“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)