The third annual NAVSA conference was held on the historic central grounds of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville from September 30 to October 2, 2005. Some three hundred registrants from three continents gathered in wonderfully clement early fall weather for fifty-odd panels, plenary addresses by Mary Poovey of NYU ("Discriminating Reading") and George Levine of Rutgers ("The Form of the Novel and the Spirit of Secularity"), and seminars in work-on-progress by Laurel Brake (London), Jay Clayton (Vanderbilt), Helena Michie (Rice), and Anthony Wohl (Vassar). A development new to the conference this year was the holding of master-classes by distinguished teachers on set texts: Isobel Armstrong (London) on Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott," Neil Hertz (Johns Hopkins) on Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta, and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Princeton) on Kipling's Just-So Stories.

This feast for the Victorianist mind was diversified by other pleasures. On Friday a tasting of Virginia wines at the Art Museum led on to the President's Supper and then at twilight to a staged reading of W. S. Gilbert's comedy Engaged at the Culbreth Theater. The Museum had on exhibit a broad "Jeffersonian" collection of art from the early nineteenth century; there was a purpose-curated display of book and manuscript Victoriana from the newly housed Special Collections library, and at a display running throughout the conference registrants could sample and order scholarly books from a number of participating academic presses. At the banquet on Saturday night were awarded the Donald J. Gray prize for the year's best essay in Victorian studies and the prize for the best graduate student paper at the previous conference. (Click here for more detail.)

As in previous years, Victorian Studies plans a special issue on the conference.

The 2005 conference received major funding support from the President, the Provost, and the Dean of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia. The Departments of English, Drama, History, and Music provided assistance of financial and logistical kinds, as did the University Press, the Library, the Art Museum, and the Center for Liberal Arts. In this breadth of support, as more conspicuously in the range of topics and scholarly perspectives represented in the conference proceedings themselves, Victorian studies here asserted their traditional interdisciplinary resonance.