victorian

“Channels and Chokepoints: Tracing the Pathways of Long Nineteenth-Century Indian Fiction”

Sponsored by the NAVSA Empire & Colonialism Caucus

CALL FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS TO SERVE AS KEYNOTE AND PLENARY SPEAKERS: due by 2/08/26

The Undergraduate and Graduate Victorian Studies Association (UGSVA) is announcing our fourth annual online conference. The UGSVA conference is run by a team of undergraduate and graduate students primarily from Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada and Carroll University, Waukesha, WI. The conference will take place on Tuesday April 28st from about 9:00 AM-4:00 PM EST (time approximate) via Zoom.

No Longer in the “Waiting Room of Literary History”:
Accounting for Nineteenth-Century Indian Fiction

A Special Issue of The Global South, Fall 2028

Beauty and the Revival of Faith will take place on 8-10 May, 2026, at the Archbishop’s Palace, Southwell, Nottingham, U.K. 

Paper proposals are welcome on any aspect of Hardy’s life, work, and legacy for the Twenty-Seventh International Hardy Conference and Festival (Dorchester, Dorset, UK; July 25th—August 1st 2026). Significant Hardy anniversaries in 2026 include the 150th anniversary of The Hand of Ethelberta, the 140th anniversary of The Mayor of Casterbridge, the 120th anniversary of The Dynasts (Part 2), and the 110th anniversary of Selected Poems. Proposals for papers on any of these anniversary texts are especially welcome.

Papers should be planned for delivery times of a maximum of 20 minutes (approximately 2000 words).

Mysteries and Mayhem is our fourth conference theme. Why do we continue to crave mystery stories?  What do they tell us about our need for suspense and our desire to solve riddles,  including the most famous of all:Whodunnit?  What do these stories of murder and mayhem teach us about the nature of evil, ideas of sin, and the essence of a villain? What do we hope to see in the survivors of these threats?  –And what do we expect from the detectives and heroes who reveal the truth in these stories? We seek papers and creative projects that explore these and related questions. 

YSLS (Young Scholars Literary Sympsium) welcomes your undergraduate,  graduate,  educator,  and independent scholar proposals! 

For Critical Insights volume under contract:

Madness in Literature

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: January 9, 2026

Invisible Wounds: Reframing Adoption Narratives in Children's Literature

MLA 2027 Convention: January 7-10, 2027, in Los Angeles, California 

The Henry James Society

CALL FOR PAPERS

37th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association

May 20-23, 2026, Palmer House, Chicago, IL

Minor Threads

“There are threads shorter and less tense, and I am far from implying that the minor, the coarser and less fruitful forms and degrees of moral reaction, as we may conveniently call it, may not yield lively results.”

Henry James. The Prefaces 

CALL FOR PAPERS

Charles W. Chesnutt Association

American Literature Association
37th Annual ConferenceMay 20-23, 2026Palmer House
17 East Monroe Street
Chicago, IL  60603

The Charles W. Chesnutt Association welcomes abstracts of no more than 300 words for presentation at two sessions on the work of Chesnutt at the 2026 ALA conference in Chicago.

Subjects for submissions are open but may include one of the following:

Volcanic Materiality: Cultural Phenomena in the Age of the Anthropocene

Editor: Dewey W. Hall

Call for Contributions 

Irish-American(s and) Periodicals

Kirsten McLeod and Tim Lanzendörfer

Sponsored by the Research Society for American Periodicals

The Dickens Project is excited to announce a new week-long Victorianist Writing Retreat, held at UC Santa Cruz as part of our annual summer Dickens Universe conference. This retreat offers scholars who are not affiliated with Dickens Project consortium institutions the opportunity to attend the Universe, as well as to dedicate time during the week to writing in community.

In 2026, the Dickens Universe, including the Victorianist Writing Retreat, will take place from July 26-August 1. While the 2026 Universe will be focused on Bleak House, participants in the retreat need not be writing on Bleak House or on Dickens. Scholars working in any area of global British nineteenth-century studies are free to apply.

The long nineteenth century was a period marked by industrial revolution, scattered religious beliefs and technological advancements. The Gothic tradition recorded these significant changes through a language of monstrosity, excess, and horror as the Industrial Revolution gained momentum, coal and steam power expanded, and as soon as the British Empire increased its extractive demands on colonized ecologies and laboring bodies. This edited volume proposes a new way of looking at Gothic figures such as vampires, parasites, doubles, and consuming machines in order to examine how such tropes adumbrated the anxieties, ethics, and violences of environmental extraction.