CFP: Midwest Victorian Studies Association Conference “Sonorities and Stained Glass: Aestheticism, Sensation, and the Arts of Sensing in Victorian Britain”
May 6-8, 2022
Richmond, Indiana
MVSA is excited to hold a vibrant, in-person conference in May 2022 if conditions allow. Safety remains the top priority. The conference will have multiple COVID safety measures in place, including a vaccine requirement for in-person registration, and confining the conference to a private venue as much as possible. If public health conditions have not improved from their current state by March 15, the MVSA leadership will postpone the conference until Spring 2023 and notify participants immediately. All papers accepted for this year’s conference will automatically be included on the 2023 program, and the organizers will offer instead some form of collaborative online programming. Please consider submitting a proposal for this year’s conference, inspired around the theme of:
Few societies both honored and changed art as much as the Victorians. In expressing their stances on music, art, architecture, and literature, the Victorians filled tomes on both their value and impropriety, spirituality, and decadence. What was the role of the arts in the lives of individuals and their societies? What did it mean to be surrounded by works appealing to the senses – aural, visual, or other? The Program Committee for the 2022 MVSA conference invites proposals for papers and panels addressing the arts and the senses in Victorian culture broadly defined. Submissions are welcome from scholars working in art history, musicology, history, science, philosophy, theater, theology, literature, and other fields of scholarly endeavor. The organizers especially encourage papers that will facilitate cross-disciplinary discussions. Specific paper or panel topics might include:
- The Visual Arts, in Theory and Practice
- Music, Sacred and Secular
- Sonorities, Soundscapes, and Noise
- Sensation, as a Physical or Emotional Experience
- Resonances, Amplifications, and Vibrations as Effects, Affects, and Metaphors
- Architecture, Sacred and Secular, Church Modernization, Monuments, and Building Controversies
- Aestheticism and the Aesthetes, Decadence, and Fin-de Siècle Ideologies of Art
- “Sensation,” in Literary Genres, Journalism, the Occult, and Other Nontraditional Outlets for the Senses
- Scientific and Medical Approaches to the Senses, Sensation, and Synesthesia
- “Spectacles” and Spectacular Entertainments, including Magic-Lantern Shows
- Religion, Aesthetics, and the Senses
- Glass Cultures, including Stained Glass, Commercial, and Art Glass
- Printing and Illustration, Innovations and Innovators, Movements and Technologies
The conference will be held in the historic Reid Memorial Presbyterian Church in Richmond, Indiana. The Reid Church is notable for its Tiffany stained-glass windows, and the conference program will include a concert on the church’s Hook and Hastings Organ.
For individual papers or panels send a 300-word abstract and 1-page vita for each participant (as MS Word or PDF documents) by February 15, 2022, to conferencesubmissions@midwestvictorian.org.