NAVSA 2008: "The Arts and Culture in Victorian Britain"

Catherine Hall Lecture and NAVSA Banquet

The NAVSA 2008 conference, convened by Janice Carlisle and Tim Barringer at Yale University, was premised on the belief that a direct engagement with material traces of Victorian Britain holds distinctive value for our field. The conference theme, "The Arts and Culture in Victorian Britain," while broad enough to appeal to scholars across all disciplines, was intended to focus attention on the aesthetic and the material, as well as the textual and historical. Edward Burne-Jones's watercolor Cupid and Psyche, reproduced in colour on posters and calls-for-papers, stood as an emblem of this ideal.

An overwhelming response to the Call for Panels and subsequent Call for Papers created a challenge for the Program Committee, made up of Yale faculty. Each panel proposal was read and evaluated separately by two committee members and by the Convenors, and the 79 panels on the conference program reflected the astounding quality and diversity of scholarship in the field internationally. A new format, the "Conversation," allowed for round-table discussion of innovative approaches to key questions in the field.

In almost thirty "Material Study Sessions," another key element of the program, small groups of Victorianists from around the world gathered to discuss clusters of objects carefully selected from Yale's various collections, in the company of leading specialists. Victorian periodicals, illustrated books, Socialist materials, children's texts, film, prints, drawings and watercolours took their place alongside neo-Gothic architecture (seen by its hardy devotees in heavy rain) and Pre-Raphaelite paintings. This key aspect of the program was made possible by the generous collaboration of a small army of Yale's librarians, curators and faculty.

Keynote speakers were the art historian Elizabeth Prettejohn, who made a powerful case for taking John William Waterhouse seriously as history painter, Aesthete and Symbolist; and the historian Catherine Hall, whose gripping account of the intellectual, personal and political development of Macaulay held the rapt attention of several hundred delegates over a final lunch in the cavernous recesses of Yale's Commons dining hall (pictured above).

Music played a larger part than in many earlier NAVSA conferences, through the inclusion of analytical and historiographic papers, the examination of historical musical instruments and recordings, and a crowning performance by student forces including a memorable group of Victorian partsongs and Edward Elgar's monumental Symphony No.1. A large audience was present for a vivid exploration of Victorian popular culture in which the magic lantern was brought to life by lanternist David Francis, speaker Joss Marsh and pianist Phil Carli, with a memorable appearance from Lawrence Manley as Scrooge.

In what may perhaps be remembered as the last NAVSA before the crash, generous funding for the conference was provided by the Provost's Office of Yale University and the Yale Center for British Art, whose elegant building (designed by Louis Kahn) provided a geographical focal point for the conference and two spectacular receptions. Thanks to an outstanding gesture of support by the Beinecke Library, a grant toward travel expenses was made available to all graduate students whose papers were accepted.

The Convenors would like to close by thanking the two Yale graduate students who acted as Conference Administrators, Caroline Murphree and Emily Coit, without whose expert work and good cheer the venture -- in which approximately 470 delegates converged upon New Haven -- would have been quite impossible.

--Tim Barringer and Janice Carlisle.