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Unity, Discord, Dissension: Women’s Global and Local Economies, 1600–1950

A 10th-Year Interdisciplinary Conference on Women, Money and Markets

In-Person | 10–12 June 2027 | University Women’s Club, Mayfair, London

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Economic agency is both an individual belief in one’s own efficacy in the world and, among others, a result of accumulated social connections and currency. This is why women’s associational organisations (clubs, reading groups, unions) have always underpinned women’s advancements in securing personal and public rights, empowerment, and economic independence. Such groups range from the informal to the extremely formal, from neighbourhood cohorts to transnational endeavours funded by government grants. Equally, the opposite is true: When a woman’s social currency dwindles, so does her economic advancement.

This year Women, Money and Markets invite scholars at all stages of their career — postgraduate, postdoctoral, independent, employed, tenured — to present cutting-edge research on women’s global and local economies from the 1600s through the 1950s. We are seeking historical, cultural, and literary scholarship that focuses on women’s networks of solidarity linked to progressing, securing, and supporting women’s professional, artistic, and economic opportunities. Work on large-scale transnational networks is as equally desired as research on small, local cohorts.

For this conference, emphasis is placed on alliances, unity, and solidarities. However, ruptures, breaks, and shifting alliances are heartily welcomed, as many women’s associational endeavours were both affected by disunity and accused of rupturing homes, marriages, and gender norms when seeking women’s basic human rights, as well as legal and economic independence from men. The conference’s cohesion will lie in the confluence of disparate papers that all ultimately point to that give-and-take between personal efficacy and social capital. The interdisciplinary nature of the conference will likewise engender mutual learning and thinking in a crossdisciplinary way on the topic of women’s economic associations.

Finally, the historical span, from the 1600s to the twentieth century, ensures that the conference will reflect an unsettling reality, namely, what Gillian Beer reminded us of in the 1980s in her book, George Eliot:

Anyone who has studied women’s movements and the discussion of women’s rights and positions knows well that there has been no steady arc of progress. Instead, arguments and determinations have been advanced and then have apparently vanished again, as we see in the relationship between the end of the eighteenth century with the complex arguments of Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the beginning of the nineteenth. (Gillian Beer, George Eliot, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1986, p. 2.)

Continued historical, cultural, and literary study of and alliances of unity around women’s economic lives is the antidote to acquiescing gained ground for women’s public and private agency.

Paper topics can include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Formal associational groups or leagues centred on women’s work, unions, and trades

• Informal cohorts of local women supporting women’s economic lives

• Transnational women’s networks providing women’s employment

• Local or national women’s networks for the employment or professional training of women

• Colonial economies and women

• The economies and labour of women of all faiths, religions, or no religion

• Disunity amongst or within women’s organisations

• Ruptures external to women’s organisations: shaming, critiquing, denouncing women’s associational and professional organisations

• Disunity and rupture internally within a woman’s lived experience or narratives of labour and economic agency

• Artistic groups promoting the advancement of women’s public-facing work

• Literary representations of the New Woman’s individual agency and social capital for securing financial independence

• Historiographies of women’s associational and organisational lives around labour, work, employment, economic agency, trading, investing, saving, or philanthropy

• Medical associations dedicated to training women doctors; nurses’ unions; solidarities between women medical professionals and their patients

• (Representations of) care communities as informal and formal women’s economies

• (Representations of) female friendships as informal and formal women’s economies

The conference will take place at the Women’s University Club in the heart of London’s Mayfair. Since its foundation, the club has actively promoted causes closely associated with women and their education.

Submitting Proposals: Please submit a 350- to 400-word proposal and a 50-word author bio to women.money.markets.1600.1950@gmail.com by 15 September 2026. All notices of acceptance will go out by 15 October 2026. We are accepting proposals for individual papers as well as panels of three participants.

Call for Papers

Bloomsbury Cultural Histories Series: A Cultural History of Countercultures in the Long-Nineteenth Century

Volume Editors: Rhi Johnson (Indiana University Bloomington) Gabrielle Miller (Baylor University)

Series Editor: Louie Dean Valencia (Texas State University)

Although the term “counterculture” is a recent development, tracing back only to the 1970s, cultural movements and ideals that reject established social values and practices, or that oppose traditional, entrenched mores and expectations, have a much longer history. Indeed, many of the social transformations associated with the modern era emerged from such challenges to the mainstream. Enlightenment thought rejected blind faith in tradition, even as some reformers enacted harsh censorship while circulating their own pornographic or heretical texts clandestinely. Romanticism elevated rebellion against social strictures, even as it was leveraged as a tool of nation building. Bohemian circles challenged bourgeois class conventions and norms around drug use, even as many bohemians benefitted from systemic societal privileges. Some abolitionist and suffrage movements in nineteenth-century Europe and the Atlantic world contested both the bourgeois model of the “angel of the hearth” and the developing pseudoscience used to justify enslavement, racism, and, eventually, eugenics, even as other reformers worked within eugenic frameworks or fostered an understanding of gender that, in many places, led women’s rights to be more restricted at the end of the century than they were at its outset.

These and other countercultural formations provide the basis for this volume, which explores the emergence, scope, and impact of countercultures, broadly understood, amid the consolidation of industrial modernity and bourgeois hegemony in the long nineteenth century. We seek essays that examine the relationships between dominant cultural forms, alternative ways of being, and interpretive frameworks that resisted, transgressed, or rejected the mainstream. Did countercultures consistently develop in direct opposition to cultural norms? How were they subsumed, assimilated, or rejected by dominant cultural actors? To what extent did cultural practices, political movements, and aesthetic forms that departed from the norm transform the status quo?

This series understands countercultures as collective formations that, across historical periods, make everyday life a site of transgressive refusal. Through alternative ways of living, believing, expressing, organizing, and belonging, they challenge dominant norms and reveal the boundaries of the proper, sacred, respectable, and legitimate as historically made, contested, and open to change; some remain fleeting experiments, while others help make broader social transformation imaginable.

(Inter)disciplinary research essays in any field are welcome. Essays should speak to a broad, interdisciplinary audience, and should respond to one of the following topic areas, within the context of the long nineteenth century:

• Countercultural movements and their origins

• Rebels and poets

• Aesthetics and sounds

• Transgressive genders and sexualities •

Cults, drugs and rituals

• Hybrid identities at the crossroads

• Resistance and counterpublic spaces

• Culture wars

These topics are held in common across A Cultural History of Countercultures, so essays not aimed specifically at one of these areas cannot be considered for inclusion in the volume. A 250-word abstract and one-page CV are due by December 1, 2026, to rhirjohn@iu.edu. Full articles (max 10,000 words), if requested, will be due April 15, 2027. Please indicate in your abstract which topic area your essay addresses. Submissions may not be under review or published elsewhere.

2027 NVSA Conference, “Trash,” Call for Papers

Victorian Poetry’s 2026 Early Career Prize: Call for Submissions

Victorian Poetry invites submissions for its 2026 Early Career Essay Prize, which recognizes exemplary essays by untenured scholars of all ranks and affiliations (including NTT and graduate student colleagues). Conferred on an annual basis, the prize carries an award of $500 and publication in Victorian Poetry. Strong essays that do not win the award may also be considered for publication as recommended by the prize committee. Submissions are due 3 August 2026. Scholars wishing to be considered should submit anonymized MS Word essays and brief CVs to victorianpoetryjournal@gmail.com with “Early Career Essay Prize” in the subject line. Prior to submission, consult our guidelines for authors. Essays written with the assistance of generative AI are ineligible for the prize.

Winning articles will be selected according to three criteria: (1) significance of contribution to the field of Victorian poetry (including its involvement with Victorian studies and other areas of inquiry in or beyond literary studies); (2) excellence of research, interpretation, and method; and (3) efficacy of presentation. The journal continues to expand its purview to a wider compass of archives and approaches. We welcome work that capaciously (re)interprets the field’s originary contexts and reconsiders Victorian poetry (broadly construed) in new, innovative, cross-disciplinary, theoretical, and / or experimental ways.

VP 2026 Early Career Prize Announcement

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.)

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.

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.