News from Other Organizations

Although NAVSA reserves its e-mail distribution list for organization-related purposes, we are pleased to provide information about related activities :

• RaVoN announces the publication of a special issue by Kate Flint. {More}
• The deadline for the Victorian Review's Hamilton Prize is imminent. {More}
• Also coming up fast: A CFP on Utopian Spaces of English Literature and Culture, 1890-1945 {More}
• A flier for Swinburne: A Centenary Conference, immediately before this year's BAVS/NAVSA conference {More}
• A CFP for a special number of The Victorian Newsletter {More}
• A CFP from The Pater Newsletter {More}
• An invitation for applicants for the Gale Dissertation Research Fellowship in 19th-Century Media {More}
• A flier for the H.G. Wells Society's upcoming conference on Ann Veronica {More}
• A CFP on Victorian Natural Environments for a special issue of Victorian Review {More}
• A CFP for next year's NCSA conference on Theatricality and the Performative in the Long Nineteenth Century {More}
• A CFP for a NEMLA panel on The Aesthetics of Social-Problem Literature {More}
• A CFP for another NEMLA panel, this one on Lessons in Sympathy in 19thC British Literature {More}
• An invitation for applicants for The Curran Fellowship for Research on the Victorian Press {More}
• A symposium on "Geometry in Victorian Culture" is upcoming at the University of Cambridge {More}
• Items of Victorian interest at the 55th Annual Midwest Conference on British Studies {More}
• A CFP for Neo-Victorian Studies {More}
• A CFP for a conference on (Dis)Entangling Darwin at the University of Porto {More}
• A CFP for next year's 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers Conference {More}
• A CFP for next year's INCS conference on "Family/Resemblance" {More}
• A call for applicants for a Pre-Raphaelite Fellowship {More}
• A CFP for an upcoming conference on Nature and the Long Nineteenth Century {More}
• Save the date for next fall's conference and exhibition on the transatlantic arts of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites {More}
• The latest issue of The Eighth Lamp—Ruskin Studies Today is now online {More}
• A free trial of the Annotated Bibliography of English Studies is on offer from Routledge. {More}

Special Issue of RaVoN

Materiality and Memory, Edited by Kate Flint

This special issue of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, edited by Kate Flint, includes essays by Clare Pettitt, Kara Marler-Kennedy, Kate Flint, Athena Vrettos, Megan Ward, Catherine Robson, Adelene Buckland, and Jonathan Farina. The special issue also includes a number of reviews of recent publications by Sally Ledger, Christopher Herbert, Julia Wright, Nicholas Dames, Anna Maria Jones, Francis O'Gorman, Adrian S. Wisnicki, Deborah Epstein Nord, Rebecca Stern, and Julia Prewitt Brown. The Table of Contents can be found here:

http://www.erudit.org/revue/ravon/2009/v/n53/index.html?lang=en

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Call for Submissions

The Hamilton Prize / Victorian Review

Victorian Review invites submissions for the annual Hamilton Prize for the best graduate student essay in the field of Victorian Studies.

Essays should be 20-25 pages in length and should not have been previously published. The winner will receive an award of $250 CAN and publication of the essay in the Spring 2010 issue of Victorian Review. The journal will also publish the names and essay titles of up to two runners-up in the Spring 2010 issue. The deadline for submissions for the 2009 competition will be June 30, 2009.

The winning essay will be selected according to the following criteria: contribution to Victorian studies; quality and originality; and style and clarity. The award will be judged by a four-member panel of the journal's Advisory Board.

Please send entries to:
vreview@uvic.ca
ATTN: Mary Elizabeth Leighton
Submissions Editor

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Call for Papers

Utopian Spaces of British Literature and Culture 1890-1945

18 September 2009

University of Oxford

From the fin de siècle to the Second World War, the construction of alternative social and private spaces exerted a peculiar fascination for many British writers. The cataclysmic historical events of the period stimulated Utopian thinking and feeling even as they seemed to make them problematic or impossible. At the same time radical demands for new spaces, whether political, religious or aesthetic, also generated new ways of reading and writing the familiar urban and domestic spaces of everyday life.

The focus of the conference is on the spatial manifestations, geographies and practices of Utopianism, rather than on Utopianism as a category of millenarian anticipation. Papers are invited which address the various material and imaginary spatial forms of the Utopian impulse in the literature of period. How do certain spaces become associated with particular political or aesthetic visions of modernity? Does the Utopian bear a particular affinity to some spaces, rather than to others? Is the Utopian impulse articulated as a desire for order or anarchy?

Plenary speakers: Professor Jay Winter (Yale); Dr Matthew Beaumont (UCL); Iain Sinclair (London)

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words in length, including your name, position and institutional affiliation to utopianspaces@ell.ox.ac.uk. Deadline for submission: 15 July 2009. Registration forms will be available on the website after this date: http://www.utopianspaces.org.

Papers are invited on any aspect, historical and/or theoretical, of the conference theme. Topics may include but are not limited to:
- the political, religious, aesthetic nature of Utopian spaces
- the city as a Utopian space
- imaginary, geographical and textual maps
- representations of Utopian spaces in literature and other media (e.g. painting, film, architecture)
- gendered/queer Utopian spaces (e.g. the struggle for female emancipation; representations of the New Woman)
- Utopian aspects of the everyday; strategies for defamiliarising the everyday (e.g. Mass Observation, Surrealism)
- theoretical considerations of Utopian "places" and geographies (Walter Benjamin, de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord and others)
- the theatre as a Utopian space
- mobility and transport
- exclusiveness of certain Utopian spaces (who is locked out from these spaces and for what reasons?)
- racialized Utopian spaces

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Swinburne: A Centenary Conference

10-11 July 2009

Senate House, University of London

Sponsored by the Modern Humanities Research Association (the George H. Genzer Bequest), Queen Mary, University of London, Oxford University and Portsmouth University.

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), poet, dramatist, novelist and critic, was late Victorian England's unofficial Poet Laureate, admired by his contemporaries for his technical brilliance, his facility with classical and medieval forms, and his courage in expressing his sensual, erotic imagination. Immensely important in his own day, Swinburne was critically neglected for a large part of the twentieth century, but his reputation has continued to rise steadily since the 1960s. There has been, however, no conference on his life and work since 1985. This international centenary conference aims to reclaim Swinburne's position as the pre-eminent late nineteenth-century poet, to draw attention to the breadth and diversity of his oeuvre, to re-evaluate his considerable achievements, and to assess his impact on those who came after. It will benefit from current critical work on aestheticism, the arts, gender and sexuality in the Victorian period, as well as recent scholarship that exposes the indebtedness of the modernists to their derided Victorian predecessors.

In addition to the three distinguished plenary speakers — Jerome McGann, Terry Meyers, and Yopie Prins — additional speakers include Jonathan Bate, Laurel Brake, Tim Burnett, Richard Dellamora, Stefano Evangelista, Nick Freeman, Ellis Hanson, Elizabeth Helsinger, Stephanie Kuduk-Weiner, Yisrael Levin, Jan Marsh, Catherine Maxwell, Linda Peterson, Patricia Pulham, Rikky Rooksby, Julia Saville, Nicholas Shrimpton, Marion Thain, Herbert Tucker, and Ana Vadillo. The conference aims to attract both those with specialist interests in Swinburne and those keen to extend their knowledge of one of the most exciting literary figures of the Victorian age. It also aims to stimulate further academic scholarship on Swinburne, with the specific intention of producing an edited collection of the best papers resulting from the conference. The conference is also timed to allow delegates to attend the joint BAVS/NAVSA conference 13-15 July 2009, Churchill College, Cambridge.

Conference Organizers:

Stefano Evangelista (Trinity, Oxford) stefano-maria.evangelista@trinity.ox.ac.uk

Catherine Maxwell (Queen Mary, London) c.h.maxwell@qmul.ac.uk

Patricia Pulham (Portsmouth) patricia.pulham@port.ac.uk

Registration Fees

£65 Standard / £45 Speakers, IES Members or concessions (postgrads, unwaged)

For registration and programme details please see:

Or contact: Jon Millington, Institute of English Studies, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU; tel. +44 (0)207 664 4859; e-mail: jon.millington@sas.ac.uk

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Call for Papers

The Victorian Newsletter

August 1 / September 15, 2009

The Victorian Newsletter invites submissions for a special number celebrating the bicentenaries of both Tennyson and Darwin. Interdisciplinary approaches are welcome; one-page proposals (electronic) due August 1, with final papers due September 15. For information or submission, contact deborah.logan@wku.edu or victorian.newsletter@wku.edu.

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Call for Papers

A special issue of The Pater Newsletter

Pater and Cosmopolitanism

The Pater Newsletter seeks essays for publication of a special issue on the subject of "Pater and Cosmopolitanism" in Spring/Fall 2009.

In "Mr. George Moore as an Art Critic" (1893), Pater asserts that "the genius of Ingres is cosmopolitan, like that of those old Greek artists," then goes on to explain why "a certain cosmopolitanism [is], in truth, an element of national character." Essays which explore the implications of cosmopolitanism for literary, aesthetic, mythic, historical, national, political, and/or cultural work in a Paterian context are invited. Essays should be 2500-3000 words, but submissions of any length (or medium) will be considered. Each submission should include a title page identifying your name and institutional address; the essay, which should not include any identifying markers; and a 200-word abstract.

Deadline for submissions (extended): 31 August 2009.

Questions and/or submissions should be directed to:

Megan Becker-Leckrone, Editor, The Pater Newsletter
Department of English, Box 455011, 4505 Maryland Parkway, UNLV
Las Vegas, Nevada 891545011
E-mail: meganb@unlv.nevada.edu
Tel: 702-895-1244
Fax: 702-895-4801

Call for Applicants

The Gale Dissertation Research Fellowship in 19th-Century Media

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) is pleased to announce a new fellowship for 2009, made possible by the generosity of publisher Gale, part of Cengage Learning, in support of dissertation research that makes substantial use of full-text digitized collections of 19th-century British magazines and newspapers. A prize of $1500 will be awarded, together with one year's subscription to selected digital collections from Gale, including 19th Century UK Periodicals and 19th Century British Library Newspapers.

Purpose: The purpose of the Gale Dissertation Research Fellowship is two-fold, (1) to support historical and literary research that deepens our understanding of the 19th-century British press in all its rich variety, and (2) to encourage the scholarly use of full-text digitized collections of these primary sources in aid of that research.

Eligibility: Eligible for this award is any currently enrolled postgraduate student, in any academic discipline, who by the end of 2009 will have embarked on a doctoral dissertation or thesis that centrally involves investigation into one or more aspects of the British magazine and newspaper press of the 19th century. Preference will be given to projects that are interdisciplinary in approach, and that propose to use methods of exploration that online collections uniquely make possible. The digitized collections used in this research may include those created by any publishers or projects, whether commercial or non-commercial.

Applications: Applicants should send a c.v., and the names and contact information of two scholars who are familiar with the applicant and his or her dissertation project; it is expected that one of these will be the student's dissertation director. The project description (approx. 500-800 words) is the key element of the application. That description should concisely explain the aims of the proposed research and the expected role of full-text digitized collections in that research.

Applications for the Gale Fellowship for dissertation research to be undertaken in 2009-10 must be submitted in electronic form and sent to galefellowship@rs4vp.org by September 1, 2009. Any queries about the application may be sent to the same address. Applicants will be notified by November 1, 2009. The successful applicant will be expected to submit a brief report to RSVP at the conclusion of the funded portion of the project, describing the results of the research.

For more information about the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, please visit the Society's website at www.rs4vp.org.

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The H.G. Wells Society Conference

Ann Veronica: Feminist, Flâneuse and Freethinker?

26 September 2009

Women's Library, London

This interdisciplinary, one-day conference marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of H.G. Wells's "feminist" novel, Ann Veronica. In this unique conference, we will be exploring the lives and work of women who were associated with Wells or were influenced by him during the Edwardian era.

Conference organizers: Emelyne Godfrey (emelynegodfrey@yahoo.com and Sylvia Hardy (sylviahardy@btinternet.com).

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Call for Papers

Victorian Natural Environments

A Special Issue of Victorian Review (Fall 2010

Submission Date for Complete Papers: 15 September 2009

The Victorian Review invites submissions for a special issue devoted to Victorian Natural Environments. Recently, various Victorianist scholarly approaches have begun noting points of confluence with environmental and ecological studies. This issue of Victorian Review is aimed at recognizing these recent insights, considering how notions of natural environments have made an impact on Victorian cultures and values. Essays that address the political role of different configurations of societies, species, living spaces and the planet itself are especially encouraged. What environments did Victorians recognize as natural and unnatural? How did issues of physical and psychological containment impact on Victorians' sense of themselves as natural agents? What performative systems circumscribed people's self-identification as human or not quite human? How do environmental, animal and posthumanist studies contribute to our understanding of Victorian identity and society?

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

Environmental Art and Literature
Popular Science and Daily Lives
Paganism and Nature Spirituality
Acting Naturally in Different Class Contexts
Decadent Nature and Decadent Artifice
Aquariums, Zoos and Other Such Animal Environments
Genius Loci—Spirit of a Place
Anthropomorphism and Animals in the Domestic Environment
Eugenics, Social Darwinism and Criminal Neighbourhoods
Peacocks, Lap Dogs, and Other Animals of Artifice
Anthropology and Environments
Technological Environments and Nature

Essays must be between 5000 and 7000 words and formatted according to MLA guidelines. Queries and abstracts are welcome at any time, but please submit the full essay electronically to the guest editor by Sept. 15, 2009: Dennis Denisoff / Department of English / Ryerson University, Toronto / denisoff@ryerson.ca

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Call for Papers

31st Annual Conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association

Theatricality and the Performative in the Long Nineteenth Century

The University of Tampa, March 11-13, 2010, Tampa, FL

Dramatic expression and self-conscious performances marked almost every aspect of nineteenth century life and artistic culture, as theatrical turns and performative mindsets introduced in the 17th-18th centuries expanded in the 1780s through the beginning of World War One. We invite paper and panel proposals that explore these themes and subjects in the long Nineteenth Century (1780-1914). Papers might address the theatrical shows—whether serious drama, circus displays, vaudeville, operas, or Shakespearean revivals—that appeared in cities and towns on both sides of the Atlantic (as well as in more distant lands). Or they might investigate how politics, social events, military engagements, domestic affairs, public trials, crime reports, religious rituals, architectural spaces, sculptural moments, exhibition halls, artistic and musical compositions, and the early moving pictures of the cinema, assumed a theatrical sensibility. Welcome also are proposals for papers and panels that bring scholarly and theoretical interests in performativity to bear on concepts of identity, individuality, and audience in the given era.

Please submit abstracts of approximately 500 words along with a brief (one page) c.v. to the Program Co-Chairs, Janice Simon (U of Georgia) and Regina Hewitt (U of South Florida) at the conference address ncsa2010@earthlink.net by Sept. 15, 2009. Speakers will be notified by or before Dec. 15.

Any graduate student whose proposal is accepted may at that point submit a full-length version of the paper in competition for a travel grant to help cover transportation and lodging expenses.

Conference sessions will be held at the University of Tampa, a campus with both the historic late-19th century Plant Hall (formerly the Tampa Bay Hotel) and a state-of-the-art conference center. Accommodations will be available at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Tampa, a short walk from campus. For further information—available in midsummer—please visit the NCSA website http://www.english.uwosh.edu/roth/ncsa/ or contact Elizabeth Winston, Local Arrangements Director (U of Tampa), at the conference address ncsa2010@earthlink.net.

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Call for Papers

The Importance of Studying Oscar [Wilde]: Plays, Stories, Letters, and Lecturers

NEMLA, April 7-11, 2010

This panel offers an opportunity to analyze the role Oscar Wilde has played and continues to play in literature, theater and other aspects of culture. Focus can be on his influential wit and wisdom and/or techniques used to present Oscar in the classroom. This topic calls for a diversity of approaches. Please send 200-400 word abstracts to Annette Magid at a_magid@yahoo.com.

Deadline for submission of paper proposal is September 10, 2009.

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Call for Papers

The Aesthetics of Social-Problem Literature

NEMLA, April 7-11, 2010

Montreal, Quebec - Hilton Bonaventure

This panel explores the relationship between social-problem literature and aesthetics in the British nineteenth century. How do novels-with-a-purpose, industrial fiction, social-problem plays, and political poetry lay claim to or distance themselves from aesthetic value? What can we make of the aesthetic dimensions of the critical response to these texts? Both before and after the advent of the Aesthetic Movement, how do art and purpose cohere? Proposals examining specific novels, plays, and poems are welcome, as are those addressing broader genre issues. Please send 300-word abstracts to Elizabeth Starr, estarr@wsc.ma.edu.

Deadline: September 30, 2009

Please include with your abstract:

Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee)

The 41st Annual Convention will feature approximately 350 sessions, as well as dynamic speakers and cultural events. Details and the complete Call for Papers for the 2010 Convention will be posted in June: www.nemla.org.

Travel to Canada now requires a passport for U.S. citizens. Please get your passport application in early.

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Call for Papers

Lessons in Sympathy in 19th-Century British Literature

NEMLA, April 7-10, 2009

In Emile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau insists on a long delay in the introduction of books, especially books of fictional literature, into Emile's educational process. For Rousseau, Emile's premature acquisition of knowledge of social relations through fictional literature harms his moral education by promoting a misdirected understanding of human relationships.

This panel investigates various ways in which nineteenth-century British literature approached the moral/immoral function of literature, focusing particularly on the relationship between reading and sympathy. Arguably under the influence of eighteenth-century thinkers' awareness of the impossibility of escaping their own senses and their suspicion of genuine sympathy, many nineteenth-century British writers attempted to offer their answers to how to educate readers in the proper use of sympathetic imagination. Often emphasizing quasi-Freudian mechanisms such as "projection" and "displacement" in sympathetic experiences, criticism on sympathy has gravitated towards unraveling the unconscious effects of the rhetoric of authors, and this panel seeks to reach a more balanced understanding of the power of fictional literature to affect readers' capacity for sympathy by paying attention to the ways that authors consciously tried to teach strategies of sympathy to their readers. What are specific reading habits that authors attempted to challenge? How does the eighteenth-century consciousness that sympathy is not an immediate identification but an imagined representation affect the representational and narrative techniques used for the embodiment of sympathy in nineteenth-century British literature? What are the intellectual and emotional effects of reading about sympathetic exchanges in fictional literature? How does nineteenth-century British literature about sympathy grapple with complicated questions about relations, whether they are between humans and society, between individuals, or simply between one and oneself?

Contact: Kyoung-Min Han (e-mail: kminhan@hotmail.com)

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Call for Applicants

The Curran Fellowship for Research on the Victorian Press

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) is pleased to announce the competition for the second annual Curran Fellowship, a travel and research grant intended to aid scholars studying 19th-century British magazines and newspapers in making use of primary print and archival sources. Made possible through the generosity of Eileen Curran, Professor Emeritus of Colby College, and inspired by her pioneering research on Victorian periodicals, the Curran Fellowship is awarded annually in the form of two grants of $2,500 each.

The Curran Fellowship is open to researchers of any age from any of a wide range of disciplinary perspectives—literary scholars, historians, biographers, economists, sociologists, art historians, and others—who are exploring the 19th-century British press as an object of study in its own right, and not only as a source of material for other historical topics. Applicants' projected research may involve study of any aspects of that press in any of its manifold forms, and may range from within Britain itself to the many countries, within and outside of the Empire, where British magazines and newspapers were bought, sold, and read during "the long nineteenth century" (ca. 1780-1914).

Applicants should send a c.v., the names and contact information of two scholars who are familiar with the applicant and his or her research goals, and a description of the project to which these funds would be applied. The project description (approx. 500-800 words) is the key element of the application. That description should concisely indicate the rationale of the larger project to which this research will contribute, and indicate how the funds would assist in that research. The applicant should have done enough preparatory work with finding aids, catalogs, and queries to archivists and librarians to be able to explain why the project's goals require that one or more particular collections of primary sources (manuscripts, printed texts, or digital facsimiles) be closely examined.

Applications for the Curran Fellowship for research to be undertaken in 2010 must be submitted in electronic form and sent to curranfellowship@rs4vp.org by October 1, 2009. Any queries about the application may be sent to the same address. Applicants will be notified by December 1, 2009. Successful applicants will be asked to submit a brief report to RSVP at the conclusion of the funded portion of their project, describing the results of their research.

For more information about the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, please visit the Society's website at http://www.rs4vp.org

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Geometry in Victorian Culture

October 1-2, 2009

An interdisciplinary symposium on "Geometry in Victorian Culture" will be held at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge, October 1-2, 2009. Speakers include Professors Gillian Beer, Marilyn Gaull, Jeremy Gray, Linda Henderson and Joan L. Richards. For further information or to attend the symposium, please contact the organiser, Alice Jenkins (a.jenkins@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk).

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The 55th Annual Meeting of the Midwest Conference on British Studies

9-11 October 2009

Pittsburgh, PA

Keynote speakers: Walter Arnstein (Emeritus Professor of History, University of Illinois) and Troy Boone (Associate Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh)

Special panels on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the work of Seymour Drescher

Registration information will be posted on the MWCBS website (http://mwcbs.edublogs.org/2008/12/08/mwcbs-2009/)

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Call for Papers

Neo-Victorian Studies

Neo-Victorian Studies (www.neovictorianstudies.com), an inter-disciplinary, fully peer-reviewed e-journal, invites scholarly and/or creative submissions on any topic related to the re-visioning of the nineteenth century from twentieth/twenty-first century critical perspectives. The journal aims to explore continuities and ruptures between the Victorian and later (post)modern periods, and analyse the nineteenth century's cultural legacies and reverberations — aesthetic and ideological, material and residual/spectral — within literature, the arts and humanities, and present-day political, legal, and medical discourse. Contributions on the period's afterlife in non-British contexts, e.g. Asian, African, Australian, North and South American frameworks, are equally welcome.

The editors especially invite comparative studies of North American and British aesthetic/ethical approaches to the period, e.g. work contrasting neo-slave narratives or narratives of Native American traumas with those of colonial suffering. We also welcome explorations of the cultural background to the twentieth-century rise of historical fiction specifically dedicated to the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly where these attempt to complicate the post-Victorian to neo-Victorian transition in one or more national literatures. Submissions probing the connections and synergies between post-colonial and neo-Victorian theory and practice are likewise of special interest.

Other possible topics include: theorising the neo-Victorian novel; the heritage industry; biographical fiction; adaptations of nineteenth-century classics and/or lesser known works; sexual politics; 'queering' recovered histories; re-conceptualising families and childhood; and problematic legacies of environmental impact.

Neo-Victorian Studies accepts submissions throughout the year. The deadline for submissions for the next general issue, to be published spring 2010, is October 15, 2009. Please consult the journal website for submission guidelines. Please address direct enquiries and/or electronic submissions to the General Editor at neovictorianstudies@swansea.ac.uk.

Call for Papers

(Dis)Entangling Darwin: Cross-Disciplinary Reflections on the Man and His Legacy

University of Porto, 4-5 December 2009

2009 marks the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth (12 February 1809) and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his groundbreaking On the Origin of Species (24 November 1859). The University of Porto CETAPS (Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies) is holding a special conference to honour Charles Darwin's enduring legacy, and examine how his ideas remain central to contemporary research, within and beyond the biological sciences, echoing the global celebrations of his life and work, and his impact across the disciplines.

Keynote Speakers

David Amigoni (Keele University, UK) and John Van Whye (Cambridge University, UK)

Special Guest Speakers

The conference title draws inspiration from the notable conclusion of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. In it he writes:

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us [...] There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Darwin's descriptions rely on the formulation of incredibly complex and visual pictures, often portrayed in a series of "imaginary illustrations" which combine colourful arrangements of both facts and suppositions. The reader is constantly involved in a visual perceptual chaos of entanglements and webbed relationships, performances and theatricalities, exhibiting the way in which the human, animal and natural worlds are mutually imbricated. This conference wishes to contribute to the ongoing disentanglement of Darwin's legacy, which remains as controversial to twenty-first century critics as it was to Darwin's contemporaries. There are still many missing links and inherent contradictions that continue to attract growing, interdisciplinary attention from a wide range of specialisms. All in all, the re-drawing of physical and psychological frontiers demanded by evolutionary theory in an attempt to define what is meant by human nature is still very much in progress, validating at the same time extraordinary opportunities for further research.

We welcome 20-minute papers in English dealing with all aspects of Darwin's legacy, from science to literature and the social sciences, the visual arts, religion, philosophy, politics and cultural relations.

Please include the following information with your proposal: the full title of your paper; a 250-300 word abstract; your name, postal address and e-mail address; your institutional affiliation and position; any audiovisual requirements you may have.

The deadline for proposals is 15 October 2009. Participants will be notified of acceptance no later than 31 October 2009.

Inquiries and proposals should be sent to the following e-mail: saragsilva@hotmail.com Conference fee: 60,00 € (includes coffee breaks and Friday lunch). Attendance is free for UP students. OPTIONAL - Conference Dinner (Friday): 20 € Please check the Porto Faculty of Letters/Sigarra website for updates. http://sigarra.up.pt/flup/noticias_geral.ver_noticia?p_nr=2711

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Call for Papers

18th Annual 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers Conference

"Journeys"

April 8-11, 2010, Texas A&M University

Keynotes: Prof. Felicity Nussbaum, Prof. Kate Flint, Prof. Mary Fissell, Prof. Erika Rappaport, and Prof. Jillian Heydt-Stevenson

This conference will explore the abundant varieties of journeys found in 18th- and 19th-century British women's writings. We encourage interdisciplinary considerations of topics such as migration, travel, exile, exploration, tourism, border crossing, religion, travel writing, art, fantasy, children's literature and more. Proposals for panels and individual papers might consider, but are not limited to, the following issues:

• Travel writings/art
• Biographical narratives
• Marriage/Honeymoon
• Continental tours
• Philosophical investigations/Scientific inquiry
• Motherhood/Childhood
• Colonialism and Empire
• Religious exploration/Spiritual awakenings
• Transatlantic movement of persons, ideas, and/or goods
• Memory as travel
• Mapping the body
• Rites of passage
• (Dis)Orienting Sexuality
• Crossing class boundaries
• Exile (Social, Political, Familial)
• Re-envisioning the past/Envisioning the future
• Women and work
• Education
• Experimenting with mediums/ Intertextuality
• Movement between private and public spheres

Individual proposals should be two pages: a cover sheet including name, presentation title, university affiliation, address, e-mail address, phone number, and brief biographical paragraph; and a 500-word abstract. Please do not include any identifying information on the abstract.

Panel proposals should include a coversheet—containing panel title, presenters' names, presentation titles, university affiliations, addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, brief biographical paragraphs, and the name of a moderator—followed by separate abstracts (500-word) that describe the significance of the panel topic and each presentation. Please do not include any identifying information on abstracts.

Proposals must be submitted electronically as an attachment in .doc or .rtf format by October 15, 2009 to the conference e-mail address at: BWWC18@tamu.edu. For more information and updates, visit our website www-english.tamu.edu/bwwc18.

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Call for Papers

Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference

Family/Resemblance

University of Texas at Austin

25-27 March 2010

The 2010 Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) Conference invites proposals for papers and panels on Family/Resemblance in the 19th Century. The conference will consider how both family and resemblance were conceived/constructed in the 19th century from multiple interdisciplinary perspectives, including and/or integrating Literature, History, Art History, Law, Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Philosophy, Music, Economics, and Theology. Topics may include:

*extended families; metaphoric families *evolution and Darwin *replication, reproduction *sexualities *sisterhoods, brotherhoods *sister arts and sibling rivalry *portraiture and family; portraiture and resemblance *mimesis, imitation, parody *genealogies *law and the family *the animal family; animal resemblances *cyborgs and robots *photography *maternity/paternity/patriarchy *gender and family; the gender of family *domesticity *artistic/literary/historic families *dynasties (monarchies, Napoleon) *legitimacy/illegitimacy *colonialism

Hosted on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, the 2010 INCS Conference will take place 25-27 March and will include a reception at the Harry Ransom Center and a plenary address by Elizabeth Helsinger, John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago.

Please submit 250 word abstracts by 1 November 2009 to Alexandra Wettlaufer at akw@mail.utexas.edu. For more information on INCS, see www.nd.edu/~incshp/. Selected conference papers will be published in Nineteenth-Century Contexts.

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Call for Applicants

Pre-Raphaelite Fellowship

A Joint Fellowship from the University of Delaware Library and the Delaware Art Museum

The University of Delaware Library, in Newark, Delaware, and the Delaware Art Museum are pleased to offer a joint Fellowship in Pre-Raphaelite studies. This short-term, one-month Fellowship, awarded annually, is intended for scholars conducting significant research in the lives and works of the Pre-Raphaelites and their friends, associates, and followers. Research of a wider scope, which considers the Pre-Raphaelite movement and related topics in relation to Victorian art and literature, and cultural or social history, will also be considered. Projects which provide new information or interpretation—dealing with unrecognized figures, women writers and artists, print culture, iconography, illustration, catalogues of artists' works, or studies of specific objects—are particularly encouraged, as are those which take into account transatlantic relations between Britain and the United States.

Receiving the Fellowship

The recipient will be expected to be in residence and to make use of the resources of both the Delaware Art Museum and the University of Delaware Library. The recipient may also take advantage of these institutions' proximity to other collections, such as the Winterthur Museum and Library, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Princeton University Library, and the Bryn Mawr College Library. Each recipient is expected to make a public presentation about his or her research during the course of Fellowship residence.

Up to $2,500 is available for the one-month Fellowship. Housing is not provided, but the funds may be used for this purpose, or for travel and other research expenses.

The Fellowship is intended for those who hold a Ph.D. or can demonstrate equivalent professional or academic experience. Applications from independent scholars and museum professionals are welcome.

Important Dates

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Call for Papers

Nature and the Long Nineteenth Century

6 February 2010

A one-day interdisciplinary postgraduate conference exploring intersections of the natural world with nineteenth-century literature and culture, to be hosted by the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Napier University on Saturday, 6 February 2010.

This conference welcomes postgraduate researchers and early-career researchers, who are warmly invited to submit proposals for 20 minute papers or for panels. Please send panel proposals or individual proposals of 300 words to em.alder@napier.ac.uk or C.C.McKechnie@sms.ed.ac.uk by 16 November 2009.

In the twenty-first century, environmentalism and the impacts of climate change form a nexus of intense debates about relationship between human culture and the natural world. However, the centrality of the natural world to the nineteenth century imagination has long been acknowledged by scholars, way-marked by Lynn Merrill's The Romance of Victorian Natural History (1989) for example, while Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (2002) demonstrates the relevance of nineteenth-century research to the modern world.

This conference probes the significance of nature to the long nineteenth century and to our study of its literature, history, science, art, and other media. How did the natural world influence people in the nineteenth century—and how did nineteenth-century culture shape attitudes to the natural world? Have twenty-first century questions over nature, climate, and the environment changed the way we view and study the cultural products of the nineteenth century, or offered new avenues for research, especially interdisciplinary research?

Delegates are encouraged to view the theme as a broad suggestion rather than in any way restrictive. Possible topics could include but are not limited to:

Representations of nature in history, literature, drama, poetry, art, theatre
Representations of, or human relationships with: oceans and the seaside, mountains and the countryside, rivers, lakes, gardens, working animals, pets
Natural history, specimens, collecting, displaying
Science and human or animal nature: hybridity, husbandry, eugenics; Darwinism and biology; Lyell and geology
Climate change, environmentalism, eco-criticism, the ecotopia
The natural world in romance, Gothic, the fantastic
Horror: biological monstrosity and the limits of the human
Human identity in the natural world
The (un)natural city, machine, media
The (super)natural world: ghosts, spiritualism, Gothic
Theoretical approaches to human and animal nature or the representation of nature in nineteenth century culture.

Proposals for panels or individual papers should be submitted no later than 16 November 2009. Please direct enquiries to Dr Emily Alder, em.alder@napier.ac.uk, or Claire McKechnie, C.C.McKechnie@sms.ed.ac.uk.

Later this summer, you can find updates at this URL: www.englit.ed.ac.uk/postgraduate/natureconference

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Save the Date

Useful and Beautiful: The Transatlantic Arts of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites

University of Delaware / Delaware Art Museum / Winterthur Museum and Country Estate

7-9 October 2010

A conference and related exhibitions, 7-9 October 2010, at the University of Delaware (Newark, DE) and at the Delaware Art Museum and the Winterthur Museum and Country Estate (Wilmington, DE). Organized with the assistance of the William Morris Society, "Useful and Beautiful" will highlight the strengths of the University of Delaware's rare books, manuscripts, and art collections; Winterthur's important holdings in American decorative arts; and the Delaware Art Museum's superlative Pre-Raphaelite collection (the largest outside Britain). This conference will focus on the multitude of transatlantic exchanges that involved Morris, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the arts and crafts and aesthetic movements of the late 19th C. We will invite papers that explore relationships and influences--whether personal, intellectual, political, or aesthetic--that connect William Morris, his friends, associates, and followers in Britain and Europe with their contemporaries and successors in the Americas. The "arts" will include not merely those at which Morris himself excelled—i.e., literature, design,and printing—but also painting, illustration, architecture, performance, and anything related to print culture in general. A formal call for papers and other details will follow in Fall 2009. For more information, please contact Mark Samuels Lasner, marksl@udel.edu, (302) 831-3250.

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The Eighth Lamp — Ruskin Studies Today

The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today Volume 2 Number 1 is now online. Please click http://www.oscholars.com/Ruskin/Ruskin3/ToC.htm to go straight to this issue. The issue can also be accessed via http://www.oscholars.com/, which is the home page of The Oscholar group of journals. The Eighth Lamp is a double-blind refereed journal and it is published by Rivendale Press, UK.  

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The Routledge Annotated Bibliography of English Studies

Routledge ABES is a specialised online bibliography providing annotated entries on all of the most significant research in literary studies published each year. Its eight sections include subject areas such as Romanticism and the Eighteenth Century. For further information please see www.routledgeabes.com. A free trial is available online if you would like to browse some of the records in more depth. For all general enquiries regarding Routledge ABES, please contact Jodie.keyse@tandf.co.uk.

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