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.