of victorian interest

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

Award
Literary Encyclopedia Research Awards

Deadline: October 1, 2026

The Literary Encyclopedia Research Award grants travel bursaries worth between £500 and £750 each to assist both emerging and established scholars in defraying the costs of archival research on a literary or related matter. This programme is funded through the donation of royalties by contributors and editors to the Encyclopedia.

Applications are accepted from members of an institution which subscribes to The Literary Encyclopedia, contributors to our publication, or individual subscribers. Scholars of Victorian literature are strongly encouraged to apply.

Starting in 2025, and in line with The Literary Encyclopedia’s commitment to lowering its carbon emissions and fostering greater inclusivity among researchers, our awards will also be offered to help fund research assistance to consult archives remotely and/or additional research costs, such as those arising from caring responsibilities.

Awards of between £500 and £750 are available to fund a range of research activities within these categories:

• Travel costs for archival research
• Research assistance to consult archives remotely
• Training in new techniques/skills
• Additional research costs, such as caring responsibilities
• Support for access needs

Conference attendance will not be covered.

Applications are considered by the Editorial Board of The Literary Encyclopedia whose decision is final. Money will be paid on presentation of receipts.

Successful applicants will be expected to write a formal report of their work to be published on our website. The contribution of the LE Research Award should be acknowledged in any publications resulting from these awards.

You can read about the winning candidates and research proposals from previous years HERE.

Successful applicants to this round must complete their research travel by June 30^th 2027. Recipients will be expected to provide formal reports on their work by start of October 2027.

Applicants should please download and complete the application form attached HERE, and email it to The Managing Editor no later than 1 October 2026. We will announce the winners by mid-November.

Long 19th-century British and Interdisciplinary Humanities panel session
58th northeast mla (Nemla) annual conference
newport, rhode island
march 6-9, 2027

 Abstract Deadline: September 30, 2026

Weather in 19 th-Century Literature and Art in the Age of the Anthropocene

Panel Chair: Dewey W. Hall, Ph.D.

Weather in 19th-century Literature and Art in the Age of the Anthropocene concerns the question of evidence of weather-related changes due to anthropogenic emissions induced, in part, by industrial capitalism. The issue centers on the extent to which man-made emissions as well as volcanic emissions contributed to the rise of the Anthropocene during the 19th -century. While humanity has been considered to be largely responsible for weather-related changes regarding shifts in wind current patterns, varying levels of precipitation, and drought-like conditions induced by an increase in anthropogenic emissions, leading Paul Crutzen to declare a new geologic epoch in Cuernavaca, Mexico (2000) during a gathering of atmospheric chemists, the conditions continued to be exacerbated by the close of the 19 th-century.

In recent years, numerous studies have emerged correlating the Anthropocene to industrial capitalism, documenting the increasing carbon footprint. Several of which include Jeremy Davies’s Birth of the Anthropocene (2016), Jesse Oak Taylor and Tobias Menely’s volume Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (2017), Pieter Vermulen’s Literature and the Anthropocene (2020), and Seth Reno’s Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884 (2021) among other publications. Many of the aforementioned studies and beyond focus on the negative effects upon the environs, which implicate human activity evident through humanity’s imprint upon lithostratigraphic records whether through glacier recession, soil erosion, declining high water marks, and so on as well dendrochronological study of growth rings in tree trunks, reflecting the changing weather conditions.

A variety of writers and artists documented the effects due, in part to a great extent, to the anthropogenic activity, 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:

• Luke Howard’s Essays on the Modifications of Clouds (1803)
• William Wordsworth's Lucy poems (1798) and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (1807)
• George Gordon, Lord Byron's "Darkness" (1816)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Cloud” (1820), “To a Skylark” (1820), & “Ode to the West Wind” (1820)
• John Ruskin's "The 'Storm-Cloud' of the Nineteenth Century" (1884)

In visual art, a host of artists captured the meteorological changes and the sky-altering effects:

• Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818)
• J.M.W. Turner's atmospheric watercolor paintings (1818–1830)
• John Constable’s oil paintings/sketches in Hampstead, London (1821–1822)
• Thomas Cole’s cloud studies (1838)
• Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Cypresses (1889)

The panel invites cross-disciplinary humanities papers that may delve into literary studies, history of art, geology, industrialism, volcanology, and, of course, meteorology, focusing on weather as recorded in literary and visual art. For consideration, please submit an abstract (200-250 words) and biography (100 words) through the NeMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22517.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact Dewey W. Hall, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona at dwhall@cpp.edu.

Image Source: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

Annual 18th- and 19th-century british women writers conference: Design
British women writers association
Palm springs, CA
march 24-27, 2027

 Abstract Deadline: October 18, 2026

In a review of Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament (1856), George Eliot writes, “There is a logic of form which cannot be departed from in ornamental design without a corresponding remoteness from perfection; unmeaning, irrelevant lines are as bad as irrelevant words or clauses, that tend no whither.” The ethics of design–whether ornamental, architectural, characterological, or psychological–were under consideration in much 18th- and 19th- century British literature and culture. From “demoniacal design[s]” in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to romantic designs in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to drawing room designs in Ada and Rhoda Garrett’s Suggestions for House Decorating in Painting, Woodwork, and Furniture, women writers were clearly preoccupied with the various possibilities and risks associated with design. Where good design promised harmony, efficiency, and pleasure, bad design portended artifice, cunning, and conflict. In novels, characters who acted with design were represented as suspect, but in natural histories, forces that acted with design were represented as evidence of God. In art and ornament, design represented order and meaning; the lack of design represented chance and irrelevance. The process of designing also offered opportunities for individualism and collaboration and for thinking about the logic of aesthetics versus function.

The organizers of the 35th annual 18th- and 19th-century British Women Writers Conference invite proposals for papers on the theme of “Design” in texts authored by women, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming writers of the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The organizers also invite applicants to propose papers that challenge and query the boundaries of British literature by engaging with texts situated within transatlantic and global contexts. In addition to presentations on 18th- and 19th-century literature, presentations on history, art history, architecture, and related fields are welcome.

Participants may use the following topics as general guidelines for considering the conference theme of design:

Visual media, including architecture, fashion and clothing, sculpture,
decor and furniture, sewing and weaving
Futurism and Modernism/modernism
Urban planning and transportation
Designing public and private spaces
Movements, trends, imitation
Innovation and novelty
The process of design (vision, creation, public response)
Functionality
Accessibility
Sustainability
The home and interior design
Cookbook and menu design
Family planning, anatomy, and reproductive health
Social design (community, romance, friendship)
Aesthetic design, including plot and form
Literary forms/formalism
Nature, landscape, and ecological design
Patterns/motifs/shapes
Intention and purpose
Scheming and cunning
Style(s)
Artifice
Modernism/modernities
Course and syllabus design, institutional design

Proposals for individual papers and panels are due October 18, 2026. For paper proposals, please submit a 300-word abstract and short CV (no more than 2 pages). For panel proposals, please submit a short description of the panel, a 300-word abstract for each paper, and a short CV (no more than 2 pages) for each participant. Instructions for submission can be found here: https://britishwomenwriters.org/. Please note that registration will be due in January 2027.

The conference will be held at the Hilton Palm Springs. The hotel is centrally located in Downtown Palm Springs with shopping, restaurants, and coffee shops within walking distance.