The North American British Music Studies Association

The North American British Music Studies Association

CFP: NAVSA 2015 Annual Conference

Victorians in the World
North American Victorian Studies Association 2015 Annual Conference
July 9-12, 2015
Honolulu, Hawaii
Deadline: December 1, 2014

NAVSA was established in 2002 to provide a continental forum for discussion of critical issues in the Victorian period, and to encourage a wide variety of critical and disciplinary approaches to the study of the field.  NAVSA sponsors an annual conference to provide a forum for presentation and discussion of research in Victorian studies.  Earlier conferences have been held in Pasadena, CA, Venice, IT, and Madison, WI.

Plenary speakers include Vanessa Smith of the University of Sydney, and Jonathan Osorio of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

The organizing committee for the 2015 NAVSA Annual Conference invites proposals for papers, panels, and special sessions on the subject of Victorians in the World.

Conference threads might include (but are certainly not limited to):

  • Victorian Travel Writing
  • Britain and America: the Special Relationship
  • South Asians in England
  • The Grotesque: Exquisite Bodies on Display
  • “Going Native”: Victorians in the Caribbean
  • Emigration
  • Victorian Worldviews
  • The Scottish Diaspora
  • Absent-Minded Imperialists
  • The foreign correspondents
  • The Victorians and the World’s Fairs
  • Architectural Imperialism
  • French maids and English nannies
  • Ibsen and the London theatre
  • The world in the Victorian school
  • Oceania in the Victorian Imagination
  • Marketing Scotland to the World
  • Dickens around the world

Deadline for paper and panel proposals is December 1, 2014; proposals for individual papers consist of a one-page (250-500 word) summary of the paper plus a one-page abbreviated cv.  For panels, a paragraph describing the panel, plus a one page summary for each paper and a one page abbreviated cv for each participant is required.

Proposals should be sent to Stephen Hancock, Conference Chair, hancocks@byuh.edu

For more information, see the conference site.

“Gladstone’s Daughter: Living Liberalism”, a blog by Phyllis Weliver in coordination with Gladstone’s Library in Wales, explores a living liberalism through the details of Victorian family life. With a rich visual component, the blog posts transcriptions and annotations of the unpublished life writings of Mary Gladstone Drew, the middle daughter of British Prime Minister Gladstone, a notable pianist, an unparalleled musical diarist, and the only woman among the PM’s private secretariat. Musical elements will feature soon. Blog postings occur every third Thursday and comments remain open for a fortnight.

The url for the blog is http://www.phyllisweliver.com/new-blog-1/.

Weliver_Blog_Image

Mary Gladstone, one of two ‘Angel Musicians’, Church of St Deiniol. Design by Edward Coley Burne-Jones, executed by Morris & Co., 1911. Photo by Phyllis Weliver.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 


CFP

Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck

Birkbeck College, University of London

July 16-18, 2015

Deadline: January 9, 2015

“The Arts and Feeling in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture”

 

 

“She saw no, not saw, but felt through and through a picture; she bestowed upon it all the warmth and richness of a woman’s sympathy; not by any intellectual effort, but by this strength of heart, and this guiding light of sympathy…” (Nathaniel Hawthorne,The Marble Faun, 1860)

This conference will explore the ways in which nineteenth-century authors, artists, sculptors, musicians and composers imagined and represented emotion and how writers and critics conceptualised the emotional aspects of aesthetic response. How did Victorian artists represent feeling and how were these feelings aestheticised? What rhetorical strategies did Victorian writers use to figure aesthetic response? What expressive codes and conventions were familiar to the Victorians? Which nineteenth-century scientific developments affected artistic production and what impact did these have on affective reactions?

The conference will consider the historically specific ways in which feeling is discussed in aesthetic discourse. It will also, however, encourage reflection about the limits of an historicist approach for understanding the emotions at play in nineteenth-century aesthetic response and the possibility of alternative methodologies for understanding the relation between feeling and the arts.

Proposals of up to 400 words should be sent to Dr. Vicky Mills at artsandfeeling@gmail.com by 9 January 2015. Please also attach a brief biographical note. Proposals for panels of three papers are also welcome, and should be accompanied by a brief (one-page) panel justification.

Possible topics might include:

  • Languages of emotion (affect; feeling; sympathy; empathy; sentimentality)
  • Theories of feeling (psychologists; art critics; philosophers; authors)
  • The arousal of specific emotions (pain; joy; anger; grief; tenderness; anxiety; disgust) and the aestheticisation of the emotions
  • The physiology and psychology of aesthetic perception (Physiological aesthetics; empathy; the nervous system; head v. heart)
  • The arts and religious feeling (biblical painting; sacred music)
  • Artists, museum visitors and concert-goers in fiction
  • The gendering of aesthetic response
  • The codification of artistic expression
  • Museum Feelings (boredom; fatigue; the museum as a site of affect; the regulation of feeling)
  • Curating feeling
  • The ‘art of feeling’ (how to feel the right thing in response to music, art, sculpture)
  • Feeling and touch
  • The role of emotion in ekphrasis; translating feeling

The conference is organized by The Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck, University of London.