victorian

The Midwest MLA conference will take place this November 14-16 at Marquette University, in Milwaukee, WI.

Literary Influences and Relationships in 19th-Century British Literature

Presentation Format: In-Person Only

Call for Papers

“Pictorial Punch – Treasures from the Archive”

 British Library Study Day, 7th November 2025

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Patrick Leary (Historian of the Victorian Press) and Julia Thomas (Cardiff University)

The Gaskell Journal

Joan Leach Memorial

Graduate Student Essay Prize 2026

Deadline for submissions: 1 February 2026

The Gaskell Journal runs a biennial Graduate Student Essay Prize in honour of Joan Leach MBE, founder of the Gaskell Society. The winning essay will be published in the Gaskell Journal (with revisions as appropriate), and its author will receive £200 from the Gaskell Society, and a complimentary copy of the Journal.

Longing to Know:

Gender and the Production of Scientific Knowledge

Special Issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies

Issue editors: Imogen Forbes-Macphail and Anna Henchman

https://www.ncgsjournal.com/

Call for Papers

The Gaskell Journal 

Joan Leach Memorial 

Graduate Student Essay Prize 2026

 Deadline for submissions: 1 February 2026

The Gaskell Journal runs a biennial Graduate Student Essay Prize in honour of Joan Leach MBE, founder of the Gaskell Society. The winning essay will be published in the Gaskell Journal (with revisions as appropriate), and its author will receive £200 from the Gaskell Society, and a complimentary copy of the Journal.

By 2026, all nine volumes of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins will be published, including the much-anticipated final volume in the series, Poetry. The 2026 international Hopkins conference will focus on the new research possibilities and provocations afforded by the texts. Hopkins 2026 will be held in historic Salem, Massachusetts (USA), at Salem State University, and will feature a Hopkins display and reception at the Burns Library, Boston College.
Topics could include:
• How to reassess Hopkins’ texts because of newly available materials.
• Hopkins the collector (of inscapes; of sensations; the writings of others).
• How to rethink Hopkins’s position in the “collectivity” of Victorian writers.

Corporate Fictions

Across the novel, theater, film, and television, and across genres and modes, the corporation has served as a key setting for fictionalizations of modern life. This panel aims to create an intermedial, intergeneric, and historically comparative conversation between literary and literary-minded scholars interested in the corporation as a representational content and form. Paper foci could include:

Oscar Wilde, French by Sympathy?

The Oscar Wilde Society invites abstracts for a special session at the 2026 MLA Convention in Toronto, Jan. 8-11 2026.

In June 2025, Royal Holloway, University of London, in collaboration with the British Association of Victorian Studies and the British Association of Romantic Studies, will host an in-person research day on Tuesday 3rd June examining realisms across literary, artistic, theatrical, and critical forms, and considering the continuing influence of nineteenth-century thought on our current moment.

Presentations will be held during the morning in which delegates present 15-minute papers attending to nineteenth-century realisms (broadly conceived), followed by an afternoon discussion-based roundtable, structured around the topic: “Managing Difficult Legacies”. 

CFP: Nineteenth-Century Legacies

The 17th Annual Conference of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association

Heights, Depths, and Extremes

The Birmingham & Midland Institute, Birmingham UK

14th-16th July 2025

The Victorian Popular Fiction Association (VPFA) is delighted to announce its 17th annual conference for 2025, inviting scholars, researchers, and enthusiasts of Victorian literature to explore this year’s theme, Heights, Depths, and Extremes. This theme encourages an examination of the limits, boundaries, and expanses of Victorian popular fiction, encompassing everything from physical and metaphorical heights to the extremities of human emotion, imagination, and social structures.

CFP: ‘My Wild Heart Bleeds: Exploring Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’and its legacy’

Sheridan Le Fanu published his sapphic vampire tale ‘Carmilla’ in 1872, reworking the vampire genre, and creating a figure who has inspired subsequent original works and reimaginings. This collection focuses on new explorations and readings of ‘Carmilla’ and its ongoing legacy, from adaptations and reimaginings to more subtle influences on the figure of the female vampire and the vampiric tradition more broadly.

The John Clare Society of North America invites proposals for its annual session at the MLA Convention in Toronto, January 8-11, 2026. Abstracts (250-300 words) are invited on any aspect of John Clare's writings, his life and times, and the work of his contemporaries. Please submit abstract and short bio by March 15, 2025, by email to Erica McAlpine (erica.mcalpine@ell.ox.ac.uk).

Call for Papers: Victorians Institute 2025

September 13-14 2025, Furman University, Greenville, SC

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Sharon Marcus, Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Victorian Studies: Who Cares?

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Henry James Society

Modern Language Association Convention

Toronto

8-11 January 2026

The Henry James Society invites proposals for the following panel. 

James on James