Re-imagining and Re-engaging with the Victorians

A virtual undergraduate and graduate conference

Conference on April 18 and Abstracts Due March 5

Hosted by Queen’s University’s ENGL 859

Contact emails: brooke.cameron@queensu.ca & sydney.wildman@queensu.ca

See full CFP below

Keynote:

Jentery Sayers, Associate Professor, University of Victoria

“Victorian Activities and the Play of Genre in Contemporary Video Games"

Organizers:

●      Brooke Cameron, Associate Professor, Queen’s University

●      Sydney Wildman, Graduate Co-Organizer, Queen’s University

●      Queen’s University Grad Students. This conference is being organized by my graduate class on Victorian literature. My students helped decide the conference theme, took the lead on writing this CFP, and will be vetting abstracts and organizing speakers.

We welcome participation from any and all interested undergraduate and graduate students. We purposely wrote the CFP and selected our Keynote Speaker so that the conference may be of interest to students from beyond the field of Victorian Studies. So please, share with your students and encourage them to apply to join us!

Conference date: April 18, 9:30am-5:00pm EST

Note: The conference will occur over Zoom. Links will be provided after the schedule is finalized.

Conference fees: It is free to present at and attend this conference. We only ask that all participants try to attend as many panels as possible.

Abstract submission date:

Please submit abstracts to Brooke Cameron, brooke.cameron@queensu.ca and Sydney Wildman, sydney.wildman@queensu.ca by March 05, 2024.

Note: panel applications are welcome as long as there is cross-institutional representation on the panel. It is expected that students will present on their work for about ten minutes. Abstracts should include the following information:

●      Name

●      Institution

●      University e-mail

●      Paper title

●      Paper abstract (100-150 word summation of essay)

CFP : Re-imagining and Re-engaging with the Victorians

Not to spook you, but the Victorians are still haunting us. Their ghosts (and their influence) never left the building. Victorian literature and culture play an active role in the way we think about ourselves and continue to shape many of our social institutions, from Christmas to the police. Concurrently, many of our modern literatures and texts actively engage with this legacy and, sometimes, push back against exclusionary paradigms or re-center voices and perspectives left out of Victorian histories. Neo-Victorian texts can propose alternative histories and take the form of experimental texts (including TV shows or video games) that merge modern and Victorian timelines.

This conference will explore different forms of re-engagement with the Victorian; papers and panels will discuss our continued fascination with this period and its cultural legacies. We invite a range of perspectives, including analyses onand beyond the Victorian canon and its inheritances in neo-Victorian rewritings or critiques. We are also interested in thinking about how innovations in literary studies or cultural trends might also shape our interest in this historical moment.

Below, you will find a suggested list of possible essay topics. Other topics are enthusiastically welcomed.

●      Victorians in the Popular Imagination

●      Literary/Cultural Transatlanticism

●      Interpreting the Spatial or the Socio-Spatial

●      Victorians & Cultivation (the garden, constructed wilderness, etc.)

●      Victorian Tourism

●      Victorians and Videogames

●      The Music Hall and the Modern Theatre

●      Victorian Influences on Modern Music

●      Neo-Victorian Young Adult Literature

●      Victorian and Neo-Victoria Aesthetics/Style

●      Literary Theory/Philosophy

●      Decolonizing Victorian Studies

●      Abjection and the Subaltern

●      Victorians and the Irish

●      Class and Professionalism

●      Domestic Economies

●      Gender, Performance, and Performativity

●      Homosocial/sexual Relationships in the Victorian Aristocracy

●      “The Woman Question” and Modern Feminism

●      Queering the Neo-Victorian Novel

●      Monstrous Genders and Deviant Bodies

●      Victorians and Genre Scholarship

●      Neo-Victorianism in Non-Western Cultures

●      Victorian Purity Culture and Postwar Nostalgia

●      Stereotype, Counterculture, Taboo, and Morality

●      Food, Fasting, Gastronomy, and Diet Culture

●      (Neo)Victorian Staging and Performance

●      Victorians and the Occult

●      Spiritualism and the “Mesmeric Mania”

●      Bad Victorian Science

●      Victorian Phrenology