education
- Law
- Trans Studies
- Religion, Theology, & Spirituality
- Medicine
- Sexuality
- Gender Identities & Roles
- Social Codes
- Cityscapes
- Agriculture
- Engineering
- Popular Culture
- Manufacturing
- Literary Genres
- Transnationalism
- History
- Transatlantic culture, politics, & law
- Copyright
- Politics
- Art
- Design
- Periodicals
- Museums
- Leisure & Entertainment
- Empire
- Scholarship–Victorian & Modern
- Publishing
- Media
- Clothing & Dress
- Science
- Technology
- Pedagogy—contemporary & modern
- Communication
- Travel/Tourism
- Public Space(s)
- Social Reform
- Theater
- Empire
- Housing
- Neo-Victorian Fiction, Poetry, Art, & Performance
- Architecture
- Please send a 300-word abstract with a one page CV (including an email address) as one file by April 20, 2020 to visawus2020@visawus.org. Please include your name in the file name.
Graduate Students are eligible for the William H. Scheuerle Graduate Student Paper Award ($600).
About our Keynote Speaker
Jolene Zigarovich’s book publications include Writing Death and Absence in the Victorian Novel: Engraved Narratives, and she is editor of Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature as well as TransGothic in Literature and Culture (Routledge 2017). Her work has been published in ANQ, Dickens Quarterly, Dickens Studies Annual, Eighteenth-Century Life, Studies in the Novel, The Wilkie Collins Journal, Victorian Review, and Women’s Studies. Her current work in progress, Necropolitics: Legislating the Dead Body and the Victorian Novel, considers the posthumous life of characters uncannily bound by legislation in the Victorian novel.
Online CFP: http://www.visawus.org/?page_id=12