of victorian interest

Youth Writers and Their Worlds
International Conference on Literary Juvenilia
Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana
Conference Dates: April 16-18, 2026

Proposal Deadline: November 1, 2025

The Ninth International Society of Literary Juvenilia Conference invites scholars to explore how youth writers imagine, question, and reshape the worlds around them. What can youth-authored creations—whether published, private, unfinished, or visual—teach us about the histories and futures of the “worlds” they engage? Organizers seek proposals that explore the rich and varied worlds youth writers create, contest, and leave behind. Submissions may take traditional or experimental approaches to juvenilia, with inquiries ranging across the material conditions, social networks, and cultural frameworks that shape youth authorship.

Youth Writers and Their Worlds aims to create an interdisciplinary space for scholars to reflect on the vibrancy and complexity of writing by young people. Organizers invite proposals for individual papers (20 minutes in length) and/or full panels of three speakers and a chair on any aspect of youth writing. While all topics related to youth authorship are welcome, organizers particularly encourage submissions engaging with the conference theme. Possible topics and panel themes might include (but are not limited to):

• Children in Print – How do child-authored texts circulate, and how are they framed by adult editors, institutions, or markets? How are these works read in their own time—and in ours?
• Writing on the Margins – What do diaries, letters, zines, schoolwork, and other under-studied forms reveal about youth creativity and the boundaries of literary value?
• Beyond Biography – How can we read child authors on their own terms, rather than as precursors of their adult selves or as mere curiosities?
• Recollections and Self-Making – How do memoirs, autobiographies, and other retrospective works engage with or reframe childhood creativity and early writing?
• Defining and Contesting Childhood – In what ways do child writers reflect, reinforce, or resist adult definitions of what it means to be a child?
• Visual Cultures of Childhood – How do drawings, scrapbooks, annotated books, and other hybrid or visual forms shape the imaginative worlds of child authors?

Keynote Speaker: Karen Sánchez-Eppler, L. Stanton Williams 1941 Professor of American Studies and English at Amherst College.

Featured Panel: Andrea Immel, Curator of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University, and Laura Wasowicz, Curator of Children’s Literature, American Antiquarian Society–learn about ground-breaking digital and print initiatives to expand archives of writing by and about young people.

Propose a Paper or Panel: Please send your proposal (300 words or less), accompanied with a brief 2-page CV, to ISLJConference2026@valpo.edu by November 1, 2025. Proposals for full panels should include a separate proposal and bio for each paper, as well as a brief overview of the panel. Participants will also be invited to submit papers based on their presentations to the Journal of Juvenilia Studies, which will publish a Special Issue on the conference topic, guest edited by Sara Danger and Emily Gowan.

Co-Chairs: Sara Danger, Valparaiso University and Emily Gowen, Harvard University

Contact: ISLJConference2026@valpo.edu

2028 marks the bicentenary of the birth of Margaret Oliphant, the brilliant and prolific Victorian novelist, biographer, essayist, reviewer and short-story writer. This special issue of the journal Women’s Writing will celebrate her rich and varied body of work, showcasing the latest developments in Oliphant studies and exploring what this once-neglected but increasingly widely recognized writer has to offer twenty-first century critics and readers.

Women's Writing published a special issue on Oliphant in 1999 to coincide with the centenary of her death; in the nearly 30 years since then, a growing body of scholarship has recognized the value and interest of her oeuvre. The Pickering & Chatto Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant, edited by Elisabeth Jay and Joanne Shattock (25 volumes, 2011-16) brings a substantial selection of her work into the scholarly domain, providing a secure foundation for further research. George Levine’s interventions (JVC 2014 and ELH 2016) encourage us to attend to Oliphant’s innovation and sophistication of style as well as content; Valerie Sanders’ Margaret Oliphant (Edward Everett Root, 2020) likewise shows how Oliphant “narrows the gap between mature Victorianism and early modernism” (p. 191), while nonetheless encouraging us to evaluate Oliphant on her own merits, of which she herself was a harsh critic.

Women's Writing welcomes proposals for articles of 7000 words, on topics including but not limited to Oliphant’s:

• realist novels
• short stories / ghost stories
• work as historian, biographer and/or art historian
• literary criticism
• travel writing
• autobiography
• correspondence
• serialization
• writing style
• approach to the Woman Question
• engagement with religious belief and/or grief
• engagement with temporality, ageing, generation
• engagement with motherhood, widowhood, family
• relationship with her publishers
• relationship with her contemporaries;
• the critical history of Oliphant studies.

Please submit abstracts of around 300 words, with a short biographical note, to the guest editors, Helen Kingstone (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Clare Walker Gore (Lucy Cavendish, Cambridge) at helen.kingstone@rhul.ac.uk and chw37@cam.ac.uk by 1st December 2025. The editors expect to notify contributors in January 2026, and anticipate that completed articles of 7000 words would be due by September 2026.