Victorian Elements

VISAWUS 2023
Seattle Public Library (Seattle, WA), 10/19-10/21

Keynote Speaker: Jesse Oak Taylor (University of Washington)

We encourage papers across all disciplines. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• ❖  Elements of style in the Victorian era (design, literary form, fashion, architecture, etc.)

• ❖  Braving the elements: weather, the environment, and climate change, then and now

• ❖  The periodic table of elements and its history

• ❖  The discovery of radium, polonium, and other “new” elements

• ❖  Classical elements: earth, water, fire, air, ether

• ❖  Elementals: gnomes, undines, sylphs, and salamanders

• ❖  Elementary education and educational reforms in the Victorian era

• ❖  Elements of detection and deduction in Victorian literature and culture

• ❖  Criminal elements in Victorian society

• ❖  Elements of Victorian art—landscape, portraits, narrative art, history painting

• ❖  Foreign and domestic elements that generated the rise of London’s art and literary markets

• ❖  Political, economic, and legal elements in Victorian literature and culture

• ❖  The exhibition, display, and interpretation of elements: chemical, natural, cultural, or social

• ❖  Elements and evolution, the elements of evolution

• ❖  Victorian Elements in the Modern Novel

• ❖  Elements of Victorian music (pitch, timbre, tonality, rhythm, volume, texture, tempo, etc.)

• ❖  Elements in the history of collecting: private and public museum collections, and curators’ and collectors’ motives at work.

• ❖  Rethinking what is elemental in Victorian Studies and in the Victorian Studies classroom

• ❖  Rethinking what is elemental in Victorian feminism and ideas about gender/sexuality

  Submit a 300-word abstract and 1-page CV to visawus2023@gmail.com by April 16, 2023. Graduate Students are eligible for the William H. Scheuerle Graduate Student Paper Award ($600)