The theme of the 2025 MVSA conference is "Genealogies." The conference dates are April 3-6, 2025, and the location is Fort Wayne, IN. Please see the conference page here.

MVSA Conference Seminars are small, with eight to ten participants each. Participants exchange work to read ahead of the 2025 conference and meet in a closed, collaborative session to discuss overlaps in their papers, refine their ideas, and think about how to move their work forward.

This year, we offer three seminars: two on topics related to the conference theme, and one open topic for work-in-progress. Formats vary for each seminar, and interested participants should apply directly to the seminar leader for consideration. Complete details and application instructions can be found below.

Seminar applications are due January 5, 2025.

SEMINAR ONE: Sustainable Traditions and Diverse Talents: How to Work with Literary Histories or Genealogies at Scale. Led by Alison Booth. 

Around the same period (if we believe in periods) as T. S. Eliot’s influential “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), the world of letters also encountered books and articles of literary geography, which often documented a tavern frequented by poets or described series of houses of novelists (see my Homes and Haunts book on this and related genres of publication, a kind of topo-biographical collection, or prosopography spatialized). Then and now, national literatures often are visualized in maps. But the possibilities of sustainable traditions and diverse talents are not confined to geography. Coteries may be studied in networks; writers of movements, regions, or identities may be anthologized. In addition to reference works in print from the nineteenth century through the 1980s, the Internet shares digital projects of various kinds that share aggregated genealogies or traditions of literature: “archives” of one author’s works and correspondence (anything biographical immediately brings in people beside the single subject, and letters radiate with time and place data); databases (e.g. Women Writers Online or AustLit ); and a wide variety of historical/thematic projects drawing on approaches that benefit from interactivity and visualization online. This is to say nothing of distant reading, beyond the individual text—although Franco Moretti claimed to have rediscovered literary geography in his emerging data-driven work (Atlas of the European Novel).

Whether digital approaches are part of your research plans or not, and whether your focus is more on earlier phases of the long nineteenth century than World War I, consider for this seminar: How do we develop a “consciousness of the past”—an aspiring poet’s sense of absorbing and rearticulating all of it, as Eliot envisioned—today, as writer, critic, theorist, or scholar? What can we do with tradition in post-custodial, post-canonical times, when we may not look back complacently and may dread current and future cataclysm? In spite of the title of T. S. Eliot’s influential intervention over a century ago (as World War I was ending), he urged both a deep sense of the past and a transcendence of individual personality: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone” (see useful introduction and edition of the essay, Poetry Foundation). Derek Walcott in a different register urges, “maturity is the assimilation of the features of every ancestor.” Of course, Eliot’s use of the masculine pronoun leaps out at us now. We should also be startled by the idea, later in Eliot’s essay, that poetry should “approach the condition of science,” an allusion to the belief that all art “aspires to the condition of music,” according to Walter Pater. But let’s work with the idea of non-individual or collective representations of writers and writing (in any genre, not just poetry or the novel or drama) building to a collective representation, not just in a concept of one Euro-centric tradition, and possibly contributing to sustainable resources for some sort of shared world?

Let us dislodge, for a bit, the focus on individual authors, nationality, period, or genre, to ask, from your research angle, how we can write collective histories beyond a tradition of great European authors. Are you doing some form of literary geography? Are you interested in how anthologies or various other practices of literary studies have worked at a larger scale? Papers should relate to “genealogies,” or collective traditions, or varied methods of associating particular works and authors with larger sets, eras, places, histories. But the short essay will need to have its own approach and subject matter, with promise for more expansive elaboration.

Participants will read all papers, so the contributions need to be 5-7 pages (maximum). You may include links to related sources, bibliography, and sites.

To apply: Please send a 300-word abstract and 1-page CV (both as MWord documents) by January 5, 2025, to Alison Booth, University of Virginia, booth@virginia.edu, with “MVSA Seminar 1” in the subject line. If accepted, I will ask for an abstract to share with everyone in the seminar as well (updated or not from the CFP version).

SEMINAR TWO: Victorian Studies & the Plant Humanities. Led by Lindsay Wells.

How might histories of art, literature, empire, and climate change be reimagined through plants, not simply as symbols or decorative motifs, but as active beings within the environment? This seminar invites papers that explore the intersections of Victorian studies and the plant humanities—an emerging field of research into the historical and cultural significance of the vegetal world. From gardening and agriculture to medicine and botany, plants played a pivotal role in countless areas of nineteenth-century Britain and its former empire, operating not only as raw materials and extracted resources, but also as agents of change and renewal. We welcome interdisciplinary approaches that engage with such disciplines as art history, literature studies, the environmental humanities, and postcolonial theory. Papers that address underexplored connections between plants and the imperial contexts of the nineteenth century are particularly encouraged, as are projects that examine how vegetal life functioned as a barometer of ecological upheaval at this time. Paper topics may include but are not limited to:

• The representation of plants in Victorian art, literature the sciences, and popular culture
• Artistic and cultural legacies of colonial plant collecting, bioprospecting, and botanical imperialism
• Representations of specific plants in relation to histories of slavery and plantation agriculture
• The ecological consequences of anthropogenic pollution and resource extraction in relation to vegetal life
• Indigenous perspectives on the vegetal world and more-than-human nature
• The development of new scientific disciplines in the nineteenth century such as plant physiology and soil chemistry
• Gardens, glasshouses, nurseries, arboretums, and other horticultural spaces and forms
• The emerging scientific awareness of vegetal mobility and intelligence

Participants will read all papers, so the contributions need to be 5-7 pages (maximum). You may include links to related sources, bibliography, and sites.

To apply: Please submit a 300-word abstract and 1-page CV to Lindsay Wells (lfwells@g.ucla.edu) by January 5, 2025, “MVSA Seminar 2” in the subject line. We look forward to your contributions!

SEMINAR THREE: New Directions in Victorian Studies. Led by Andrea Kaston Tange.

Proposals are invited for drafts of works-in-progress addressing any topic related to the field of Victorian studies, broadly construed. In prior years, participants have brought book proposals, article and chapter drafts, and grant proposals, though any genre of writing is welcome. Accepted participants will submit no more than 30 (double-spaced) pages of work two weeks prior to the conference, identifying key issues on which they would like feedback. Each participant will be assigned to serve as primary reader on ONE other submission, including providing detailed feedback in the form of one page of single-spaced typed notes. In addition, participant will review excerpts of remaining seminar submissions (writers will identify up to 5pp on which secondary readers should focus). Seminar conversation will focus on each paper in turn, as well as considering productive overlaps between them.

To apply: send a 300-word abstract (as Word or PDF file) and brief (1-2pp) CV to Andrea Kaston Tange (akastont@macalester.edu) by January 5, 2025, with “MVSA Seminar 3” in the subject line.