“What Can Area Studies or Critical Comparativism Offer Victorian Studies?” – a virtual roundtable conversation
The Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States
Held online on Zoom: click here to join
September 16, 2022, 9:00am – 11:00am Pacific Time
VISAWUS warmly invites you to join them for a virtual event “What Can Area Studies or Critical Comparativism Offer Victorian Studies?” This event is part of a year-long Zoom series titled Victorian Promises. See event details below.
“What Can Area Studies or Critical Comparativism Offer Victorian Studies?” A virtual roundtable conversation hosted by Dr. Kellie Holzer and featuring Dr. Zarena Aslami (Michigan State), Dr. Anna Berman (Cambridge), Dr. Ross Forman (Warwick).
In their introduction to a recent issue of Victorian Literature and Culture, Sukanya Banerjee, Ryan Fong, and Helena Michie suggest that “it might be time to collaborate with disciplinary formations such as area studies, which are marked by their cross-disciplinary and primarily non-European focus. To bridge the gap between nineteenth-century studies and area studies—to twin, in other words, the temporal axis with a spatial one—is one way to ‘lateralize’ Victorian Britain, to think of widening in coeval terms” (6-7).
Please join VISAWUS for an engaging dialogue about the prospects of “widening” Victorian Studies by integrating the methods and knowledges of Area Studies and Critical Comparativism. Participants will explore the following questions. Are there horizons to “widening” the field of Victorian Studies? How can scholars and teachers overcome the individual and institutional obstacles to such “widening”? For instance, how can we address language barriers or scanty knowledge of nonwestern vernacular texts? How do we develop networks of collaborators, including vernacular speakers, translators, regional specialists?
Future events in the VISAWUS Zoom series 2022-23 “Victorian Promises”
- October 14, 10am: The Promise of Religion
- November 4, 11am: The Promise(s) of Victorian Feminism
- January, date TBA: The Promise of the Cosmos
- February 24, 4pm: Promises of the Victorian International Art Market