victorian

American Literature Association: “Music and the American Literary Imagination” Symposium

January 28-30, 2027 in Nashville, Tennessee

CFP: “Sounding the Subject in the Nineteenth Century” 

Romanticism and Property

Canberra, 18-20 November, 2027

Women and/of the Empire(s): On the 150th Anniversary of Queen Victoria’s Proclamation as Empress of India (1876-2026)

29-30 October 2026

An international conference hosted by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Faculdade de Letras), University of Porto, Portugal

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Ana Cristina Mendes (Professor of English Studies, University of Lisbon, President of the Association for Cultural Studies)
Martin Hewitt (President of the British Association for Victorian Studies, Visiting Professor of English, University of Leeds, Editor of the Curran Index)

Nineteenth-century British literature frequently interrogates the boundaries of community dynamics, examining not only what the individual contributes to a collective and what it means to belong, but how communal engagement fundamentally reshapes the individual. 

Consistent with the NeMLA 2027 theme, "Empowering Communities," this panel explores a vital dual imperative within the nineteenth-century British novel: the structural tension between individuals whose actions serve to empower their communities, and communities that conversely function to shield and empower otherwise fragile individuals.

Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature invites article submissions on the topic of “planetary precarity” for its Winter 2027 issue. This special issue will consider how precarity is produced on both local and global scales. As we confront our own possible extinction-level threats caused by climate disaster and, supposedly, a future dominated by artificial superintelligence, we seek to investigate how the Victorians reconceived their own precarity in the face of extractive capitalism and ecological crisis.

The Forum Section invites scholars to reflect on the different ways that their research and/or pedagogy has intertwined with their lives in relation to the theme of the Volume. It is a more immediate exploration of how one’s research is shaped out of one’s personal experiences and positionalities. This section was introduced in 2023, encouraging contributors to experiment with styles outside academic writing to tease out the intricacies of pedagogy, research, and lived experience. Forum pieces can be more personal and self-reflective, and can include open ended enquiries. There are aspects of research that never make it to the research paper.

CFP: MW/SWCCL, “Taking Care”

Midwest/Southwest Conference on Christianity and Literature

College of the Ozarks
Point Lookout, Missouri
September 25-26, 2026

Keynote Speaker: Jeffrey Bilbro, professor of English at Grove City College and editor-in-chief at Front Porch Republic

“Quiet Desperation”: Pessimism in Emerson and Thoreau 

12-13 March 2027

University of Łódź

Faculty of Philology 

Sorbonne Université

Research Unit VALE

Online conference

Call for Papers 

The Politics of Light in Neo-Victorian Fictions - Call for Contributions

 The Victorian period saw the introduction of a multiplicity of overlapping technologies and cultural practices of lighting, which radically transformed labour and the medical sciences, reinvented the night and connected ideas of leisure and security, refashioned the domestic interior as well as the perception of public appearance, and greatly impacted architecture and urban planning, policing, warfare and, not least, philosophy and the arts.

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

– Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak, 27th January 1904

We are delighted to announce that Errant is now open for submissions to its fifth issue.

Textual Embodiments: Remediating Meaning Across the Disciplines

Rome Link Campus University, September 11-12, 2026

A Matter of Life and Death

Call for Papers: Victorians Institute Conference 2026

September 11-13, 2026, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Knoxville, TN

Following along from the urgency of last year’s theme, Victorian Studies: Who Cares? this year’s theme asks conference participants to consider matters of life and death in the Victorian era. What did it mean to live and die in Victorian England? How are matters of life and death reflected in the literature of the time?

We’re delighted to announce a new online event to mark Dickens’s passing. On this occasion, our theme does not dwell on the Inimitable’s death, but focuses instead on his ever-expanding life on the big and small screen. Dickens was first adapted for silent cinema in 1901, and since then his work has appeared countless times on film and television. Since Dickens’s Bicentenary in 2012, a number of significant screen adaptations have appeared, including Armando Iannucci’s Personal History of David Copperfield (2019), Steven Knight’s Great Expectations (2023), two Artful Dodger character adaptations, and multiple versions of A Christmas Carol.

Submit Abstract

Session Type: Standing Session / Panel
Primary Area / Secondary Area: British and Anglophone / Our Ruling Classes: Class, Power, Conflict
Presiding Officer(s): Shataparni Bhattacharya (Indiana University - Bloomington)
shabhat@iu.edu

Abstract