of victorian interest

Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature
A Special winter 2027 Issue
"Planetary Precarity"

 Abstract Deadline: November 1, 2026

Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature invites article submissions on the topic of “planetary precarity” for its Winter 2027 issue. This special issue will consider how precarity is produced on both local and global scales. As humans confront our own possible extinction-level threats caused by climate disaster and, supposedly, a future dominated by artificial superintelligence, the organizers seek to investigate how the Victorians reconceived their own precarity in the face of extractive capitalism and ecological crisis. Essays may consider the complicities of Victorian science (including scientific institutions and technologies spawned by scientific breakthroughs), politics, and economics in producing precarity locally and/or globally. Essays could also explore counter-movements that fight to reduce precarity, such as eco-topian communities, trade unions, political parties, agricultural reformers, activist movements, and artists of the period. Authors may choose their preferred lens, from carbon to ecology, from labor to design, from bodies to affect. Overall, the special issue wishes to theorize and historically trace the emergence of the planetary as a politically and ecologically resonant category during the nineteenth century, although essays may also investigate precarity as a historically situated feeling generated by nineteenth-century political trends, scientific findings, and speculative art.

 

Essays should be 7,500-9,500 words, inclusive of notes. The citation style is The Chicago Manual of Style (18th edition), full footnotes and no bibliography. Please submit full essays by November 1, 2026, via Scholastica (https://victorians.scholasticahq.com/for-authors).

Ashley Miller (Albion College) joins Victorians’ editorial team as guest editor for this issue.

Image source: A Private View at the Royal Academy (1883) by William Powell Frith

"Keywords in Religion and Victorian Studies"
A Special Issue of Victorian Studies
NAVSA Religion and Spiritualities Caucus

 Abstract Deadline: July 31, 2026

At the invitation of Victorian Studies, the NAVSA Religion and Spiritualities Caucus is organizing a special issue devoted to fifteen keywords that illuminate the interdisciplinary dimensions of nineteenth-century religion. Contributors are invited to take up a particular keyword and make a pointed, argumentative case for what that keyword makes newly visible— historically, methodologically, or theoretically—in Victorian studies. 

We seek short essays (2,300-word maximum, inclusive of endnotes and bibliography), each taking its own distinctive approach to its keyword. 

The aim is not for a dictionary definition or encyclopedia-style entry but instead a polemical short-form argument about why the keyword matters now and what it makes newly visible in the study of Victorian religion. The collection as a whole aspires to serve as both a methodological resource and teaching tool, while showcasing some of the exciting work currently happening in our field.

Possible keywords might include:

• Affect 
• Archives 
• Class 
• Disability 
• Ecocriticism 
• Empire 
• Form 
• Gender 
• Industry 
• Lyric 
• Materiality 
• Politics 
• Print Culture 
• Race 
• Syncretism 
• Technology 
• Translation 
• Transnational 

Contributors are warmly encouraged to propose keywords not on this list.

To submit: Please email proposals of a keyword with a 300-word abstract to the Steering Committee of the Religion and Spiritualities Caucus at vs-rel-keywords@outlook.com by July 31, 2026. Abstracts should include your name, institutional affiliation, and a brief indication of your proposed essay’s central argument. Decisions on the abstracts will be communicated in September 2026, and final submissions will be due April 30, 2027 for peer review.

Image Source: The Lord Gave and the Lord Hath Taketh Away, Blessed Be the Name of the Lord by Frank Holl, 1868

HOgg’s World Now: Conference
James Hogg Society
University of Glasgow
July 2-4, 2027

 Abstract Deadline: December 31, 2026

The James Hogg Society will be holding a conference at the University of Glasgow on July 2-4, 2027. The organizers warmly invite paper proposals that engage with any aspect of Hogg’s life and writing and with the broader community of authors associated with Scottish Romanticism. The first volume of The Stirling / South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg was published over thirty years ago now, and the edition is still ongoing, with several collections of Hogg’s periodical publications recently released. Considering the progress of this edition and other major editorial projects in Scottish Romantic studies (i.e., Galt, Lockhart, Scottish Women Writers), as well as new theoretical developments, this conference invites you to consider new ways of reading Hogg and his world. 

The James Hogg Society particularly welcome proposals from graduate students, postgraduate students, and early career scholars.

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following: 

• Editing the works of the Scottish Romantics 

• The Blackwood’s Circle (including John Gibson Lockhart, William Maginn, David Macbeth Moir, Walter Scott, John Galt, John Wilson) 

• James Hogg and periodical culture

• Scottish women writers of the Romantic period and their relationship to Hogg and his world

• Hogg and transatlantic Scottish Romanticism 

• New archival, bibliographical, and editorial approaches to Hogg

• Hogg’s afterlives, including adaptations and fan culture 

• Reading Hogg and the Scottish Romantics through a Green or Blue Humanities lens

• James Hogg and Animal Studies

• Dis/ability in the works of Hogg and his contemporaries

• Theorizing Hogg’s treatment of Jacobitism in light of Leith Davis and Kevin James’s new edited collection, Shaping Jacobitism, 1688 to the Present: Memory, Culture, Networks (Edinburgh University Press, 2025)

• Hogg, colonization, empire, and/or Indigeneity

• Race and ethnicity in the works of the Scottish Romantics

• Hope in the unsettled age of the Scottish Romantics

• Scottish Romanticism and literary play/playfulness

Given Hogg’s tendency to challenge traditional forms, this conference will disrupt elements of the traditional conference, including different forms of presentations that allow for more time to discuss the ideas attendees bring to the table. The organizers welcome proposals for twenty-minute conference papers and for panels with a variety of formats, including roundtables.

Please submit a 250-word abstract by 31 December 2026 to Sharon Alker at alkersr@whitman.edu. Please address any questions to Sharon Alker.

Image Source: Portrait by John Watson Gordon, 1830

Leon Edel Prize
Henry James Review

Submission Deadline: November 1, 2026

The Leon Edel Prize is awarded annually for the best essay on Henry James by a beginning scholar.  The prize carries with it an award of $300, and the prize-winning essay will be published in the Henry James Review. 

The competition is open to applicants who have not held a full-time academic appointment for more than four years. Independent scholars and graduate students are encouraged to apply. 

Essays should be 20-30 pages (including notes), original, and not under submission elsewhere or previously published.  Please send the manuscript in Microsoft Word format.

Send electronic submissions to: hjamesr@creighton.edu

Author's name should not appear on the manuscript.  Please identify essays as submissions for the Leon Edel Prize.  The competition is limited to one submission per author.

A brief curriculum vitae should be included.  

Decisions about regular publication are also made at the same time as the prize decision. 

Image Source: National Portrait Gallery, London

Event
South Africa, 1904
A collaboration between the research society for victorian PERIODICALS (RSVP) and navsa’s empire and colonialism CAUCUS
Zoom
June 12, 2026

You are invited to "South Africa, 1904": A Collaboration Between RSVP and NAVSA's Empire and Colonialism Caucus! As part of our digital events series, the Empire Caucus has organized a Pick-a-Periodical event featuring Dr. Gigi Tang with our friends at the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP). Join us on Zoom on June 12 at 8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m BST / 5 p.m. CET to learn about the periodical South Africa and how Dr. Tang uses it in her research. The event will feature a presentation followed by an interactive discussion of a pre-circulated issue from the periodical.

Register now!

2026 Early Career Essay Prize
Victorian Poetry

Submission Deadline: August 3, 2026

Victorian Poetry invites submissions for its 2026 Early Career Essay Prize, which recognizes exemplary essays by untenured scholars of all ranks and affiliations (including NTT and graduate student colleagues). Conferred on an annual basis, the prize carries an award of $500 and publication in Victorian Poetry. Strong essays that do not win the award may also be considered for publication as recommended by the prize committee. Submissions are due 3 August 2026. Scholars wishing to be considered should submit anonymized MS Word essays and brief CVs to victorianpoetryjournal@gmail.com with “Early Career Essay Prize” in the subject line. Prior to submission, consult the Victorian Poetry guidelines for authors. Essays written with the assistance of generative AI are ineligible for the prize.

Winning articles will be selected according to three criteria: (1) significance of contribution to the field of Victorian poetry (including its involvement with Victorian studies and other areas of inquiry in or beyond literary studies); (2) excellence of research, interpretation, and method; and (3) efficacy of presentation. The journal continues to expand its purview to a wider compass of archives and approaches. The organizers welcome work that capaciously (re)interprets the field's originary contexts and reconsiders Victorian poetry (broadly construed) in new, innovative, cross-disciplinary, theoretical, and / or experimental ways.

time for teaching
Victorian interdisciplinary studies association of the western United states
virtual roundtable series
fall 2026

 Abstract Deadline: June 15, 2026

This virtual roundtable series, organized by the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States (VISAWUS), is dedicated to the problem and practice of teaching Victorian studies in an era marked by retrograde policies and techno-optimistic imperatives. It asks, how do educators teach nineteenth-century literature and culture, while remaining present to the challenges of the twenty-first century university? And what might educators gain by employing Victorian modes of embodied learning—such as object lessons and recitation assignments—in the contemporary classroom?

A Matter of Life and Death
Victorians Institute Conference 2026
Crowne Plaza Hotel, Knoxville, TN
September 11-13, 2026

Abstract Deadline: June 1, 2026

This year’s theme asks conference participants to consider matters of life and death in the Victorian era. What did it mean to live and die in Victorian England? How are matters of life and death reflected in the literature of the time?

How did Victorians understand the precariousness of life, the inevitability of death, and the spaces in between? What social, medical, and philosophical frameworks shaped their experience of mortality and survival? Organizers encourage papers that address how literature, art, and culture negotiated these tensions—between body and spirit, progress and decay, presence and absence.

Matters of life and death were everywhere in the Victorian world: in the rise of public health movements and sanitary reform, in debates about evolution and spiritualism, in the moral crises of empire and industrial modernity. They animated the novel’s preoccupation with illness, inheritance, and the afterlife; they haunted poetry’s meditations on memory and loss; they infused journalism, theology, and science alike.

Organizers welcome a wide range of interpretations—from studies of literal death and mourning to figurative or ideological “life and death” struggles within gender, race, class, religion, and nation. What does it mean, now, to care about Victorian life and Victorian death? How might our contemporary critical practices themselves be understood as matters of life and death for the field?

Some possible areas of exploration might be:

A Matter of Life

• Birth, babies, children, marriage, family, lineage
• Celebration, joy, fulfillment, community
• Feasts, bounty, wealth
• Employment
• Growth, Urbanization
• Science, medicine, nursing, caretaking
• Darwin and Evolution
• Home, shelter
• Animals, harvest, nature, growth

A Matter of Death

• Death, funerals, cemeteries, burial
• Mourning clothes and customs
• Hunger and food insecurity
• Unemployment
• Stagnation, urban decay
• Violence, murder, grave robbing
• Homelessness, incarceration
• The Victorian Gothic

A Matter of Life and Death

• The undead: ghosts, vampires, hauntings
• Mortality/immortality
• Letters, diaries, biography, legacy
• The Beginning or The End
• The remembered and the forgotten, memorials
• Sickness and Disease
• Sanitation and Public Health
• Seances and the Supernatural
• Empire and Colonialism
• Industrialism and Machines

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words and a brief CV to thevictoriansinstitute@gmail.com by June 1st, 2026. Presentations should be 15-20 minutes in length. Undergraduates are invited to submit to a separate undergraduate panel; please send abstract of 300 words or less accompanied by brief bio instead of standard academic CV.

Questions may be addressed to the conference e-mail address (above) or directly to Dr. Molly Granatino at granatino@utk.edu.

Call For Papers
Dickens on Screen
Online Event Hosted by the Dickens Society
June 6, 2026

Abstract Deadline: May 11, 2026

The Dickens Society is delighted to announce a new online event to mark Dickens’s passing. On this occasion, our theme does not dwell on the Inimitable’s death, but focuses instead on his ever-expanding life on the big and small screen. Dickens was first adapted for silent cinema in 1901, and since then his work has appeared countless times on film and television. Since Dickens’s Bicentenary in 2012, a number of significant screen adaptations have appeared, including Armando Iannucci’s Personal History of David Copperfield (2019), Steven Knight’s Great Expectations (2023), two Artful Dodger character adaptations, and multiple versions of A Christmas Carol.

For this Dickens on Screen virtual event, organisers invite short papers of no more than 10 minutes, to be recorded as a video presentation with slides, on any aspect of Dickens in relation to screen culture. Contributions on more recent, individual adaptations are very welcome, as are more wide-ranging discussions of Dickens’s varied global screen history and reconsiderations of Dickens as a cinematic novelist. Papers will be assessed on the basis of their contribution both to our understanding of Dickens and also to the study of his screen afterlives.

The event will be held in the early afternoon (Eastern Daylight Time) on Saturday June 6th. During the session, the video presentations will be shared and a live discussion with time for questions will follow. Accepted speakers will be expected to attend the live online event on June 6th, and further guidelines on recording videos will be provided in due course.

Please send abstracts of 100-200 words and a short bio to the organiser, Chris Louttit, at chris.louttit@ru.nl by May 11th. Decisions will be sent to speakers by May 13th, and video presentations should be shared with the organiser by May 31st. Any queries should be emailed to the address above.

Image source: Dickens's Dream (Robert William Buss, 1880)

Award
Literary Encyclopedia Research Awards

Deadline: May 10, 2026

The Literary Encyclopedia has extended the deadline for round one of our Research Awards until May 10, 2026.  Full details are available here.

Awards of between £500 and £750 are open to eligible emerging scholars and early career researchers, either to support the cost of research-related travel, or to assist with approved remote research costs.