The University of Victoria hosted the fifth annual NAVSA conference at the Laurel Point Inn and Harbour Towers hotels on the city's beautiful inner harbour from October 10-13, 2007. The conference brought together the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada and the North American Victorian Studies Association to contemplate the theme of "Victorian Materialities."

From Victorian calling cards to corsets, coal to carpets, gas to umbrellas, from the filmic light beam to fidelity sound, this conference featured papers on all aspects of Victorian material culture. The plenary speakers set the keynotes for a wide-ranging and exciting interdisciplinary program, with historian Philippa Levine discussing nudity in the colonial imagination, art historian Lynda Nead addressing early filmic and late-Victorian scientific imagery, and literary critic Linda Hughes reading "sideways" across the Victorian print archive.

The conference featured workshops and seminars by scholars drawn from Canada, the UK, and the US: Stephen Arata (on Victorian reading practices); Nicholas Daly (on chromolithography); Seth Koven (on letters and the archive); John Picker (on the Atlantic cable); Erika Rappaport (on tea); and Talia Schaffer (on domestic handicrafts).

An innovation of the conference was a series of teaching workshops, in which leading teachers and scholars shared their pedagogical techniques with workshop participants. These workshops featured Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (on Victorian book illustration); Peter Bailey (on the Victorian music hall); Kirstie Blair (on Victorian poetry and the material body); Donald Hall (on Victorian pornography); Gail Turley Houston (on Victorian fiction and the body); and Jennifer Green Lewis (on Victorian photography). All shared their teaching materials and methods in workshops that mixed graduate students with seasoned teachers and scholars.

The conference also featured a provocative dance presentation by Susan Haines and Susanne L. Seales, a dancer and historian respectively, who are collaborating to produce a triptych on the lives of Pre-Raphaelite women. The Violet of Iffley Road (a dance based on the life of Jane Morris) was the second in the series. Striking poses from famous Pre-Raphaelite paintings and photographs, Haines evoked Morris's contributions to and engagements with Pre-Raphaelite artistic culture.

This conference was run by the University of Victoria's Organizing Committee (consisting of Rebecca Gagan, Mary Elizabeth Leighton, Judith Mitchell, and Lisa Surridge) with invaluable assistance from undergraduate and graduate students from Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia, the University College of the Fraser Valley, and the University of Victoria. Thanks go to the Regional Organizing Committee, consisting of faculty and graduate-student representatives from the Departments of History and English at Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia, the University of Northern British Columbia, and UBC Okanagan. The conference was generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Department of English, Simon Fraser University; the Office of the Vice Provost Academic and the Office of Research and Graduate Studies, University of Northern British Columbia; and the Departments of History and English, the Faculty of Humanities, the Lansdowne Speakers Program, and the Learning and Teaching Centre, University of Victoria.

The conference will be remembered as a deeply collegial experience, a time when delegates gathered to renew and create friendships and to exchange ideas in the Laurel Point's sunny atrium.

Rebecca Gagan
Mary Elizabeth Leighton
Judith Mitchell
Lisa Surridge