cfp.english.upenn.edu

Conference Dates: Nov. 14-16, 2013

Location: Courtyard by Marriott, Portland City Center, Portland, Oregon

VISAWUS 2013 explores the Victorians’ enthusiasm and apprehension regarding modern progress and innovation. We encourage papers across all disciplines, including (but not restricted to) art history, literature, gender, history of science, history, material culture, political science, performance, life writings, journalism, photography, popular culture, and economics.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Joseph Bristow (English, UCLA), author and editor of numerous works on Victorian and modern literature and theories and histories of sexuality, including Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (1995), Sexuality (1997), The Fin-de-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s (2005), and Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend (2009), is currently working on a project on “The Sex of Victorian Poetry” and editing the Journal of Victorian Culture and the Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture series.

Papers are solicited for topics such as:
Urbanization, urbanity, and the flux of modern life
New nationalisms
Modern understandings of the global and the cosmopolitan
Class mobilities and new professions
Progressive Victorian social reform movements
New Victorian types: New Women, dandies, Decadents, swells
Anticipations of modernist formal styles
New media: audio and visual technologies
Advances in Victorian drama
New sciences and pseudo-sciences
Modern illnesses and modern medicine
The novel and novelty
Commodity culture and consumerism
Modern understandings of sexuality and desire
Resistances to modernity: nostalgia, pastiche
New religions
The apex of empire
Modern warfare
Neo-Victorianism and steampunk aesthetics

To submit: By March 15, 2013, email 300-word abstracts and a 1-page CV (name on BOTH) to visawus2013@gmail.com.

Please note: Graduate student papers are eligible for the William H. Scheuerle Graduate Student Paper Award ($300.00).