SILENCES
Northeast Victorian Studies Association
Cornell University April 10-12, 2026
Keynote Panel with Rachel Ablow, Jason Camlot, and Priya Joshi

View the full call here >> https://northeastvictorianstudies.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/...

The Northeast Victorian Studies Association seeks proposals on the theme “Silences” for its annual conference at
Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In an era of mounting censorship, assaults on academic freedom, and
disturbing passivity regarding humanitarian and climate crises, this conference will examine the uses, abuses, and
meanings of silence across the nineteenth century.

Scholars in our field are familiar with the deceptive amplitude of silence. George Eliot famously posited an
unbearable “roar which lies on the other side of silence” and crafted novels so wide-ranging yet intimate that
readers risked exposure to it. The British Raj strictly controlled the Indian press after 1857, yet this censorship
served to galvanize nationalist sentiment. Even the ostensibly repressed Victorians were recast by Michel
Foucault as a culture “which speaks verbosely of its silence” by minutely describing and classifying sex. We
welcome submissions that explore such contradictions of silence and silencing in both Victorian literature and our
discipline.

We encourage discussions that tune in to concrete examples of Victorian silence as well as to the conceptual
lacunae around which nineteenth-century aesthetics and politics revolved: the pregnant caesura, the unnamed
narrator, the subaltern who cannot speak. Atop Thornfield Hall, Jane Eyre invokes the “silent revolt” of millions of
women confined to domestic labor while, yards away, her immured Creole predecessor laughs. How does silence
become a tactic of refusal or solidarity? When is it an unsurpassable limit of the text or archive? And when is it not
silent at all?

Victorians often took it upon themselves to speak for and “protect” the “voiceless,” yet the very ascription of
voicelessness could facilitate disenfranchisement, institutionalization, and dispossession. Who in Victorian texts
(and Victorian studies) lacks what Edward Said called “the permission to narrate,” and how might we reexamine
this suppression?

Today, a hum of anthropogenic noise pollution disorients creatures large and small, and millions of terabytes of
audio and video are recorded daily. This aural overload began in earnest in the nineteenth century, when steampowered
industry, railways, phonographs, urban growth, and mass culture made actual quietude both rarer and
newly notable. This conference will ask what can be learned from the silence on the other side of that roar.

Proposals (no more than 300 words) are due by Oct. 15, 2025(email only, in Word format). Submit them to Will Glovinsky, Chair, Program Committee: wglovinsky@binghamton.edu. Please note: all submissions to NVSA are evaluated anonymously. Successful proposals will stay within the 300-word limit and make a compelling case for the talk and its relation to the conference topic. Please do not send complete papers, and do not include your name on the proposal. Include your name, institution, email address, and proposal title in the body of the email. Papers should be 15 minutes long.

For more information on recommended topics, travel grants, and essay prizes please see: https://northeastvictorianstudies.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/...