of victorian interest

Call for papers
Fiction in Victorian and edwardian socialist PERIODICALS
Virtual conference
February 5-6, 2027

 Abstract Deadline: October 31, 2026

This online study day, the first co-organized by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) and the Victorian Popular Fiction Association (VPFA), will bring together scholars from both societies to share knowledge and build expertise about understudied popular authors and genres, complex multidisciplinary forms, and the material print genre of socialist periodicals.

The socialist movement emerged in Victorian Britain during the 1880s with the foundation of the Democratic Federation (later the Social Democratic Federation) in 1881, the Fabian Society in 1884, and the Socialist League in 1885. Alongside the political developments ran a rich seam of socialist fiction, both novel length and short form. Like the Chartists before them, socialists used fiction as a vehicle for political discourse, shaping it for a popular audience. The majority of it was published within periodicals, never reaching book form.

Michael Rosen (2018) has argued that, “In Britain, the ideas of socialism embodied many strands of intertwined thought and activity, owing their thought to very different – sometimes contradictory – traditions.” The fiction which emerged during this period reflected those often-conflicting ideologies and factions.  It was presented in a multiplicity of genres, including science fiction, fairy tales, fables, moral tales, realist novels, humourous stories, mystery stories, romances and utopias.

Many authors of such texts are familiar to us – George Bernard Shaw, Edith Nesbit, William Morris, H.G. Wells, Edward Carpenter, Margaret Harkness – while others have remained more obscure and less known, although popular in their own time.  Socialism was an international movement and many European, North American and Australian socialist novels enjoyed widespread English distribution and recognition, with influences running in both directions. Socialist periodicals were consumed by individual readers but also communally: in reading groups; lectures and meetings; informal “worker’s libraries” and reading rooms; and read aloud during services in the Labour Church.  The use of fiction as part of collective activity is another research area that demands further exploration.

Suggested Topics for Proposals

RSVP and VPFA invite proposals for a joint study day on topics including but not limited to:

• Genre and socialist fiction, whether prose or poetry (i.e., epic, utopia, fable)
• Periodical publication and / or serialisation; the socialist periodical as a home for fiction
• Education versus entertainment in the socialist periodical
• Modes of reception
• Trans-Atlantic, Trans-European, and / or Imperial Socialist fiction
• Regional and / or dialect socialist fiction
• Religion and socialist fiction
• Gender in socialist fiction
• Relationship between socialist fiction and other movements and campaigns – eugenics, pacifism, social purity, temperance, pastoralism, feminism, sexual liberation, anticolonialism, anarchism, the cooperative and guild movements, etc.
• Individual writers, editors, proprietors, and / or texts
• Disagreements and splits within the socialist movement and the role of the periodical press

Visit https://rs4vp.org/vpfa-online-study-day/ for more information.

Call for Contributions

Volcanic MATERIALITY in Literature and Art of the ANTHROPOCENE
Edinburgh University press

 Abstract Deadline: November 30, 2026

Volcanic Materiality: Phenomena in the Age of the Anthropocene asserts that volcanic eruptions during the long nineteenth century contributed to the rise of the Anthropocene, which has been viewed as human impact on the climate and environment since James Watts’s reinvention of the steam engine in 1784. Whereas in the past geologic epoch, the Holocene, the Earth evolved and changed over deep time, unprecedented changes have occurred in the past 240 years inducing a global, existential crisis as a direct result from human intervention due in part to capitalist industrialism, which has disrupted the climate and environment. Volcanic Materiality: Phenomena in the Age of the Anthropocene stakes out the claim that volcanic eruptions in their fiery reality with a Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) of 4 or greater created shocks to the system that exacerbated the growing threat of carbon emissions. Subsequently, with implications for the 21st century, the edition considers these two major questions: 1) How have volcanoes and humanity contributed to the rise of the Anthropocene due to volcanic and anthropogenic activity? 2) What sort of evidence appears in literary and visual representations during the long nineteenth century?

Volcanic matter really matters. During a one hundred year span from the 1780s to 1880s, a series of volcanic eruptions occurred that altered the atmosphere, disrupted weather conditions, and caused unprecedented loss due to famine and widespread disease: Laki, Iceland (1783-1784); Vesuvius, Italy (1794); Pico Viejo, Canary Islands (1798); Tambora, Indonesia (1815); Ferdinandea, Sicily (1831); Hekla, Iceland (1840, 1845); and Krakatoa, Indonesia (1883). Various critics have written about the systemic effects geologically, meteorologically, and ecologically such as Richard Altick, David Higgins, Monique Morgan, Marilynn Olsen, Nicholas Robbins, Jesse Oak Taylor, and Gillen D’Arcy Wood. 

A variety of writers and artists documented the effects due, in part to a great extent, to the eruptions, which may include the sky watchers identified, but are not limited to the following. 

In literary studies, one might think of literary and non-literary records:

• Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne (1789) in response to the effects of the Laki eruption
• William Wordsworth's Lucy poems written in Goslar, Germany (e.g., "Strange fits of passion" and "A slumber did my spirit seal") influenced by the Pico Viejo eruption
• George Gordon, Lord Byron's "Darkness" (1816) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818) in response to the Tambora eruption
• Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Remarkable Sunsets" in Nature (1883) and John Ruskin's "The 'Storm-Cloud' of the Nineteenth Century" (1884) shaped by the Krakatoa eruption

In visual art, a host of artists captured the dramatic stratovolcanic eruptions and the sky altering effects:

• Joseph Wright of Derby's Vesuvius from Portici (1774-1776)
• J.M.W. Turner's Eruption of Soufriere Mountain (1812)
• J.M.W. Turner's Vesuvius in Eruption (1817)
• Caspar David Friedrich's Woman before the Rising or Setting Sun (1818-1824)
• Georges Seurat's Bathers at Asnieres (1884)
• William Ascroft's Twilight and afterglow effects at Chelsea (1888)

Scholars interested in submitting to the call for contributions to the edited collection Volcanic Materiality in Literature and Art of the Anthropocene, under contract with Edinburgh University Press, will be asked to include a 200-300 word abstract along with a 100 word biography sent to Dewey W. Hall, Ph.D. at dwhall@cpp.edu. The deadline will be November 30, 2026. Full drafts will be due February 28, 2027.

Image Source: Caspar David Friedrich's Woman before the Rising or Setting Sun (1818-1824)

Call for Editors
The Journal of UNDERGRADUATE Research in the Humanities (JURH)
Carroll University Center for the Humanities

Application Deadline: November 1, 2026

The Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Humanities (JURH) is looking for guest editors for its Summer 2027 issue. The organizers are happy to consider nineteenth century-focused themes. Click here to learn more about JURH.

Assistant Professor, TENURE-TRACK, Victorian literature
Department of English
University of notre dame
notre dame, IN

Application Deadline: October 22, 2026

The Department of English at the University of Notre Dame invites applications for a full-time, tenure-track appointment at the rank of Assistant Professor in Victorian Literature. The anticipated start date for the position is August 2027, and candidates must have completed all requirements for a PhD in Victorian literature or closely related field by that date. Candidates should show evidence of an ambitious program of research and a commitment to excellence in teaching and service. We welcome applicants working in any genre and with any critical approach. The position requires teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels (normally two courses per semester), including introductory or survey courses in Victorian literature, and courses in more specialized topics. The successful candidate will also mentor and advise students at all levels. 

To apply, candidates should submit the following through Interfolio: https://apply.interfolio.com/192973

• An application letter;
• A current cv;
• The names and contact information of three referees (who will be contacted if the candidate is called to interview).

Candidates may be asked to provide additional materials later in the review process, including a writing sample and dossier of references.

Applications must be received by October 22, 2026, for full consideration. We expect to conduct all interviews of longlisted candidates over Zoom. Finalists will be invited to visit campus for departmental interviews.

Inquiries may be directed to Professor Yasmin Solomonescu, Chair of the Search Committee, at ysolomon@nd.edu. Further information about the Department of English and the University of Notre Dame can be found at https://english.nd.edu/ and https://www.nd.edu/.

The University of Notre Dame seeks to attract, develop, and retain the highest quality faculty, staff and administration. The University is an Equal Opportunity Employer, and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national or ethnic origin, sex, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or age in employment. Moreover, Notre Dame prohibits discrimination against veterans or disabled qualified individuals, and complies with 41 CFR 60-741.5(a) and 41 CFR 60-300.5(a). We strongly encourage applications from candidates attracted to a university with a Catholic identity.

Associate or full professor Position in Victorian Literature
Department of English
University of notre dame
notre dame, IN

Application Deadline: October 22, 2026

The Department of English at the University of Notre Dame invites applications for a full-time appointment at the rank of Associate Professor or Professor in Victorian Literature. Candidates should have a distinguished record of publication and a demonstrated commitment to excellence in teaching and service. We welcome applicants working in any genre and with any critical approach. The position requires teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels (normally two courses per semester), including introductory or survey courses in Victorian literature, and courses in more specialized topics. The successful candidate will also mentor and advise students at all levels. We are particularly seeking candidates eager to take a leading role in the life of our department and university, and in the profession as a whole. The anticipated start date for the position is August 2027. 

To apply, candidates should submit the following through Interfolio: https://apply.interfolio.com/193155

• An application letter;
• A current cv;
• The names and contact information of three referees (who will be contacted if the candidate is called to interview).

Candidates may be asked to provide additional materials later in the review process, including a writing sample and dossier of references.

Applications must be received by October 22, 2026, for full consideration. We expect to conduct all interviews of longlisted candidates over Zoom. Finalists will be invited to visit campus for departmental interviews.

Inquiries may be directed to Professor Yasmin Solomonescu, Chair of the Search Committee, at ysolomon@nd.edu. Further information about the Department of English and the University of Notre Dame can be found at https://english.nd.edu/ and https://www.nd.edu/.

The University of Notre Dame seeks to attract, develop, and retain the highest quality faculty, staff and administration. The University is an Equal Opportunity Employer, and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national or ethnic origin, sex, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or age in employment. Moreover, Notre Dame prohibits discrimination against veterans or disabled qualified individuals, and complies with 41 CFR 60-741.5(a) and 41 CFR 60-300.5(a). We strongly encourage applications from candidates attracted to a university with a Catholic identity. 

Call for papers
A cultural history of countercultures in the long-nineteenth century
Bloomsbury Cultural Histories Series

 Abstract Deadline: December 1, 2026

Although the term “counterculture” is a recent development, tracing back only to the 1970s, cultural movements and ideals that reject established social values and practices, or that oppose traditional, entrenched mores and expectations, have a much longer history. Indeed, many of the social transformations associated with the modern era emerged from such challenges to the mainstream. Enlightenment thought rejected blind faith in tradition, even as some reformers enacted harsh censorship while circulating their own pornographic or heretical texts clandestinely. Romanticism elevated rebellion against social strictures, even as it was leveraged as a tool of nation building. Bohemian circles challenged bourgeois class conventions and norms around drug use, even as many bohemians benefitted from systemic societal privileges. Some abolitionist and suffrage movements in nineteenth-century Europe and the Atlantic world contested both the bourgeois model of the “angel of the hearth” and the developing pseudoscience used to justify enslavement, racism, and, eventually, eugenics, even as other reformers worked within eugenic frameworks or fostered an understanding of gender that, in many places, led women’s rights to be more restricted at the end of the century than they were at its outset. 

These and other countercultural formations provide the basis for this volume, which explores the emergence, scope, and impact of countercultures, broadly understood, amid the consolidation of industrial modernity and bourgeois hegemony in the long nineteenth century. The organizers seek essays that examine the relationships between dominant cultural forms, alternative ways of being, and interpretive frameworks that resisted, transgressed, or rejected the mainstream. Did countercultures consistently develop in direct opposition to cultural norms? How were they subsumed, assimilated, or rejected by dominant cultural actors? To what extent did cultural practices, political movements, and aesthetic forms that departed from the norm transform the status quo?

This series understands countercultures as collective formations that, across historical periods, make everyday life a site of transgressive refusal. Through alternative ways of living, believing, expressing, organizing, and belonging, they challenge dominant norms and reveal the boundaries of the proper, sacred, respectable, and legitimate as historically made, contested, and open to change; some remain fleeting experiments, while others help make broader social transformation imaginable.

(Inter)disciplinary research essays in any field are welcome. Essays should speak to a broad, interdisciplinary audience, and should respond to one of the following topic areas, within the context of the long nineteenth century:

• Countercultural movements and their origins
• Rebels and poets
• Aesthetics and sounds
• Transgressive genders and sexualities
• Cults, drugs and rituals
• Hybrid identities at the crossroads
• Resistance and counterpublic spaces
• Culture wars

These topics are held in common across A Cultural History of Countercultures, so essays not aimed specifically at one of these areas cannot be considered for inclusion in the volume.

A 250-word abstract and one-page CV are due by December 1, 2026, to rhirjohn@iu.edu. Full articles (max 10,000 words), if requested, will be due April 15, 2027. Please indicate in your abstract which topic area your essay addresses. Submissions may not be under review or published elsewhere.

Image Source: A Wreath of Roses (1880) by Marie Spartali Stillman

Online Event
"Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground": Oscar Wilde in NY on 9/11
The American Trust for the british library
septemeber 16, 2026

To mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Christine Nelson, in conversation with Philip Palmer, recalls one of the British Library’s most significant transatlantic partnerships: the exhibition Oscar Wilde: A Life in Six Acts, which originated in London and opened at the Morgan Library in New York in September 2001. This talk reconstructs the unprecedented circumstances of the New York installation, which was scheduled to be completed the morning of 9/11, and reinforces the essential values of international friendship and cooperation.

This virtual program is free and open to all.

To register, please visit:

https://atbl.us/event/virtual-where-there-is-sorrow-there-is-holy-ground-oscar-wilde-in-ny-on-9-11/ 

Unity, Discord, Dissension: Women's Global and Local Economies, 1600-1950
A 10th-Year Interdisciplinary Conference on Women, Money, and Markets
University Women's Club, Mayfair, London
June 10-12, 2027

 Abstract Deadline: September 15, 2026

Economic agency is both an individual belief in one’s own efficacy in the world and, among others, a result of accumulated social connections and currency. This is why women’s associational organizations (clubs, reading groups, unions) have always underpinned women’s advancements in securing personal and public rights, empowerment, and economic independence. Such groups range from the informal to the extremely formal, from neighborhood cohorts to transnational endeavors funded by government grants. Equally, the opposite is true: When a woman’s social currency dwindles, so does her economic advancement.

This year Women, Money and Markets invite scholars at all stages of their career—postgraduate, postdoctoral, independent, employed, tenured— to present cutting-edge research on women’s global and local economies from the 1600s through the 1950s.

The organizers seek historical, cultural, and literary scholarship that focuses on women’s networks of solidarity linked to progressing, securing, and supporting women’s professional, artistic, and economic opportunities. Work on large-scale transnational networks is as equally desired as research on small, local cohorts.

For this conference, emphasis is placed on alliances, unity, and solidarities. However, ruptures, breaks, and shifting alliances are heartily welcomed, as many women’s associational endeavors were both affected by disunity and accused of rupturing homes, marriages, and gender norms when seeking women’s basic human rights, as well as legal and economic independence from men.

The conference’s cohesion will lie in the confluence of disparate papers that all ultimately point to that give-and-take between personal efficacy and social capital. The interdisciplinary nature of the conference will likewise engender mutual learning and thinking in a cross-disciplinary way on the topic of women’s economic associations.

Finally, the historical span, from the 1600s to the twentieth century, ensures that the conference will reflect an unsettling reality, namely, what Gillian Beer reminded us of in the 1980s in her book, George Eliot:

"Anyone who has studied women’s movements and the discussion of women’s rights and positions knows well that there has been no steady arc of progress. Instead, arguments and determinations have been advanced and then have apparently vanished again, as we see in the relationship between the end of the eighteenth century with the complex arguments of Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the beginning of the nineteenth. 1"

Continued historical, cultural, and literary study of and alliances of unity around women’s economic lives is the antidote to acquiescing gained ground for women’s public and private agency.

Paper topics can include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Formal associational groups or leagues centered on women’s work, unions, and trades
• Informal cohorts of local women supporting women’s economic lives
• Transnational women’s networks providing women’s employment
• Local or national women’s networks for the employment or professional training of women
• Colonial economies and women
• The economies and labor of women of all faiths, religions, or no religion
• Disunity amongst or within women’s organizations
• Ruptures external to women’s organizations: shaming, critiquing, denouncing women’s associational and professional organizations
• Disunity and rupture internally within a woman’s lived experience or narratives of labor and economic agency
• Artistic groups promoting the advancement of women’s public-facing work
• Literary representations of the New Woman’s individual agency and social capital for securing financial independence
• Historiographies of women’s associational and organizational lives around labor, work, employment, economic agency, trading, investing, saving, or philanthropy
• Medical associations dedicated to training women doctors; nurses’ unions; solidarities between women medical professionals and their patients
• (Representations of) care communities as informal and formal women’s economies
• (Representations of) female friendships as informal and formal women’s economies

The conference will take place at the Women’s University Club in the heart of London’s Mayfair. Since its foundation, the club has actively promoted causes closely associated with women and their education.

Submitting Proposals: Please submit a 350- to 400-word proposal and a 50-word author bio to women.money.markets.1600.1950@gmail.com by 15 September 2026. All notices of acceptance will go out by 15 October 2026. We are accepting proposals for individual papers as well as panels of three participants.

1 Gillian Beer, George Eliot, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1986, p. 2.

Online Event
Empathy and the Victorian Novel
Center for Victorian Studies, University of Leicester
October 22, 2026

This event is part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded Curiosity project “Empathy, Difficulty, Difference: Creative Curiosity in Practice” led by Dr. Felicity James (University of Leicester), which explores the links between empathy, literature, and healthcare. It is hosted by the Centre for Victorian Studies (CVS), in association with the Literary and Cultural Histories Research and Pedagogy Cluster. You can find out more about the CVS and our upcoming events at le.ac.uk/victorian-studies. 

Speakers: 

Elaine Auyoung (University of Minnesota) – “George Eliot and the Fragility of Readerly Empathy” 

  

Suzanne Keen (Scripps College) – “Other-directedness before and after Comte: Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders”

 

Rachel Ablow (University at Buffalo, SUNY) – “Empathy, Belief, and Martyrdom in John Henry Newman’s Callista” 

Please register for a free ticket here:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/empathy-and-the-victorian-novel-tickets-1997684941436 

Image Source: Reader in Green (1894) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Building in a time of crisis
Annotation event at cove
Sponsored By bavs and the English department at purdue
September 7-17, 2026

 Email coveeditions@gmail.com to join