The North American British Music Studies Association

The North American British Music Studies Association

CFP: Midwest Victorian Studies Association 2017: Victorian Taste

Oberlin College & Conservatory, Oberlin, Ohio, April 28-30

What was Victorian taste? How did British Victorians at home and abroad discuss, theorize, market, judge, and consume taste? How was taste imagined and envisioned in relation to literary, visual, and musical arts? How did new knowledge of Britain’s historical and aesthetic past impact tastes of contemporary Victorians? MVSA’s 2017 conference invites papers that reflect fresh and current thinking about taste and the Victorians. Proposals are sought from scholars working in art history, musicology, history, science, philosophy, theater, and literature. We particularly encourage presentations that will contribute to cross-disciplinary discussion.

The 2017 conference will be held at Oberlin College & Conservatory, in the 1963 Minoru Yamasaki-designed buildings that reflect the neo-gothic splendor of some of the college’s oldest buildings. Aside from attending panels, seminars, and the Jane Stedman plenary lecture, conference participants will have the opportunity to tour a special Victorian exhibit at the Allen Memorial Art Museum and attend “What the Victorians Heard,” a concert by Oberlin’s Collegium Musicum (directed by Steven Plank), as well as dozens of other ongoing musical and theatrical performances.

MVSA’s 2014 Jane Stedman Lecture will be given by Candace L. Bailey of North Carolina Central University. Professor Bailey is a leading social and cultural musicologist, and an expert on music in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. She is a past president of the North American British Music Studies Association.

For the fourth year, MVSA’s conference will feature three seminars open to graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars led by senior scholars on topics related to the conference theme. Participants pre-circulate 5-to-7 page papers. Stay tuned for the forthcoming seminar CFP on the MVSA website.

The deadline for proposals will be September 30, 2016. The official call for papers and additional information about the conference will soon be available.

This post came from Patrick Leary to the Victoria Listserv, and may be of interest to those working with 19th-century periodicals.

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I am very pleased to announce a major new edition of the Curran Index.  Editor Gary Simons has made enormous progress in uncovering and publishing the identities of contributors to major Victorian magazines, now including a number of titles that were never part of the original Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals.  Gary details his latest findings here:
http://www.victorianresearch.org/2015_Dec_Curran_Index_rev.pdf

Those not familiar with the Curran Index will want to read the introductory material on the website, and have a browse through the listings: http://victorianresearch.org/curranindex.html  Under Gary’s editorship, the Index has expanded hugely since Eileen Curran and I first put it online over a dozen years ago, and now provides listings for about 7,500 contributions by some 1,000 authors.  I would encourage anyone who works with 19th-century British periodicals to make use of — and where possible to contribute to — the work of the Index, which is in essence a continuation of the mission of the Wellesley.  The foundational argument of this ongoing project is simply stated: knowing who wrote what matters.  I would argue further that finding out who wrote the articles, poems, and stories in the Victorian press, which was so largely governed by the custom of anonymity, matters now more than ever, as the enormously varied output of that press has now become so much more accessible and explorable than it has ever been.

If you are working on a particular author and believe that you have identified one or more previously unattributed works that were published in 19th-c. magazines or newspapers, please consider making those findings available to other scholars through the Curran Index.  Gary Simons would love to hear from you; he can be reached at gsimons1946@yahoo.com  By the same token, please drop him a note if you have any comments or suggestions about the Index.  As with so many scholarly research projects, feedback of any kind is hard to come by, and always very welcome.

CFP Deadline: 31 Oct 2015

The Midwest Victorian Studies Association [MVSA] will hold its 2016 annual conference at the University of Missouri–Columbia, April 8-10. Taking as its starting point the remarkable explosion in the periodical press and the availability of cheap print in the Victorian Era, the conference aims to attract papers that reflect fresh and current thinking about the topic.

Proposals for papers of twenty minutes in length are sought from scholars working in musicology, history, art history, science, philosophy, theater, and literature. The deadline for proposals is October 31, 2015. For further details, please see  http://www.midwestvictorian.org/p/conference.html

MVSA’s 2016 Jane Stedman Plenary Speaker will be Leanne Langley, Associate Fellow at the University of London’s Institute of Musical Research, social and cultural historian of music, and leading authority on music journalism in nineteenth-century Britain. Her talk is entitled “Musical Times: The Achievement of the Musical Press in Nineteenth-Century England.”

The conference will also feature three seminars open to graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars led by senior scholars on topics related to the conference theme. Seminar participants pre-circulate 5-to-7 page papers. This year’s topics are “Print Culture and the Mass Public,” led by Julie Codell; “Finding/Creating a Voice in the Periodical Press,” led by Leanne Langley; and “The Transatlantic Periodical Press,” led by Jennifer Phegley.  The deadline for submitting a seminar proposal is October 15, 2015.

MVSA is an interdisciplinary organization welcoming scholars from all disciplines who share an interest in nineteenth-century British history, literature, and culture.

From March 2nd to 6th, the Essay program on BBC Radio 3 will air a series on Unsung Heroines of Classical Music, and on 8 March the entire day has an exciting full day of women’s music: http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2015/international-womens-day-r3

As part of this celebration of International Women’s Day, NABMSA member Phyllis Weliver will be presenting a 15-minute essay, “Classical Music’s Unsung Heroines: Mary Gladstone”, on BBC Radio 3 at 10:45 Greenwich Mean Time/5:45 Eastern Time on Thursday, March 5, 2015.  Listen live (or later as a podcast):  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006x3hl

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded NABMSA member Phyllis Weliver a Fellowship for her project, Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon, 1876-1883.  She will begin her 12-month fellowship on January 1, 2015. Congratulations to Dr. Weliver!