CFP: “Victorian Energies: Sucrocultures, Carbocultures, and Petrocultures in the Long Nineteenth Century” Victorian Review Special Issue / Proposal Deadline: September 1, 2024 / Paper Submission Deadline: April 1, 2025

This special issue revises the history of energy production and consumption through the cultural, imaginative, and infrastructural forms of Victorian literature. Proposals of 100 words are due by September 1, 2024. Full essays of 7,000 – 8,000 words (inclusive of notes) will be due April 1, 2025 and will be evaluated by a single peer reviewer before editorial board approval. Kindly direct queries and proposals to the guest editor, Michael Tondre: [email protected]. For more information, see the attached CFP (PDF).

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CFP 4th International Poe and Hawthorne Conference / “Dis/embodiment” / Paris, France / Deadline: September 15, 2024

We are pleased to invite paper and session proposals for the 4th International Poe and Hawthorne Conference on the theme Dis/embodiment. This academic event, to be held in Paris, France (July 1-4, 2025), is organized by the Poe Studies Association (PSA) and the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society (NHS) in partnership with Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Université Paris Cité, Sorbonne Université, Université Bretagne-Sud, and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Previous co-sponsored international conferences of the PSA and NHS have been held in Oxford, England (2006), Florence, Italy (2012), and Kyoto, Japan (2018).

We invite proposals for individual papers as well as full panels, roundtables, and more creative formats, on Poe, Hawthorne, or Poe and Hawthorne as they relate to the theme of dis/embodiment. While we welcome new readings of canonical oeuvres, we are also interested in proposals turning to texts that have received less critical attention. We also invite proposals that place the question of bodies in Poe and/or Hawthorne in conversation with other writers and literary, aesthetic, philosophical, political, and cultural traditions. We are particularly interested in proposals that seek to explore their relation to French contexts, including how French writers, critics, philosophers, artists, and filmmakers have drawn on their writings, or translated them into French. From Baudelaire and Mallarmé, to Marie Bonaparte, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, to Claude Richard, Henri Justin, and Paulin Ismard, Poe has often been on the mind of French readers. We hope that this conference will offer the opportunity to revisit the French side of Poe, as well as to recover “the French face” of Hawthorne, from his “Second Empire critics” (Anesko and Brooks) to more recent engagements. We also welcome proposals that seek to position the question of bodies in Poe and/or Hawthorne beyond a transatlantic setting and within larger historical and geographical networks and traditions.

Individual paper proposals should be no more than 250 words and include speaker affiliation and a 100-word biographical statement. Panel or round-table proposals, which may be up to 1,500 words, should include a panel rationale, organizer and speaker names, affiliations and biographical statements, as well as paper titles and abstracts.

Please submit your proposals to [email protected] by 15 September 2024. Confirmations of accepted proposals will be sent out by mid-November 2024.

For full details, please see the 4th International Poe and Hawthorne Conference complete CFP (PDF)

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CFP NCSA Annual Conference / “Fusions of Culture, Time, and Space” / Deadline: September 30, 2024

The Nineteenth-Century Studies Association conference is coming to New Orleans, March 27-31, 2025! More information and the CFP can be found here: https://ncsaweb.net/2025-conference-information/

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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 [email protected].

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INCS Stein Prize 2023:

Winner: Trish Bredar, “‘A Voyage of Discovery’: Reimagining the Walking Woman through Nineteenth-Century Diaries.” Victorian Literature and Culture 50.4 (2022): 609-38.

Theories of how pedestrians in the Nineteenth Century interacted with their environments powerfully inform the ways in which literary scholars and art historians interpret works from this period. In “‘A Voyage of Discovery’: Reimagining the Walking Woman through Nineteenth-Century Diaries,” Trish Bredar radically undermines dominant conceptualizations of female mobility. She argues that our current understanding of physical mobility in prior centuries is based largely on men’s experiences and on readings of Rousseau, Wordsworth, Thoreau, Benjamin, and de Certeau. In making this case, she builds on the work of feminist scholars, “who have done much to expose the gender disparities that shape the way that people physically navigate the world.” However, she challenges the popular idea that female mobility was “marginal or transgressive.” Bredar draws on a corpus of over a hundred manuscript diaries in which women document their attitudes toward strolls and outings. Based on this grass-roots approach, she proposes abandoning rather than adapting the male-inspired model of le flâneur. She advocates replacing it with “new paradigms of mobility that emerge from women’s experience.” By providing insights into “how women practiced, conceptualized, and narrated their pedestrian mobility,” this article invites scholars to rethink their understandings of perspective, embodiment, and agency in literature and artistic representations from this period.

Runner Up: Mary Bowden, “Cultivating Arboreal Time in Hardy’s Fiction,” Dibur Literary Journal 11 (2022): 89-100.

In “Cultivating Arboreal Time in Hardy’s Fiction,” Mary Bowden examines how the novels Under the Greenwood Tree and The Woodlanders counterpoint the timescales and rhythms of human lives and the lives of trees. Richly situated in wider critical conversations about Hardy, ecology, and the natural world, Bowden’s compelling and well written essay advances these discussions with ingenious analyses of how the novels incorporate Hardy’s knowledge of practices such as coppicing and pollarding. Through these silvicultural methods, a tree might live on indefinitely, sending out fresh shoots again and again from its stump, remaining always in a state of growth and development. Bowden shows how the characters in these works too are attracted to the promise of a life of recursive youth and renewal. Such dreams must prove illusory, but with the juxtaposition of biotemporal patterns, cadences, and scales, Hardy—like Bowden—demonstrates the power of incorporating the time of trees into the human form of the novel.

Runner Up: Aisha Motlani, “Architecture as Enemy: Felice Beato’s Photographs of Lucknow.” Oxford Art Journal 44.3 (2022): 419-44.

Analyzing the work of war photographer Felice Beato in 1857 India, Aisha Motlani’s “Architecture as Enemy” offers compelling insights into the weaponization of popular forms (the souvenir photograph, for example) in imperial battle. As Motlani illustrates, the British had critiqued the perceived excesses, flourishes and hybridity of Lucknow architecture before 1857, their denigration operating as a thinly-veiled critique of India itself. In the aftermath of the 1857 rebellion, ideological and physical destruction coincided; targets of aesthetic critique became military targets. Motlani’s essay covers impressive and fascinating ground, introducing the reader to Nawabi architecture (“a distinctly eclectic architectural style that combined Indian, Persian, and European forms”), to Felice Beato’s strategies for staging and representing conquered territory, to the role of architecture in colonial domination, and to the conventions of nineteenth-century war photography.

Stein Prize Committee 2023: Rebecca Stern (Chair), Richard Menke, and Darci Gardner.

INCS Susan Morgan Graduate Essay Prize 2023:

Winner: Francesca Colonnese, “Slow Motion, Slow Time: Perceptual Events in “The Lady of Shalott” 

Francesca Colonnese’s essay blazes a new and exciting trail between the disciplines of literary studies and cognitive science. Returning to Tennyson’s iconic poem ‘The Lady of Shalott,’ Colonnese demonstrates how the cognitive phenomenon of tachypsychia–the sensation that time slows down during periods of intense excitement or stress–helps to clarify questions of time and agency that have long divided critical discussions of the work. At the same time, Colonnese’s astute close readings forge a larger connection to time as a felt, subjective condition recoverable through verse form offers exciting possibilities for future studies. The readers were impressed with the essay’s clarity and sophistication.

Honorable Mention: Margaret Gray, “Forging an Economic Future? Female Victorian Travellers on the Industrialisation of the Antiquities Trade in Egypt and Japan, 1848-1880” 

Margaret Gray’s ambitious and wide-ranging essay uses its geographically-comparative method to detail the specific and significant consequences of the narratives of Victorian women travelers in Egypt and Japan Turning attention away from people and toward objects–fake antiquities produced in Egypt and Japan for the export market– Gray shows, using close-reading and historical context, that the divergent appraisals of British women writers toward these manufactured artifacts justified larger political and economic assumptions about the two countries that ultimately shaped two very different colonial projects and revealed the prejudices lying beneath nineteenth-century international trade and economic policies –prejudices that helped shape narratives of global development that remain influential today. Gray’s project is exemplary of strong interdisciplinary research.

Honorable Mention: Hyunjoo Yu, “On a Train Out of Place: Railroad in Zitkala-ša’s Semi-Autobiographical Stories” 

Hyunjoo Yu’s essay proposes exciting ways to bring feminist affect studies and critical race studies to bear on the infrastructures that underlay nineteenth-century experience around the globe. This innovative perspective on railway narratives uses the settler colonial’s train car as an entry point into an evocative study of the powerful affective framework of shame that engulfs Indigenous narrative generally and railway stories particularly. Yu’s work focuses on representations of railroads in the stories of the Yankton Dakota writer Zitkala-Ša, demonstrating how those stories unpack the complex, multilayered affects–comfort and shame, fascination and horror–that imperial technologies instilled in those racialized peoples cast as outsiders to the project of modernization. Yu’s essay helps us see how such technologies and their associated affects not only worked in the service of oppression and assimilation, but also offered unexpected sites of possibility and even resistance. The essay’s discussion of how shame, using railroad as an affective material of capitalistic-colonial object, entangles Native and Asian lives is particularly compelling. The essay proposes new avenues within sovereignty studies to investigate railroads and other modes of mobility as staging grounds for colonial re-inscriptions and holds meaningful potential to expand diverse yet understudied research on the “capitalistic-colonial mess,” which includes the Yellow Peril discourses, Indigenous relations, and U.S. settler colonialism.

Susan Morgan Prize Committee 2023: Jen Camden (Chair), Elizabeth Chang, John Miller, Jiwon Min.