cfp.english.upenn.edu

The North American Victorian Studies Association Conference for 2012, in Madison, Wisconsin, September 27-30, invites papers on the theme of networks. Keynotes include Amanda Anderson, Adam Phillips, and a visual networks panel with Caroline Arscott, Tim Barringer, Julie Codell, and Mary Roberts. Participants will also be able to sign up for networks seminars of 15 presenters of precirculated 5-page position papers on the topic.

March 1, 2012 is the deadline for electronic submissions of proposed papers and panels. We welcome proposals of no more than 500 words for individual papers; for panel proposals, please submit abstracts of 500 words per paper and a panel description of 250 words. Please include a one-page cv and submit all files in .pdf format to english.wisc.edu/navsa. Conference threads might include:

Networks of artists, critics, consumers, scholars
Networks of print (books, chapbooks, newspapers, magazines, letters, pamphlets), including relations among publishers, printers, editors, writers, readers
Commodity culture networks and the circulation of things and bodies
Networks of discourse (such as science, religion, nature, politics)
The science of networks, then and now
Textual networks (characters, plot, language, intertextuality)
Networks of influence, production, reception
Networks of display or exhibition
Fashioning networks among otherwise unconnected authors and historical figures
Transnational and other migrations: geographic, cultural, ideological, rhetorical
Borders and "borders" -- theorizing cultural connection, separation, entanglement
Diasporic networks: cosmopolitanism, wandering, exile
Clandestine networks such as spies, secret agents, and detection
Networking technologies
Network arts
Social networks including leisure clubs and professional societies
Family and kinship networks
Victorian cities: streets, arcades, parks, or other networks of urban space
Imperial networks
Network forms: gossip, blackmail, suspense, serials,, periodicals, or other genres
Psychic and supernatural networks: seances, spiritualism, mediums
Digital networks and twenty-first century reading practices
Networked periodization: romantic/victorian/modernist
Networks of resistance: feminist, ecological, queer
Networks of iteration and translation (between image, text, adaptation)