News and Announcements

Feel free to share news and announcements of interest to the INCS membership by sending an email with the subject heading “INCS Website” to the INCS Webmaster Jiwon Min (jiwon.min@emory.edu). Please provide summary information as below (nature of announcement, title, place, dates, deadline) and include a URL pointing toward a more comprehensive outline of the relevant information.

Call For Papers / Open Edition Journals / Transporting Childhood Through Play: The Making of the World in Board Games, 19th – 21st centuries

“By transporting us to these tropical and transoceanic regions that we were so often already imagining, the beautiful images in this game allow us to see, so to speak, the beautiful sights of these countries brought to life.”

With these words, the game Dans les colonies (1900) invites young players to a vicarious experience of colonialism. The cards inside the box bear witness to the circulation of games and the ideas they conveyed throughout Western Europe and North America: the name of each region is written in German, while the rules are translated into approximate French. From versions of ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ to board games featuring explorers, tourists, cyclists or motorists setting out to discover the wonders of the globe, games offering playful versions of geographical exploration became increasingly popular from the 19th century onwards. From the rise of colonization in the 19^th century to contemporary globalisation, this issue will examine how games (board games, lotto, card games, puzzles, paper cut-out figures, and miniature theaters) bring the world within reach of players through illustrated material media. Although numerous studies have already analysed video games from postcolonial perspectives, analog games remain relatively understudied in this regard. Taking a long-term historical perspective, this issue will pay particular attention to recent games such as Settlers of Catan (1996), renamed Catan in 2015, in light of older examples. This broad chronolgy will allow us to assess the critical positioning that has developed in board games since the 1990s.

This issue will examine the objects in question in terms of their materiality to understand the effect of games on our perception of global space. This includes the reduction of monuments and mountains to a domestic and child-friendly scale; the adaptation of maps to the space of the game board in a setting that combines conquest and discovery; and the repetition of familiar — and often stereotypical — images of faraway places and ‘others’. It will consider the overt and implicit ideological positioning that underlies the various game mechanics, and the gestures and attitudes those imply on the part of the players: grid-based classification, resource extraction, conquest, and even violence reproduced on a symbolic scale. We will focus in particular on the way in which games mobilize the bodies involved in the game: what positions are taken, what interactions occur between players, and what rituals are established around board games?

While the scientific literature on board games is dominated by English-language references, this issue will focus on presenting games from diverse cultures, analyzing their transnational circulations. These are illustrated, for example, by ethnographer Stewart Culin’s research on Japanese sugorokus and North American indigenous games. The issue will also address the phenomena of recycling and remediation: for instance, Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days was, as mentioned above, turned into several games across France and Europe. In the United States, it became the background of a newspaper serial by journalist Nellie Bly, a serial which then itself gave way to a new game, Around the World with Nellie Bly.

Submission of proposals

Proposals for articles (approximately 3,000 characters, including spaces) – abstracts including methodological aspects and the issue addressed, accompanied by a short biography and bibliography – should be sent before 8 June 2026 to the Strenae journal (strenae@afreloce.fr).

Submission of articles

Finalized articles (30,000 to 40,000 characters including spaces, spaces and notes) must be submitted by February 1^st, 2027. They may be written in English or French. Authors writing in a language other than their mother tongue must have their text proofread by a native speaker before submission. Articles must comply with the journal’s guidelines for authors: https://journals.openedition.org/strenae/200

Revisions and publication

Publication is scheduled for November 2027.

See Open Edition Journals for further details about possible themes, information about submission, and references.

INCS Stein Prize 2025

Winner: Sebastian Egholm Lund, “The Climate of Utopia: Victorian Hothouses and H. G. Wells.” Victorian Studies, vol. 65, no. 4, 2023, pp. 618-39. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.2979/vic.00044. (While official date of publication is 2023, the article did not appear until 2024.)

Sebastian Egholm Lund’s article, “The Climate of Utopia: Victorian Hothouses and H.G. Wells,” is a superb work of ecocritical literary scholarship. Lund’s persuasive argument unfolds in compelling prose, elucidating the Victorian techno-utopian hubris of envisioning an Edenic planetary hothouse, while forging connections with the unsettling prospect of solar geoengineering as a response to climate change today. Grounded in expert historical research and perceptive textual analysis, Lund focuses on the writings of Wells, particularly The Time Machine (1895), as well as the more obscure short story “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (1894). From the Wardian case to the Crystal Palace, Lund contextualizes Wells’s visions of climate engineering within “the metaphoric paradox of the hothouse,” in which the Victorian era both instigated catastrophic climate change through exponential increases in atmospheric carbon emissions, and simultaneously envisioned an ideal future of anthropogenic technological environmental manipulation. Timely and thought-provoking, Lund suggests the limitations of planetary climate engineering, as foreshadowed by Wells and as manifested in the current climate crisis.

Runner Up: Winter Jade Werner, “The Hikayat Abdullah, the Missionary Press, and the Making of Nineteenth-Century ‘World Literature.’” Comparative Literature, vol. 76, no, 4, 2024, pp. 451–71. https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-11316397.

The Richard Stein Essay Prize Honorable Mention for 2025 is awarded to Winter Jade Werner for “The Hikayat Abdullah, the Missionary Press, and the Making of Nineteenth-Century ‘World Literature,'” published in Comparative Literature. Deeply researched, theoretically informed, and analytically sharp, this essay uses the historians’ tool of microhistory to understand an intriguing nineteenth-century literary encounter involving Abdullah bin Abdel Kadir, known as the father of Malay Literature. Casting her eye beyond this microhistory, Werner entertains larger questions about the category of the literary and the notion of the nation. Even in a secularizing epoch, she locates religious institutions and religious practices at the heart of the making of world literature as a field.

Stein Prize Committee 2025: Lara Kriegel, Holly Case, and Andrea Rager.

INCS Susan Morgan Graduate Essay Prize 2025

Winner: Michele Brugnetti, Sapienza University of Rome / University of Silesia in Katowice, “A New Form for a New Crisis: the emergence of the novel-essay and the case of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean”

In his concise, suggestive, and well-researched paper, Michele Brugnetti makes a strong case for reading Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1884) as a signal contribution to the fin-de-siècle European tradition of the novel-essay. Drawing on Stefano Ercolino’s theorization of the novel-essay in continental literature, Brugnetti convincingly argues that Pater’s reimagination of the Bildungsroman around processes of aesthetic reflection was more than just an ornamental, gratuitous suspension of narrative action. Instead, Pater experimentally combined the Bildungsroman with the novel-essay to explore how aesthetic reflection could play a constitutive role in the unfolding of plot and the development of individual character. “In a moment defined by acceleration, fragmentation, and the collapse of inherited certainties,” Brugnetti suggests, “Pater stages in Marius the Epicurean a radically inward turn: it explores how perception, shaped by prior texts and aesthetic encounters, inhabits tension—seeking, through the interpenetration of essay and novel, a form provisional enough to reflect a self continuously in the act of becoming.” (8) The committee was particularly impressed by the breadth of Brugnetti’s engagement with the Paterian source material and his meaningful dialogue with scholarship related to the pan-European decadent novel.

Honorable Mention: Rebecca Sheppard, University of British Columbia, “Poisoned Thought and Circulatory Collapse in George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil”

What happens to a body or a mind when emotions are bottled and blood does not circulate as it should? How might the language of nineteenth-century affect and circulatory theory unveil heretofore hidden valences in the pathologized characters inhabiting the world of George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil? Rebecca Sheppard’s insightful and witty essay proposes answers to these questions, arguing that Eliot’s novella “exposes what happens when circulation, meant to sustain life through constant renewal, no longer functions healthily. […] Eliot encodes this failure in the language of pressure, blockage, and accumulated strain” (6). The prize committee found the interdisciplinary nature of the essay to be particularly noteworthy. Sheppard convincingly deploys Victorian-era medical literature in her attentive close readings of The Lifted Veil to conclude that the structure of Eliot’s novella itself, much like that of the pathologies ailing Latimer, offers the “physiological and narrative inversion” of an “acceleration [that] defines the dominant logic of modern life” (13).

Susan Morgan Prize Committee 2025: Nick Wolters, Matthew Skwiat and John MacNeill Miller.

Call for Papers / Vernon Lee Conference / “Order and Chaos: Vernon Lee and the Politics of Disruption / 1-3 September 2026 / University of Liverpool / Abstracts (300 words) and a short bio (100 words) due 18 January 2026

This conference aims to explore the political questions and challenges we face today through the lens that Vernon Lee brought to the same kind of challenges in her time: a lens that is simultaneously thought–provoking, curious, playful, radical, and multidisciplinary. Papers may wish to explore the breakdown and/or the imposition of illusory order or structure in various fields (educational, social, commercial, entertainment, literary, scientific, information), what damage it is doing and whether it can somehow be harnessed or managed to be beneficial; how resistance, rebellion and nonconformity in public, academic, and private life, thought and publication can modify “however infinitesimally, the opinions and ideals and institutions of the present and the future” as Lee suggests in Gospels of Anarchy.

We welcome presentations, lightning presentations, panels/ roundtables, workshops, or creative practice sessions. We would particularly like to hear about the ways in which Lee’s works speak to current events and trends, and postulate or enable the development of healthy, sustainable futures. Papers (15 minutes) Roundtable/ panel (60 mins), workshops (60 mins), creative practice session (60 mins), and lightning papers (10 mins). We would be delighted to discuss proposals for panels or individual presentations, and to answer any questions you may have. Please submit questions, abstracts (300 words) and a short bio (100 words) in a Word/ GoogleDoc to the review committee email vernonleealliance@gmail.com by 18 January 2026.

Thanks to the generosity of the International Vernon Lee Society, we hope to offer bursaries to early-career/precarious scholars – more details on the application process will be made available in due course.

The conference is organized by members of The Vernon Lee Alliance (VLA): Matthew Bradley (The University of Liverpool, UK), Elisa Bizzotto (Iuav University of Venice, Italy), Sally Blackburn-Daniels (Teesside University, UK), Mary F. Burns (Independent Scholar, US), Mandy Gagel (University of Michigan, US), Mary Clai Jones (Chadron State College, US), Tomi-Ann Roberts (Colorado College, US)

See full CFP for more details and additional information about submitting abstracts and panel proposals.

**CFP Victorian Poetry / “Poetry’s Parts” Keyword Series / Deadline: rolling**

Victorian Poetry is pleased to announce a new keyword series called “Poetry’s Parts.” We invite proposals for short keyword essays (ca. 1,100 – 1,300 words) exploring Victorian poetry’s parts, whether formal (“sonnet”) or figural (“apostrophe”), cultural (“cosmopolitan”) or critical (“lyricization”). Considered and published on an ongoing basis (as opposed to appearing in a designated special issue), essays should apprehend pressing conceptual, aesthetic, historical, cultural, political, archival, and / or methodological questions and problems that shape the field (or, alternatively, that have been neglected to the field’s detriment). As warranted, authors might also consider the ways the field (as revealed by the keyword under discussion) is animated by or animates other (sub)disciplines or genealogies of thought in ways recognized or unrecognized.

Keywords need not be limited to those that fall strictly within the specialist purview of Victorian poetry. For instance, essays exploring the resonances of broad concepts such as “atmosphere” or “race” as refracted distinctively by and through Victorian poetry (broadly construed) are most welcome. Because these essays should make arguments as opposed to offering handbook-style overviews, proposals revisiting keywords explored in prior issues will eventually be accepted as the series unfolds. Pedagogical discussion may be appropriate if it serves an illustrative purpose that keeps in view the series’ focus.

Proposals are subject to editorial review (with an eye toward giving deliberate shape to the series, especially in its early stages) and keyword essays to peer review. If contemporaneous appearance in print is necessary for offering substantive insight, the editor will consider joint proposals (ideally, featuring scholars of different ranks and affiliations, on and off the tenure track), whether on the same keyword from quite distinct vantages or on different but productively entangled keywords. Joint proposals should be limited to two or three scholars, as larger groups are difficult to accommodate in print outside the confines of a special issue. Direct queries and proposals to the editor at victorianpoetryjournal@gmail.com.