of victorian interest

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.