of victorian interest

Call for papers
Women and/of the Empire
International Conference
University of Porto, Portugal
29-30 October 2026

Proposal Deadline: 15 June 2026

Under the Royal Titles Act of 1876, Britain’s Queen Victoria, who had often, albeit informally, been called Empress of India, had the title officially added to her style. The nominal head of the most powerful country in the world henceforth matched the titles used by the monarchs of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. In a context of international rivalry, the overtones of grandeur were intended to instill a notion of British superiority as well as to flatter the “Mother of Europe”. Ironically, however, the new title was also an attempt to cover up how close British control over India had come to utter collapse due to the Indian Mutiny (also known in India, significantly, as the First War of Independence) less than two decades earlier. At the same time, Victoria’s proclamation as Empress arguably exalted her as a supreme figure of the age in a global perspective as much as highlighted the fact that she was a woman with visibility and power in a period that almost universally denied women a range of rights and opportunities that we have come to assume are integral to any modern, democratic society.

This conference will seek to explore the realities and the legacies of the Victorian Age, its monarch and its empire. It will focus on women, their engagement in private and public life, their experience of class, travel, migration, and cultural exchanges – on either side of the cultural divide involved in imperial encounters – as well as on how women writers, of Victorian and later periods, have engaged artistically and critically with such realities in their poetical and fictional works.

Although Queen Victoria provides the starting point for the conference, we are also interested in contributions dealing with other aspects of the imperial/colonial experience, not limited to the nineteenth century, women, or the British Empire. Comparative perspectives, as well as broader chronological approaches, are also welcome.

The organisers welcome proposals for 20-minute papers in English responding to the above. Suggested (merely indicative) topics include:

• national (ethnic, religious, etc.) identity/ies and the ideology/ies of empire
• women, power/powerlessness, and the experience of empire
• Victoria’s/Victorian exceptionalism in a historical and global perspective
• nostalgia, trauma, exaltation: the legacies of empire
• institutions of national/imperial memory: academies, museums, libraries, archives
• rival discourses of patriotism and identity, war and peace, prejudice and (in)tolerance
• literary and artistic representations of Queen Victoria in the nineteenth century and later
• politically radical perspectives on, and attitudes to, empire by Victorian women writers and activists
• representations of empire: literature, autobiography, journalism, the visual arts, digital media, etc.

This conference reflects the concerns of the research strand “From Classicism to Victorianism” of CETAPS (the Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies). 

The standard conference fee is 80 euros. A reduced fee of 40 euros is available for students. The conference will be held in person at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto. All delegates are responsible for their own travel arrangements and accommodation.

Submissions should be sent by email to victoriaempire@letras.up.pt

Please organise your proposal into two separate files:

1. a file containing the full title and a 200-250 word description of your paper;
2. a file containing the author’s data: name, affiliation, contact address, paper title and author’s bio-note (150 words).

Please name these two documents as follows:

1. Surname_Name_Abstract_Empire
2. Surname_Name_AuthorInfo_Empire

Deadline for proposals: 15 June 2026

Notification of acceptance: 30 June 2026

Deadline for registration: 30 September 2026

More information available later at https://womenandempire.wordpress.com/

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Ana Cristina Mendes
(Professor of English Studies, University of Lisbon, President of the Association for Cultural Studies)

Martin Hewitt
(President of the British Association for Victorian Studies, Visiting Professor of English, University of Leeds, Editor of the Curran Index)

Executive Committee:
Jorge Bastos da Silva (coord.) | Ana Catarina Anjos | Cláudia Coimbra | Tânia Cerqueira

Scientific Committee:
Alexandra Lopes | Dragoș Ivana | Elena Butoescu | Iolanda Freitas Ramos | Jéssica Bispo | João Paulo Pereira da Silva | Jorge Bastos da Silva | Katarzyna Pisarska | Maria Zulmira Castanheira | Miguel Ramalhete Gomes | Paula Alexandra Guimarães | Rogério Puga

For further queries please contact:
CETAPS – Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies
Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto
Via Panorâmica, s/n
4150-564 PORTO
PORTUGAL
www.cetaps.com

Call for Papers
Special Issue of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film
Adapting Thackeray

Abstract Deadline: January 19, 2026

Is Thackeray adaptable? William Makepeace Thackeray was one of the titans of the Victorian age whose realistic works and characters satirized and moralized British society. While theatrical and cinematic adaptions of his works pale in comparison to other novelists like Dickens, many throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century reimagined Thackeray and his characters, particularly Becky Sharp, Colonel Newcombe, Barry Lyndon, and Arthur Pendennis. Attempts at adapting Thackeray produced stirring successes and complete failures from authors and dramatists including Dion Boucicault, J.M. Barrie, Langdon Mitchell, and John Brougham. These productions reworked Thackeray while exploring a number of social and cultural issues surrounding gender, empire, performance, and war. 

This special issue is interested in investigating the ways Thackeray has been adapted on the stage and early screen, but also in shining a light on the actors, directors, and performances that brought his works to life.

Topics might include:

• 19th/20th Century Early Film/Theater adaptions of Thackeray
• Thackeray and Empire
• Gender/Queer Thackeray
• Thackeray and Theater
• Transmedia Adaptations
• Thackeray and Performance
• Disability and Thackeray
• Thackeray and Theatre/Film history

Please send paper abstracts of 250 words with short bio (100 words) by January 19, 2026 to guest editors Matthew Skwiat at Matthew.Skwiat@morehouse.edu and Christina Jenat christina.jen@sus.edu. Acceptances will be sent out by February 9th. Final articles are due June 1st 2026 and should be between 5000-8000 words, inclusive of citation.

DEADLINE EXTENDED
CALL FOR PAPERS THE TWENTY-SEVENTH INTERNATIONAL THOMAS HARDY CONFERENCE AND FESTIVAL
Dorchester, Dorset, UK
July 25th—August 1st 2026

Submission Deadline: January 25, 2026

Paper proposals are welcome on any aspect of Hardy’s life, work, and legacy for the Twenty-Seventh International Hardy Conference and Festival. Significant Hardy anniversaries in 2026 include the 150th anniversary of The Hand of Ethelberta, the 140th anniversary of The Mayor of Casterbridge, the 120th anniversary of The Dynasts (Part 2), and the 110th anniversary of Selected Poems. Proposals for papers on any of these anniversary texts are especially welcome.

Papers should be planned for delivery times of a maximum of 20 minutes (approximately 2000 words).

Like its predecessors, the 2026 Conference is designed to appeal both to Hardy scholars and to general readers. We invite proposals from established scholars, Hardy enthusiasts, early-career researchers, independent scholars, and postgraduate students. Postgraduate students may be eligible for bursaries to help defray conference expenses. Confirmed plenary speakers include Jacqueline Dillion, Roger Ebbatson, Trish Ferguson, Mark Ford, Richard Franklin, and Jackie Walker. Lectures and conference papers will be supplemented by excursions and entertainments relating to the local context which Hardy’s work celebrates, and from which it emerged.

Proposals (absolute maximum 300 words) should be sent by email to Dr Mary Rimmer at mrimmer@unb.ca. Each must be accompanied by a short biographical note (75 words or less) in a separate document file. These notes will not be consulted during the vetting process but will be used by panel chairs to introduce speakers during the conference.

All submissions will be read and adjudicated by an academic panel. The closing date is 25 January 2026. Papers given at the Conference may be considered for publication in the peer-reviewed Thomas Hardy Journal appearing in Autumn 2026.

Please note that all submissions will be acknowledged: if the submission is not acknowledged within four business days, the proposer should re-send.

Doctoral Futures
Co-led by the ACLS, AHA, MLA, and Sbl

NAVSA is proud to participate in Doctoral Futures, an initiative co-led by the ACLS, AHA, MLA, and SBL, and generously funded by the Mellon Foundation. Doctoral Futures seeks to transform doctoral education in the humanities and interpretive social sciences to better serve students, advance scholarship, and contribute to the public good. NAVSA has committed to work with other scholarly organizations to:

• Advocate for higher completion rates, efficient time-to-degree, equitable funding, and sustainable program structures;
• Support the recruitment of diverse cohorts including first-generation students, students from underrepresented institutions, and non-traditional candidates;
• Promote curricular innovation that integrates rigorous academic and scholarly training with professional development;
• Support collective and holistic mentorship models and training faculty in inclusive advising practices;
• Center principles of access and inclusion in all aspects of graduate education;
• Prioritize student well-being throughout the doctoral experience.

We welcome recognition of the full spectrum of careers for which doctoral training prepares graduates, including positions in teaching-intensive institutions, cultural organizations, the public service, the private sector, and publicly engaged scholarship, and commit to legitimizing these diverse pathways through our conferences, publications, and professional discourse.

More information about the Doctoral Futures initiatives can be found here: https://www.acls.org/doctoral-futures/

Call for Papers
The Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Humanities (JURH)

Submission Deadline: February 9, 2026

WANT TO PUBLISH YOUR SCHOLARLY WORK?

• The Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Humanities (JURH) is looking for excellent undergraduate essays.

WHAT IS JURH?

• JURH is a new biennial journal that will provide a national forum to showcase the best in undergraduate Humanities research.
• JURH is governed by a board of nationally recognized scholars and overseen by Dr. Lara Karpenko, Professor of English, and Director of the Center for the Humanities at Carroll University and Dr. Lauri Dietz, Executive Director, Center for Faculty Development, Loyola University, Chicago.
• JURH is run by an Editorial Team of undergraduates. The ET will be responsible for all publishing and editing decisions.
• The inaugural issue in 2023 published 14 articles representing universities such as Brown University, Beloit College, and Chapman University. Submissions also represented four countries and five US states!
• Click here to learn more about JURH.

HOW TO APPLY?

• Send .docx documents in an email attachment to Dr. Lara Karpenko at lkarpenk@carrollu.edu by February 9th, 2026.
• All work must be submitted in MLA format and be between 4,000 and 10,000 words.
• All writers must be current undergraduates or have graduated within the past twenty-four months. 
• Writers can be from any 2- or 4- year institution across the United States or world.
• The editors are looking for work in the following fields (list not exhaustive): art history, critical race studies, cultural studies, dance studies, film criticism, literary criticism and literary studies, gender studies, history, musicology, philosophy, politics and political theory, rhetoric, religious studies, and theatre studies.

Victorian Periodicals Review
ASSOCIATE EDITOR POSITION

Application Deadline: December 15, 2025

Victorian Periodicals Review (VPR) is hiring an Associate Editor to oversee book reviews and assist the Editor with content development. The Associate Editor will help shape the journal’s editorial vision and critical interests, and we are seeking an innovative scholar of nineteenth-century periodical studies with meticulous editing and organizational skills.

The Associate Editor will be responsible for the book reviews section, including identifying new books relevant to the field of periodical studies, coordinating with publishers, recruiting reviewers, offering advice for revision, copyediting, and proofreading. The Associate Editor will also work with the Editor to organize roundtables, state-of-the-field essays, and other special features. The Associate Editorship is a three-year position with the opportunity to renew; it is an unpaid position and is ideal for a scholar looking to develop editorial and leadership skills.

VPR is deliberately seeking to diversify its editorial board, and we encourage expressions of interest from scholars from a wide range of backgrounds, specializations, and career levels. Candidates must have demonstrated expertise in nineteenth-century periodicals or newspapers (through relevant publications or teaching) and impeccable written communication skills. Editorial experience is desirable (such as working on a journal or digital project, editing special issues or collections of essays, or supervising MA/PhD students).

Candidates should send a one-page letter explaining their interest and qualifications for the role and a one-page CV to Katherine Malone, Editor, katherine.malone@sdstate.edu by Monday, December 15, 2025. The position will begin in late January 2026.

2026 Joseph R. Dunlap Memorial Fellowship
William Morris Society, United States

Application Deadline: January 2, 2026

The William Morris Society in the United States calls for applications for the 2026 Joseph R. Dunlap Memorial Fellowship.

The Dunlap Fellowship supports scholarly and creative work about William Morris. The fellowship offers funding of up to $1000 for research and other expenses. Projects may deal with any subject – biographical, literary, historical, social, artistic, political, typographical – relating to Morris. The Society also encourages translations of Morris’s works and the production of teaching materials (lesson plans and course materials) suitable for use at the elementary, secondary, college, or adult-education level. Applications are sought particularly from those at the beginning of their careers. Recipients may be from any country and need not have an academic or institutional appointment, nor must recipients hold a Ph.D. Although recipients are not required to be members of the William Morris Society, the Society encourages those applying to join and to share in the benefits of membership; membership is free for students.

In some years the Society offers a second, smaller fellowship, the William Morris Society Award (the amount to be determined by the committee of judges). The purpose and aims of this second award are the same as for the Dunlap Fellowship.

Applicants should send a two-page description of their project, a separate budget page, a c.v., and one letter of recommendation. For a translation project, please submit an additional letter from a recognized authority able to certify the applicant’s competence in both languages. For teaching materials, we ask also for a cover letter describing the ways in which the materials might be used in learning situations. Applications must be received by January 2, 2026.

Send applications by email with the subject line “Application for the 2026 Dunlap Award” to: williammorrissocietyus@gmail.com.

Scholars seeking support for their participation in conference sessions sponsored by the William Morris Society in the United States are encouraged to apply for the Society’s Conference Travel Award. Please contact us at williammorrissocietyus@gmail.com for more information.

 BWWC 2026: "Collections & Collectives"
The 34th Annual 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers Conference
Auburn University, AUburn, Alabama
May 7-9, 2026

Proposal Deadline: January 15, 2026
Keynote Speakers: Elizabeth Miller (UC Davis), Julie Park (Penn State), and Julian Whitney (Wabash College)

The organizers of the 34th annual British Women Writers Conference (BWWC 2026) invite proposals for papers focusing on the theme of “Collections & Collectives.” The organizers wish to consider ways in which those who identify as women engaged in or textually represented practices of collecting and collectivity within global and transatlantic contexts during the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Proposals could consider collection materially or conceptually: in terms of objects and institutions or in terms of creating, organizing, and mobilizing collectively. What personal or public benefit comes from collections and collective action? What harms are involved in various means of collecting or in collective action? How might these be mitigated and redressed?

Proposals might engage with the conference theme as it relates to the following topics:

• Libraries (personal and public)
• Archives (physical and digital)
• Museums (art, portrait, zoological, natural history)
• Scrapbooks, extra-illustrated books commonplace books, anthologies
• Print and manuscript ephemera, autographs
• Menageries, botanical gardens, conservatories
• Tchotchkes, mementos, souvenirs
• Salons and soirees
• Bluestockings
• Suffrage
• Socialist activism
• Collaborative writing
• Artists’ collectives
• Cooperatives
• Communes

Proposals on other topics related to archives and collections, as well as topics that fall outside of the scope of the conference theme, are also welcome. We are also strongly encouraging submissions on pedagogical and professional issues, including roundtables, workshops, and plenary discussions.

“The Underground: Prohibition, Abolition, Expression”
Midwest Victorian Studies Association 2026
Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio
April 10-12, 2026

Proposal Deadline: December 6, 2025

Inspired by Cincinnati’s historic role in the Underground Railroad and its National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the theme of this year’s conference is “The Underground: Prohibition, Abolition, Expression.” This year’s conference seeks to investigate the relationship between the literal underground — the built and geological spaces beneath our feet — and the metaphorical and political “undergrounds” of Victorian Britain. Prohibitions and abolitions can drive things underground, but the underground can also be a place of fecundity and growth. What kinds of expression result from conditions of prohibition or abolition? What grows underground?

Paper topics might include but are not limited to:

• Colonial uprisings and revolutions; underground newspapers, publications, and circulations
• Abolition: legacies of abolishing the slave trade, emancipation, reactions to the U.S. Civil War
• Race science and racial passing as modes of concealment or subversion
• Prohibition and temperance movements
• Underground diplomacy and intelligence networks in imperial contexts
• Underground railways in London and elsewhere
• Scientific and subterranean imaginaries, e.g. geological time, fossil records, stratigraphy
• Seeds, literal and figurative: underground forms of botanical life (e.g. roots, fungi, rhizomatic species)
• Anthems and protest music
• Censorship and archives that exist due to censorship (e.g. Lord Chamberlain’s Plays)
• Laboring “underground”: mining, sex work, child labor, informal or clandestine earnings
• Bans, embargos, vetoes, boycotts, bars, disbarment, erasure
• Finding one’s voice in a repressive atmosphere
• “Underground” sexualities and gender expressions
• Marginal religious sects and spiritualist circles
• Substitution, coding, improvisation
• Closed sessions, private meetings, clubs, secret societies 
• Fairy tales and underground worlds
• Discarded, suppressed, or “low” cultural forms (e.g.ephemera and scrapbooks)
• Forms of resistance: labor regulations, union efforts, grass-roots political movements
• Technologies of concealment and exposure (e.g. x-rays, coding, telegraphy)

Remote Participation Keyword Roundtable:

The majority of the conference will be devoted to in-person papers. However, in lieu of seminars this year, we are experimenting with a hybrid roundtable session for lightning talks on a keyword. Thus a subset of our call for papers is a call for proposals for the keyword roundtable, which includes the opportunity for remote participation.

If you are interested in participating this session, please propose a keyword and plan to give a six-minute talk about how it illuminates and raises questions about the Victorian period and our contemporary interactions with it. Talks that engage with teaching, research process, and other types of work are welcome. These short presentations will be followed by a moderated discussion of the intersections — conceptual or practical — between these topics. 

All other conference sessions will be in-person only. Remote participants (presenters and attendees) will have access to this keyword session only at a separate, much reduced, conference registration rate. This hybrid format offers space to surface terms and concepts that resist easy consensus, and to reflect critically on what language could or could not do in the nineteenth century — and what it still can’t do today.

Conference Highlights:

• Stedman Lecture by Nathan K. Hensley, Professor, Georgetown University
• MVSA Lifetime Achievement Award honoring Linda K. Hughes, Professor Emerita, Texas Christian University
• The conference will run from lunchtime, Friday, April 10, to lunchtime, Sunday, April 12. The Board Meeting will take place in the morning of Friday, April 10.

How to Apply:

Please submit an abstract (~350 words) and a brief CV for individual papers or keyword submissions. To propose an in-person panel or roundtable, submit a brief overview, plus individual paper abstracts and brief CVs for all participants.

Please apply by December 6, 2025, through this Google form (https://bit.ly/MVSA2026). 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.

Image: A Ride for Freedom-The Fugitive Slaves (Eastman Johnson, 1862) 

The Critical Age in Victorian Popular Literature
Online Study Day in Association with the Victorian Popular Fiction Association
Tuesday, May 19, 2026

Keynote Speaker: Dr Louise Benson James, Ghent University

Deadline for Submissions: February 19, 2026

This one-day symposium seeks to explore representations of the ‘critical age’ – the (peri-) menopause – in Victorian popular literature. The peri-menopausal and menopausal experiences of Victorian women have to date been overlooked or underrepresented in scholarly discussions of the period. Victorian popular literature, from novels to periodicals to advice books, provided an essential forum for discussing and shaping the public understanding of women’s bodies, even as much of it sought to obscure the female body. The (peri-) menopausal experience was often framed in terms of illness, excess, and degeneration, or, conversely, was relegated to silence. Women at the ‘critical age’ are frequently marginalised and associated with a range of negative stereotypes in literary and cultural narratives. This call for papers invites exploration of how this phase of women’s lives was constructed in the Victorian imagination, in medical discourses and advice literature, and in women’s lived experiences.

Organizers invite 20-minute papers exploring any aspect of the critical age in Victorian popular literature. Topics for exploration include but are not limited to:

• Representations of the critical age in Victorian popular fiction

• The medicalisation of (peri-) menopause

• Cultural constructions of middle-aged women

• Class and (peri-) menopause

• Menopause in Victorian advice literature

• Motherhood and (peri-) menopause

• Experiences of the critical age in Victorian women’s life writing

• Myths and popular misconceptions

The event will also include a Digital Humanities Research Skills Workshop, with an emphasis on making digital methods more accessible. Organizers invite short papers or workshop proposals that showcase how digital tools can be used to research women and their bodies in Victorian literature. Possible topics include data creation/cleaning/visualisation, textual, quantitative or statistical analysis, using AI or specific tools (such as Voyant or Power BI).

The event will be free to VPFA members and £5 for non-members. To join the VPFA click HERE.

Please send proposals (max. 250 words) and a short biographical note to jessica.cox@brunel.ac.uk and siobhan.smith@tees.ac.uk by 19th February 2026.