of victorian interest

Call for applications
VIctorianist Writing Retreat at Dickens Universe
UC Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, California
July 26-August 1, 2026

Application Deadline: December 1, 2025

The Dickens Project is excited to announce a new week-long Victorianist Writing Retreat, held at UC Santa Cruz as part of our annual summer Dickens Universe conference. This retreat offers scholars who are not affiliated with Dickens Project consortium institutions the opportunity to attend the Universe, as well as to dedicate time during the week to writing in community.

In 2026, the Dickens Universe, including the Victorianist Writing Retreat, will take place from July 26-August 1. While the 2026 Universe will be focused on Bleak House, participants in the retreat need not be writing on Bleak House or on Dickens. Scholars working in any area of global British nineteenth-century studies are free to apply.

Hosted by Dr. Heather Nelson, this retreat is designed for scholars who are at least three years beyond their Ph.D. and who are working on a book, book chapter, or journal article. Applications are welcome from college and university faculty on and off the tenure ladder, independent scholars, high school teachers, and alt-ac workers.

Participants in the retreat will spend three hours every afternoon writing in some kind of communal structure (to be determined by group members in accordance with their preferred writing practices). They will also meet for one hour every morning to discuss and workshop material written the previous day. Everyone who participates in the retreat is welcome to participate in as many or as few Dickens Universe activities as they choose. The writing blocks and workshops won’t conflict with scheduled lectures, faculty seminars, or social events. More information about the Dickens Universe is available at https://dickens.ucsc.edu/dickens-universe/.

To apply, please send an email to Courtney Mahaney (cmahaney@ucsc.edu) that includes a 2-page C.V. and a 500-word abstract of the writing project you’d like to work on during the retreat. 

Successful applicants will need to register for the Dickens Universe and choose whether they would like to live on campus or stay off campus for the week. The on-campus registration cost in 2026 will be $1,950; the commuter registration will be $975 and includes all meals. More information about registration will be sent to accepted participants in February of 2026.

Feel free to email the Dickens Project (dpj@ucsc.edu) with any questions. 

• Announcement webpage: https://dickens.ucsc.edu/vwr/
• Download the flyer: https://dickens.ucsc.edu/files/2025/10/VWR-flyer.pdf

Order and Chaos: Vernon Lee and the Politics of Disruption
University of Liverpool, School of the Arts Library
1-3 September 2026, in-person and online

Abstract deadline: 18 January 2026
Registration opens: 1 May 2026

 “It is only in our own day that people are beginning to question the perfection of established rules of conduct, to discuss the drawbacks of duty and self-sacrifice, and to speculate upon the possible futility of all ethical systems, nay, upon the possible vanity of all ideals and formulas whatever.” 
—Vernon Lee, Gospels of Anarchy, 1909

A radical breakdown of trust in institutions across government, media, education, religion— is currently gripping Western Europe and the US. An atmosphere of uncertainty and fear has been created: for individuals, for groups holding common goals, and even for whole nations as the spectres of authoritarianism and anarchy become increasingly real. Among much else, freedom of thought the right of assembly, personal/medical rights, gender preference and expression, efforts to save the environment—all are under attack throughout the world.

In 1908, Vernon Lee (1856-1935)—a writer always sensitive to new political, social and cultural formations—wrote Gospels of Anarchy with her signature blend of irony, and literary flair. The book explores, and sometimes devastates, the theories of Order and Anarchy, and of Utopia and Dystopia, promulgated by literary and philosophical giants of the nineteenth century such as Emerson, Tolstoi, Nietzsche, William James and H. G. Wells. In 1912, her book Vital Lies expanded on these themes. In a manifesto that speaks loudly to our own era of post-truth politics, she vehemently attacked those who were “redefining truth in such a way as to include edifying and efficacious fallacy and falsehood” and thus helping to dissolve the whole idea of truth altogether.

This conference aims to explore the political questions and challenges we face today through the lens that Vernon Lee brought to the same kind of challenges in her time: a lens that is simultaneously thought-provoking, curious, playful, radical, and multidisciplinary. Papers may wish to explore the breakdown and/or the imposition of illusory order or structure in various fields (educational, social, commercial, entertainment, literary, scientific, information), what damage it is doing and whether it can somehow be harnessed or managed to be beneficial; how resistance, rebellion and nonconformity in public, academic, and private life, thought and publication can modify “however infinitesimally, the opinions and ideals and institutions of the present and the future” as Lee suggests in Gospels of Anarchy.

Organisers welcome presentations, lightning presentations, panels/roundtables, workshops, or creative practice sessions that engage with the following topics (but are not limited to)

• Freedom of Thought, Speech, and Expression
• Pacifism, anti-violence, anti-nationalism, anti-imperialism
• Protest, strikes, rebellion
• Philosophy, ethics, and morality (individual, governmental, national, corporate)
• Feminisms, local, global and radical
• Trans studies
• Human and animal rights
• Psychology, psychiatry, neurology, and mental health
• Environment, ecology, and the Anthropocene
• Sustainable futures
• Education and self-development

Organisers would particularly like to hear about the ways in which Lee’s works speak to current events and trends, and postulate or enable the development of healthy, sustainable futures.

Papers (15 minutes) Roundtable/ panel (60 mins), workshops (60 mins), creative practice session (60 mins), and lightning papers (10 mins).

Organisers would be delighted to discuss proposals for panels or individual presentations, and to answer any questions you may have. Please submit questions, abstracts (300 words) and a short bio (100 words) in a Word/ GoogleDoc to the review committee email vernonleealliance@gmail.com by 18 January 2026.

Thanks to the generosity of the International Vernon Lee Society, we hope to offer bursaries to early-career/precarious scholars—more details on the application process will be made available in due course.

The conference is organized by members of The Vernon Lee Alliance (VLA):  Matthew Bradley (The University of Liverpool, UK), Elisa Bizzotto (Iuav University of Venice, Italy), Sally Blackburn-Daniels (Teesside University, UK), Mary F. Burns (Independent Scholar, US), Mandy Gagel (University of Michigan, US), Mary Clai Jones (Chadron State College, US), Tomi-Ann Roberts (Colorado College, US).

Beyond Binaries: Victorian Literature in Transnational Contexts
NAVSA-ACCUTE Conference
Concordia University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
June 4-7, 2026

Proposal Deadline: November 21, 2025

The view of Victorian literature as primarily ‘national’ obscures the depth of its cross-cultural engagements beyond Europe, engagements that were never just one thing—neither purely appropriative nor purely transformative, neither simply imperial nor simply personal, but irreducibly multiple in approach, execution, and impact. This complexity registered across Victorian literary culture: in translation practices that blended scholarly rigour with commercial ambition, in aesthetic movements that drew on non-European forms for genuine experiment, cultural distinction, or gesture of resistance, and in the careers of writers whose encounters with other traditions served at once personal, artistic, and professional ends. To recognize this complexity is to see that cross-cultural engagement was not supplementary to Victorian literary culture but constitutive of it, to understand that what we now call “Victorian literature” took form in, and depended upon, these multiple encounters with non-European traditions.

This panel seeks papers that can hold this complexity in view: work that examines how Victorian writers engaged with non-European traditions across multiple registers, receiving, representing and reproducing them in ways that resist categorization within binary theoretical or analytical models. Submissions that combine literary analysis with approaches from cultural history, translation studies, comparative methodology, or material culture are encouraged, as are those that go beyond familiar interpretive frameworks (e.g. power and agency; authentic and imitative; civilized and primitive) to consider how cross-cultural encounters encompassed contradictory impulses and effects, how they entailed complex processes of aesthetic and cultural mediation (i.e. translation, adaptation, conscious allusion), how they transformed both source traditions and receiving contexts.

Possible avenues of inquiry may include:

• Translation practices: What strategies, negotiations, or distortions characterized the translation of non-European works into English, and how did these shape Victorian literary culture?

• Aesthetic theory and criticism: How did encounters with non-European traditions alter Victorian debates about taste, beauty, or the purpose of art?

• Comparative analysis of form:  How did encounters with non-European literary traditions reshape Victorian narrative techniques, poetic structures, or dramatic conventions?

• Networks of mobility: How did travel, migration, and exile facilitate literary exchanges across borders?

• Reception and readership:  How did Victorian audiences interpret, adapt, or resist texts shaped by cross-cultural encounters?

• Identity formation through difference: How did engagement with foreign texts complicate Victorian constructions of selfhood, nationality, or religious belief?

• Material studies of circulation: How did publishing networks, periodicals, and libraries facilitate cross-cultural literary exchange?

• Contemporary methodological questions: What can digital humanities, postcolonial theory, or translation studies contribute to our understanding of these historical intersections?

This panel is co-sponsored by the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) and the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE). It will take place at the ACCUTE 2026 Conference, hosted by Concordia University, 4-7 June 2026.

Please submit a 250-word proposal, including a 50-word abstract and a brief biographical note, by Friday, 21 November 2025, via ACCUTE’s Online Submission Form.

Panelists need not be ACCUTE members provided they are members in good standing of NAVSA; however, only ACCUTE members will be eligible for travel funding. Proposals not accepted for this joint panel will still be considered as part of ACCUTE’s General Call for Papers.

For any enquiries, please contact Dr. Reza Taher-Kermani (Concordia University, Montreal): reza.taherkermani@concordia.ca

Victorian Trade
VSAWC Conference
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
May 1-2, 2026

Proposal deadline: December 1, 2025

The Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada is pleased to announce that its next conference, on the topic of Victorian Trade, will take place in Winnipeg MB (Treaty One Territory) on May 1 and 2, 2026. VSAWC looks forward to welcoming Dr. Sarah Fee (Senior Curator, Global Fashion & Textiles; Royal Ontario Museum) as our plenary speaker.

Trade establishes new relationships and shapes existing ones. Nineteenth-century trade evokes not only economic pursuits, labour activism, and the geographical movement of goods but also the exchange of ideas. We encourage proposals that expand our ideas about Victorian trade, whether focused on material objects, people, knowledge, identities, values, or emotions.

Topics for exploration include but are not limited to:

• the movement of raw materials, manufactured goods, and knowledge between people and places
• treaties, agreements, and contracts
• the trade in enslaved people and products of their labour
• bartering and bargaining
• the nineteenth-century book trade
• the nineteenth-century art market
• trade unions, guilds, and apprenticeships
• vocational schools, workingmen’s libraries, and reading rooms for tradespeople
• trade publications
• the emergence of new professions and professional identities
• national and regional borders
• physical and conceptual borders
• non-commercial forms of exchange, including gift culture
• material culture and craft
• stock exchanges and banking
• stamps, monetary systems, and the gold standard
• transportation and communication systems
• street trade, peddling, arcades, and department stores
• mutuality, trust, distrust, and betrayal
• hoarding, frauds, swindles, and scams
• neo-Victorian authors who ‘trade’ in Victorian tropes
• the trading of ideas in the context of contemporary or Victorian-era education

Organizers welcome proposals for papers, panels, and workshops that explore the theme of Victorian Trade. Established scholars, emerging scholars, independent scholars, and graduate students are all encouraged to apply. Please send a proposal of no more than 200 words, accompanied by a brief biographical statement, to vsawc2026@gmail.com. In the case of panels or workshops, please share participants’ materials in a single email. Please submit proposals no later than December 1, 2025.

Our conference will be held at the Alt Hotel in downtown Winnipeg. Graduate students and underemployed scholars will have the opportunity to apply for funding to reduce the cost of participation. Please direct any questions to conference host Dr. Vanessa Warne (vanessa.warne@umanitoba.ca). To learn more about the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada and past conferences, please visit our site. To learn more about our organization’s journal, Victorian Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies, please visit: https://victorianreview.org/

Call for Contributions
Teaching Dickens's Compositional Process & Serial Form

Submission Deadline: January 31, 2026

The Digital Dickens Notes Project (www.dickensnotes.org) announces a call for participants to contribute lesson plans, assignments, or short essays about approaches to teaching with and about Charles Dickens’s working notes. Dickens Notes is a peer-reviewed, NEH-supported, open-access digital scholarly edition of the detailed working notes Charles Dickens kept for his novels in the second half of his career. Organizers are looking to feature approaches to teaching about Dickens’s compositional process, serial form, or other facets of his novels that make use of the working notes. Contributions can vary in form and focus, but should offer both:

• a practical component (e.g. a lesson plan describing classroom activities; a student-directed activity description; an assignment); and
• a concise (approximately 500-1000 words) critical introduction that describes the approach, pedagogical goals, and the appropriate course level and type within which the lesson plan or assignment has been or might be featured, along with a list of any relevant primary and secondary sources and resources.

While organizers look forward to contributions that center the working notes, they are also interested in approaches and assignments that feature Dickens's notes tangentially as part of a consideration of his serial form and/or compositional practice. For more information, please see the Call for Contributions or contact the project directors, Anna Gibson and Adam Grener, at dickensnotes@gmail.com.

Special Issue: Journal of Postcolonial Writing
Telling the Story of Oceans and Archives: Rethinking the Novel Form

Abstract Deadline: November 15, 2025

The novel as a genre has usually been credited with travelling well. Whether as part of Macmillan’s Colonial Library transporting British classics to Indian readers, or in offering object lessons disseminated in Francophone Africa, the novel seems to be the ever-present marker of colonial encounters. The ideological stakes of these encounters have long been recognized in scholarly examinations of the novel as an instrument of power. Yet how these transoceanic movements that took the novel from Europe to its colonies reshaped the genre is a story that is still underexplored.

This special issue (under contract with Journal of Postcolonial Writing) situates the postcolonial novel, broadly construed, at the juncture of two distinct yet related fields: transoceanic studies and archival studies. The transoceanic paradigm connecting Europe and its former colonies has been integral not just to the dissemination of the novel, but to the contours of the genre itself: nowhere is this history of engagement better documented than in colonial archives (Joshi, In Another Country). It should thus come as no surprise that many colonial/postcolonial novelists (Perkins, Sansay, Ghosh, Gurnah, von Reinhold, Vassanji, among others) write metaliterary fictions preoccupied with the oceanic systems that carried the novel from Europe to its colonies and with the archives–secret and known, speculative and actual–that promise access to places and people lost to history. These novelists are preoccupied with what we term “the transoceanic archive”. When we view the novel through a transoceanic and archival lens, we attend, most obviously, to state archives documenting the global political and commercial networks that connected the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans—networks through which the novel traveled, and that shaped its materiality and literary history. But the conjunction of the transoceanic and the archival also destabilizes understandings of the archive itself. The transoceanic archive is composed of overlapping transnational layers; it is literally in transit (Hofmeyr, “The Complicating Sea”). Thus, while the transoceanic frame allows us to see how the novel travelled from Europe to its colonies, and also between colonies, the archival approach captures traces of these travels, discernible within the novels themselves, as well as existing in the maritime archives. By juxtaposing these two analytical frameworks, we hope to understand what happens to the generic form of the novel as it travels across the seas and encounters official and unofficial archives, and the extent to which the novel itself takes on the task of archiving these transoceanic journeys.

This special issue looks at how the novel drew on these archives for inspiration, took on the task of archiving lost and untold histories, and used the idea of reclaiming narratives to reconcile with its transoceanic travels. Organizers welcome contributions that explore exemplary texts, literary-historical inflection points, historical trajectories, or transnational dynamics in Anglophone and Anglophone-adjacent novelistic traditions. Organizers particularly look forward to submissions that place these questions within the context of the 19th and 20th centuries. In challenging Eurocentrism, this special issue will prioritize contributions from and about the Global South, which organizers define as encompassing the indigenous North.

Among the topics that contributors might explore are the following:

• Maritime histories in engagement with novelistic traditions
• Archival histories of the novel's production, dissemination, or reception
• Pacific, Atlantic, or Indian oceanic world in relation to novel history
• Primary source materials in the literary history of the novel
• The novel form, epistolarity, and transoceanic correspondence
• Oral narrative (or other non-written narrative) and longform prose as novelistic genres
• Translations and transmedial adaptations of novels
• Strategies for decolonizing the novel
• Aesthetic experimentation and the limits of the novel as a form

For more information, see Telling the Story of Oceans and Archives: Rethinking the Novel Form.

Submission Instructions
Please send an abstract (150 words) and a short author bio by November 15, 2025, to Sunayani Bhattacharya (sb40@stmarys-ca.edu) and Lanya Lamouria (llamouria@missouristate.edu). Final papers (6,000 - 8,000 words) due May 30, 2026. Anticipated issue publication date 2027.

International Interdisciplinary Conference
Tennyson 2026: Ecology, Landscape, Environment
Lincoln, UK
July 14-17, 2026

Abstract Deadline: January 31, 2026

Sponsored by the Tennyson Society and Bishop Grosseteste University, this interdisciplinary conference will convene in Lincolnshire, the landscape into which Tennyson was born (see https://tennysonsociety.com/tennyson-2026-conference.)

Tennyson’s poetry was central in forming Victorian responses to the natural world and to scientific advances which underpin today’s emerging fields of environmental studies and plant humanities, as well as interdisciplinary studies of literature and science, literary geographies, literature and the arts, and literature and print culture. His evocative idyllic settings inspired painters from the Pre-Raphaelites to Edward Lear, while his struggles with evolutionary theory engaged with a different vision of ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’. His poetic sonorities inspired new soundscapes in music and even later film adaptations. This will be a timely opportunity to explore the varied legacies left to us by the Victorians and their Poet Laureate, and to assess their relevance to the global climate and social justice crises of today.

Our conference welcomes proposals that range widely, from geology to garden design, from the celebration of landscape to warfare and the destruction of landscape, from the minutiae of the ‘Flower in the Crannied Wall’ to the ‘Vastness’ of Space, from the threat of industrialisation and global capitalism to the promise of a utopian future, from imperial land-grabbing to the preservation of local identities and dialects.

Possible topics (among others):

• Science and Evolution
• Neo-Victorian Afterlives   
• Industrialization, Pollution, Extractive Capitalism   
• Landscape and Gender, Sexuality
• Sites of Devastation, War, and Warfare
• Environment and Psychology
• Dialect, Regionalism, and the Sense of Place
• Poetry’s Periodical and Print Ecologies
• Walking, Walking Tours, and Poetry
• The Lives of Flora and/or Fauna
• Ecologies, Landscapes, and Race 
• Class Hierarchies, Law, and Land Inheritance
• Tennyson and “Nature Poets”
• Tennyson and the Arts, Sculpture, Architecture
• Tennyson and Ruskin, Morris, Meredith, Hardy
• Tennyson, Music, and Soundscapes
• Tennyson & L.E.L., E. Brontë, EBB, C. Rossetti
• Tennyson’s Personal and Literary Networks
• Tennyson and Horticulture, Gardens, Farming
• Tennyson and the Sea
• Tennyson, Imperialism, and Foreign Lands
• Cemeteries, Waste, Dust
• Poetry and the Cosmos
• Plant Humanities

Keynote Speakers
Dinah Birch, “Tennyson and Ruskin: Versions of the Modern”; Clare Pettitt, “Tennyson's Garden: Idylls of the King and the Technologization of Nature”; Lindsay Wells, “Tennyson, Horticulture, and the Plant Humanities”

Abstracts should be 300 words maximum, with a bio (150 words maximum).
Address inquiries and submit proposals as attachments to Tennyson2026@bishopg.ac.uk.

Sponsors’ support has enabled a very affordable conference rate, with affordable housing as well. 

Youth Writers and Their Worlds
International Conference on Literary Juvenilia
Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana
Conference Dates: April 16-18, 2026

Proposal Deadline: November 1, 2025

The Ninth International Society of Literary Juvenilia Conference invites scholars to explore how youth writers imagine, question, and reshape the worlds around them. What can youth-authored creations—whether published, private, unfinished, or visual—teach us about the histories and futures of the “worlds” they engage? Organizers seek proposals that explore the rich and varied worlds youth writers create, contest, and leave behind. Submissions may take traditional or experimental approaches to juvenilia, with inquiries ranging across the material conditions, social networks, and cultural frameworks that shape youth authorship.

Youth Writers and Their Worlds aims to create an interdisciplinary space for scholars to reflect on the vibrancy and complexity of writing by young people. Organizers invite proposals for individual papers (20 minutes in length) and/or full panels of three speakers and a chair on any aspect of youth writing. While all topics related to youth authorship are welcome, organizers particularly encourage submissions engaging with the conference theme. Possible topics and panel themes might include (but are not limited to):

• Children in Print – How do child-authored texts circulate, and how are they framed by adult editors, institutions, or markets? How are these works read in their own time—and in ours?
• Writing on the Margins – What do diaries, letters, zines, schoolwork, and other under-studied forms reveal about youth creativity and the boundaries of literary value?
• Beyond Biography – How can we read child authors on their own terms, rather than as precursors of their adult selves or as mere curiosities?
• Recollections and Self-Making – How do memoirs, autobiographies, and other retrospective works engage with or reframe childhood creativity and early writing?
• Defining and Contesting Childhood – In what ways do child writers reflect, reinforce, or resist adult definitions of what it means to be a child?
• Visual Cultures of Childhood – How do drawings, scrapbooks, annotated books, and other hybrid or visual forms shape the imaginative worlds of child authors?

Keynote Speaker: Karen Sánchez-Eppler, L. Stanton Williams 1941 Professor of American Studies and English at Amherst College.

Featured Panel: Andrea Immel, Curator of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University, and Laura Wasowicz, Curator of Children’s Literature, American Antiquarian Society–learn about ground-breaking digital and print initiatives to expand archives of writing by and about young people.

Propose a Paper or Panel: Please send your proposal (300 words or less), accompanied with a brief 2-page CV, to ISLJConference2026@valpo.edu by November 1, 2025. Proposals for full panels should include a separate proposal and bio for each paper, as well as a brief overview of the panel. Participants will also be invited to submit papers based on their presentations to the Journal of Juvenilia Studies, which will publish a Special Issue on the conference topic, guest edited by Sara Danger and Emily Gowan.

Co-Chairs: Sara Danger, Valparaiso University and Emily Gowen, Harvard University

Contact: ISLJConference2026@valpo.edu

2028 marks the bicentenary of the birth of Margaret Oliphant, the brilliant and prolific Victorian novelist, biographer, essayist, reviewer and short-story writer. This special issue of the journal Women’s Writing will celebrate her rich and varied body of work, showcasing the latest developments in Oliphant studies and exploring what this once-neglected but increasingly widely recognized writer has to offer twenty-first century critics and readers.

Women's Writing published a special issue on Oliphant in 1999 to coincide with the centenary of her death; in the nearly 30 years since then, a growing body of scholarship has recognized the value and interest of her oeuvre. The Pickering & Chatto Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant, edited by Elisabeth Jay and Joanne Shattock (25 volumes, 2011-16) brings a substantial selection of her work into the scholarly domain, providing a secure foundation for further research. George Levine’s interventions (JVC 2014 and ELH 2016) encourage us to attend to Oliphant’s innovation and sophistication of style as well as content; Valerie Sanders’ Margaret Oliphant (Edward Everett Root, 2020) likewise shows how Oliphant “narrows the gap between mature Victorianism and early modernism” (p. 191), while nonetheless encouraging us to evaluate Oliphant on her own merits, of which she herself was a harsh critic.

Women's Writing welcomes proposals for articles of 7000 words, on topics including but not limited to Oliphant’s:

• realist novels
• short stories / ghost stories
• work as historian, biographer and/or art historian
• literary criticism
• travel writing
• autobiography
• correspondence
• serialization
• writing style
• approach to the Woman Question
• engagement with religious belief and/or grief
• engagement with temporality, ageing, generation
• engagement with motherhood, widowhood, family
• relationship with her publishers
• relationship with her contemporaries;
• the critical history of Oliphant studies.

Please submit abstracts of around 300 words, with a short biographical note, to the guest editors, Helen Kingstone (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Clare Walker Gore (Lucy Cavendish, Cambridge) at helen.kingstone@rhul.ac.uk and chw37@cam.ac.uk by 1st December 2025. The editors expect to notify contributors in January 2026, and anticipate that completed articles of 7000 words would be due by September 2026.