victorian

’Cause in London Town

There’s just no place for a street fighting man

—The Rolling Stones, 1968 

Mick Jagger’s words above can sometimes feel axiomatic.  London has an outwardly less impressive revolutionary tradition to call upon than many of its closest neighbours, most obviously Paris.  This is to say, of course, that history is political: if the past seems quiet, what hope for remaking the future?   

London Rising is interested in redeeming the capital’s radical past whilst insisting upon the revolutionary potential of the present.  Our aim is to collectively describe a continuum of tumult in London, attuned to the struggle between conflicting forces.

Seeking paper abstracts for the panel “Supernatural Visions” at the British Women Writers Conference (BWWC) in Forth Worth, Texas, from March 5-7, 2020. The panel organizer invites submissions that analyze works by 18th- and 19th-century women writers that explore ghost-seeing, supernatural visions, and the invisible. In recent years, scholars such as Shane McCorristine, Srdjan Smajic, and Sarah Willburn have explored the significance of ghost-seeing in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Since the affective turn in the early 1990s, the humanities and social sciences have witnessed a profound and renewed interest in how feelings operate; their relationship to both the human, the nonhuman (or more than human), and other feelings. As researchers, teachers and artists, we often struggle with the place and status of emotions in creative processes, institutions, the workplace, classrooms, and in our own research. How do we feel about all of this?

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In this year of the centennial of women’s suffrage in the US, the Fuller and Alcott Societies invite your participation in the Thoreau Gathering (July 8-12, 2020 in Concord, MA).  Our focus will be on gender as part of the Gathering’s larger theme of “Thoreau and Diversity: People, Principles, Politics.”  What did Thoreau’s two most famous female contemporaries in the Concord circle have to say to him, to each other, or to their larger worlds about changing the legal and human status of women? 

CFP: Louisa May Alcott Society

American Literature Association Conference, San Diego, CA, May 21-24, 2020

For over a century, Louisa May Alcott’s writings have been adapted in many ways—for stage, radio, television, and film. As scholars such as Beverly Lyon Clark, Elizabeth Keyser, Elise Hooper, and others have documented, Alcott’s work remains timely and continues to inspire adaptations and spinoffs for diverse audiences. The best known, of course, are the numerous film adaptations of Little Women. Each new production of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel both represents and reinterprets the lives of the four March sisters for a new audience.