of victorian interest

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.

Event
Markup, Maps, and Multimedia: Building Digital Projects with COVE
Digital Humanities Summer Institute
University of Montreal
June 15-19, 2026

This course introduces graduate students, university faculty, and independent scholars in the humanities to some foundational tools and critical frameworks within digital scholarship, with an emphasis on developing publishable projects. Using the open-access, scholar-led platform COVE (Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education), participants will explore how digital tools deepen analysis, expand communication, and support public-facing research—all without prior technical experience.

The course blends technical fluency, theoretical grounding, and collaborative creativity. Participants will gain accessible entry points into the digital humanities, including text encoding, spatial analysis, and introductory coding. Each will design a project—such as an annotated edition, dynamic timeline, map, or multimedia gallery—using COVE Studio and COVE Editions.

Hands-on sessions will introduce TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) for semantic markup and HTML for web publishing. Participants will also work with IIIF-compliant images to build interactive maps, timelines, and curated galleries, learning to upload, reorganize, annotate, and apply art historical metadata—skills especially valuable for scholars of literature, visual culture, and material history.

This multimodal approach highlights how visual, textual, and digital forms intersect to tell complex stories. By the end, participants will have developed a solid foundation in digital humanities methods and a project-in-progress for future inclusion in research, teaching, or public humanities initiatives.

To learn more or to register, please visit https://dhsi.org/registration-fees/.

Instructor:
Kate Faber Oestreich is Professor of English at Coastal Carolina University. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century British literature, adaptation studies, and the ways multimodal and digital forms reshape reading and teaching practices. She is co-author, with Jennifer Camden, of Transmedia Storytelling: Pemberley Digital’s Adaptations of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley (2018), and her articles appear in Adaptation, Brontë Studies, South Atlantic Review, Victorians Institute Journal, Nineteenth Century Studies, and several edited collections. Her recent work examines how immersive and interactive environments—from YouTube adaptations to collaborative digital editions—extend and transform nineteenth-century texts. She is Pedagogy Consultant for the Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education (COVE), where she has co-led international workshops on COVE Editions and Studio and developed resources for integrating annotation, timelines, and mapping into humanities courses.

Event
2026 Dickens Universe
The Dickens Project
UC Santa Cruz
July 26-August 1, 2026

The Dickens Project presents the 2026 Dickens Universe, a week-long scholarly and community-based retreat on the UC Santa Cruz campus from July 26 to August 1, 2026. This year’s focus is on Bleak House, and participants engage in lectures, seminars, discussion groups, film screenings, Victorian tea, and a variety of social and intellectual events.

Each year, the Dickens Universe brings together researchers, teachers, students, and independent scholars for a week of sustained engagement with Victorian literature, culture, and nineteenth-century studies. The 2026 program centers on Bleak House and continues the Universe’s long tradition of fostering interdisciplinary conversation across literature, history, social justice, and cultural studies. Participants join lectures, seminars, discussion groups, film screenings, and social events that create a unique space for cross-generational and cross-institutional exchange.

Event Flyer
Learn more or register at: dickens.ucsc.edu

Call for Papers
LONDON FOUNDLING HOSPITAL CONFERENCE
INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH
UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
OCTOBER 16, 2026

Proposal Deadline: August 1, 2026

Interdisciplinary Subject Fields
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century British History and Economics / Gender, Family, Cultural, Political, Music, and Literary Studies

Hidden Identities in the London Foundling Hospital Archives, New Questions and Discoveries
Over the last two decades, scholarship on the London Foundling Hospital has expanded well beyond Ruth McClure’s Coram’s Children. The opening of the vast collection of the Foundling Hospital Archives under the auspices of the notable charity, Coram, has added to our broader awareness of exactly how central the Foundling Hospital was to the life of London between 1741 and 1929. Its hub-like records offer many opportunities for interconnected institutions that developed over the eighteenth century and emerged as part of the social welfare state in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

Within the 800 linear feet of the Coram records at the London Archives, some of which is now available freely online, the condition of women, children, and their gendered world emerges boldly and bluntly. Researchers have shown how institutions such as social hierarchies, churches, schools, hospitals, and prisons shape identities. We are interested in papers that uncover heretofore hidden histories, including, but not limited to, intersectionality between the benefactors, institutional administrators, petitioners, and children; we are also interested in connections between contemporary literature and nonfiction works that provide insight into underrepresented categories of identity, including disability, race, gender, and class; we are also interested papers that examine and analyse the life cycles of children and the configuration of hospital life within changing popular understandings of who is in and who is outside of the family, both legally and culturally.

The Foundling Hospital records also hold insights into intimate domains, including pre-nuptial sexuality, sexuality, marriage, motherhood, and fatherhood. Evidence for these relationships appears in the formal and informal work of motherhood, and in the production of goods and domestic services, embedded in the extensive archives. Additional sources, coupled with court records, medical texts, popular media, oral histories, and digital spaces, invite fresh interpretations of how social identities are produced, regulated, and contested.

We invite the following: a three-person panel with three twenty-minute papers, each with fifteen minutes for comments; a four-person panel with four fifteen-minute papers and a fifteen-minute comment; or an individual twenty-minute paper. Please send the proposal and abstracts, along with short bios, to Jessica A. Sheetz-Nguyen, PhD, jsheetznguyen@uco.edu by 1 August 2026.

Additional Contacts:
Kristen Renzi, PhD, renzik@xavier.edu; Janette Bright, PhD, janette.bright@london.ac.uk