Of Victorian Interest

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Of Victorian Interest

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CFP: 2025 Midwest Victorian Studies Association Conference (Application Deadline: 11/15/24)

Midwest Victorian Studies Association
Purdue University Fort Wayne
Fort Wayne, IN
April 3-6, 2025

Application deadline: November 15, 2024

“Genealogies”

Inspired by Fort Wayne’s proximity to the Allen County Library, with its large genealogical center, MVSA 2025 takes the theme of “Genealogies.” We encourage participants to think about origins and descent broadly speaking and across disciplines. Genealogies were powerful scientific tools or narrative red herrings, and they were also sources of anxiety for Victorians. Of course, people have genealogies, but so do ideas, artistic forms, and texts, including scholarly concepts and methods themselves. MVSA invites proposals for papers that present, interrogate, explore, celebrate, and puncture material and textual genealogies.

Papers might take up issues including but not limited to:

  • Generation, reproduction, evolution or devolution, family relationships, heritages
  • Biography, autobiography, memoir, life writing, prosopography
  • Academic genealogies, disciplinary development, people who shaped Victorian studies or fields of Victorian-era academic studies, the 19th-century rise of the “ologies”
  • Non-biological genealogies, kinship, affiliation, collaboration, inspiration, adoptive or queer families
  • Textual genealogies, genres, inter-generational borrowings and departures
  • Public records (census, marital, birth, death, public health)
  • Inheritance, legacies, family trees
  • Genetics, eugenics, animal-human divides and congruences
  • Genealogies of form, art, music (e.g., ekphrasis)
  • Brotherhoods and sisterhoods (such as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood or the “sister arts”)
  • Intergenerational knowledge and/or trauma, memories of violence, burdens of history
  • False genealogies, misattributions, inter-generational misunderstandings
  • Collections, hagiographies, libraries, museums, archives
  • Childhood or aging studies, power dynamics of age, generational strife
  • Pedigree, breeding, speciation, racializations
  • Health, medical humanities, infectious diseases, development of treatment methodologies, professionalization of medical disciplines (e.g. handwashing and germ theory)
  • Heraldry (Burke’s Peerage and similar records), aristocracy, titles, estates

Conference Highlights:

  • Jane Stedman Lecture (keynote) by Alison Booth
  • Visit to Allen County Public Library
  • Fort Wayne Philharmonic concert April 5, 7:30-8:30pm, featuring Ralph Vaugh Williams's Dona nobis pacem and Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” symphony.
  • Work-in-Progress Seminars led by Alison Booth, Lindsay Wells, and Andrea Kaston Tange (separate CFP forthcoming)

The Preliminary Conference Schedule Is as Follows:

  • Thursday: option for Allen County Public Library tour (other options later in the conference), welcome reception in the evening
  • Friday and Saturday: sessions all day
  • Sunday: Board meeting

How to Apply:

Please submit an abstract (~350 words) and a brief CV. To propose a panel or roundtable, submit a brief overview, plus individual paper abstracts and brief CVs for all participants. Please apply by November 15, 2024 through this Google form. The committee aims to return decisions by the end of the calendar year.

Click the following link to download the call for papers as a PDF.

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