Vernon Lee in America: Text, Application, and Practice
Colorado College
Colorado Springs, CO, USA
June 29 - July 2, 2025
Proposal Deadline: January 3, 2025
Vernon Lee in America: Text, Application, and Practice seeks papers or workshops on a wide range of topics that showcase how her ideas can be studied or applied not only in scholarly works but also in practical applications. The aim of this conference is to gather interest and participation in the expansion of Vernon Lee studies in North America. Of particular interest, this interdisciplinary conference hopes to explore how we might look to Lee’s ideas and theories as methods and practices for engaging in our contemporary world. For example, Harry Francis Mallgrave, an architectural theorist writes that Lee and Kit Anstruther-Thomson’s “Beauty and Ugliness” anticipated our embodied responses to buildings and the built environment. Simon Reader’s Notework examines the compiling methods of Lee and other nineteenth-century authors as a response to burgeoning systems of organizing knowledge. Lee’s work on empathy and psychological aesthetics anticipates the discovery of mirror neurons in the field of neuroscience, and scholars are currently writing about her ideas as they apply to artificial intelligence and the experience of art. These are only a few of the ways Lee’s works have been applied to interdisciplinary fields. The conference organizers are eager to see an expansion of how her works might apply in fields such as:
- Music and musicology
- The intersections between science and literature
- Psychological aesthetics
- Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence
- Creative practice
- Performance
- Authorship, publishing, and reading studies
- Digital Humanities
Vernon Lee in America: Text, Application, and Practice will be an in-person, three-day conference, open to academics, independent scholars, and aficionados of Lee and her circle at all stages of their careers. There is a continually growing interest in Lee’s works in North America, and one of the objectives of this conference is to hear and discover the many and varied research and ideas that scholars are pursuing, and to forge networks and collaborations. At this conference, we encourage speakers to present current research on Lee from any discipline.
We welcome individual paper presentations, round table discussions in any of the following formats:
- Individual paper (20 minutes speaking time/2500 words)
- Individual lightning talk (7 minutes speaking time/1000 words)
- Round table panel, up to 5 participants (40 minutes speaking time in total)
- Creative writing responses or creative/critical responses to conference themes (20 minutes speaking time/2500 words)
- Practice-based workshop or performance (40 minutes)
If you would like to propose an individual paper, panel, or workshop to present at the conference, please submit a 300-word abstract and a brief biography (50 words) to the conference organizers at VLinAmerica2025@gmail.com by Friday, January 3, 2025.
Conference Committee :
Tomi-Ann Roberts, Professor of Psychology, Colorado College
Mary Clai Jones, Associate Professor of English and Humanities, Chadron State College
Mary F. Burns, Independent Scholar and Novelist
Sally Blackburn-Daniels, Research Fellow, Teesside University
