Following two years of disruption caused by the pandemic, we were delighted to be holding annual BAVS conferences once again. The 2023 BAVS conference will be hosted at the University of Surrey (31 August – 2 September 2023). The 2022 BAVS conference was held at the University of Birmingham (1-3 September 2022).
In recent years, BAVS has also organised various smaller activities such as the BAVS@Home series of online events, Victorian Valentines, Undisciplining Victorian Studies, ‘Florence Nightingale – Beyond the Lady with the Lamp’ and Violence, Vaccination, and Immigration in the Socio-Literary Imaginary. There has also been a series of ‘BAVS Talks’ events, videos of which are available to view online.
Other recent events funded by BAVS:
London Victorian Studies Colloquium, “Repairing Research in Victorian Studies”, 7-9 April 2022.
The LVSC, held 7-9 April 2022, was a space for PG and ECR students to make connections, share research and develop their own research community – something which has been greatly missed for the past few years. For many delegates, even those two or three years into a PhD, it was their first in person event. The generous funding from BAVS meant that we were able to reduce the overall cost of attending, which was especially valuable considering the career stage of our delegates. We had eighteen delegates in total and just under half of our delegates chose to stay on campus at RHUL, creating a residential environment in which delegates could build meaningful professional relationships.
Breaking Barriers: Nineteenth Century Visual Culture in the Woke Age
January 27th, 2021.
MeToo, BLM, LGBTQ+ rights, Extinction Rebellion – these are just some of the social movements that have contributed to the woke age. Moments of great change and reflection often make us think about our own social responsibility, be that our historical research, or what kinds of history we’re interested in. The long nineteenth century was also a time of furious debate, intense anxiety, and substantial progress, but its outdated views on gender, race and other pressing social issues remain in the visual epitaphs all around us, from statues to monuments, buildings to paintings. It is our social responsibility to rethink these objects and consider how they are represented and interpreted in the now.
This collaborative event will do just that. Edge Hill University and The British Association of Victorian Studies are pleased to welcome speakers from a range of backgrounds to talk about how their research on long-nineteenth-century visual culture interacts with changing social attitudes and ideas, considering the uncomfortable, problematic and even liberating experience of revaluating art and its legacies.
· Keynote: Laura Eastlake (Edge Hill University)
The Victorians and Cleopatra: Unwriting the Greatest (Orientalist) Love Story Ever Told
· Patricia Pulham (University of Surrey)
‘Touching Statues: Reading 19thC Narratives of Sexual Violation in the MeToo Era’
· Nichole Cochrane (University of Exeter, BAVS/BARS 19C Matters Fellow)
‘Bonaparte in Britain: Popularity, Propaganda and the Lives of ‘Great’ Men’
· Gemma Shearwood (Uni of York)
‘The devil on his shoulder’: considering Flaxman’s memorial to the Early of Mansfield in relation to the memorial of Charles Watson
· Rebecca Senior (Henry Moore Postdoctoral Fellow)
Commemorating colonialism: Monuments, oppression and visual culture in Britain during the long nineteenth century
Wit is a prominent feature of nineteenth-century culture that encompasses genres from satire to nonsense. Well-known examples range from Dickens’s humorous sketches to joke pages in magazines, and from political cartoons in the tradition of Cruikshank and Gillray to music hall routines. Women’s participation in these discourses, however, still goes underacknowledged or even completely unrecognised. This reflects on cultural attitudes of the present day as well as the nineteenth century. While feminist comedy is now a genre in its own right, the question ‘Can women be funny?’ is still regularly posed. In popular imagination of the nineteenth century, women are the subjects of humour rather than humourists themselves. The centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act brought back into the public eye many contemporary cartoons ridiculing the suffragettes, and the strikingly similar earlier satires on the New Woman.
This interdisciplinary conference is interested in women’s active participation in humour and comedy in the long nineteenth century, as comic writers, artists, and performers. We will seek to address the reasons for the perceived absence of women from comic discourse, whether because their work was not recognised as humorous, because they issued it under male pseudonyms, or because they encountered resistance from a cultural establishment that regarded comedy as a male domain.
Participants may want to address topics including:
We welcome papers on individual female humourists which may include, but are not limited to:
Speakers: Ellen Bulford Welch (University of Sheffield) and Jonathan Taylor
(University of Surrey)
Join us at the picturesque Severndroog Castle on Shooter’s Hill in Greenwich for a BAVSfunded
public lecture celebrating the launch of a new virtual exhibition about the castle’s
literary history. We will be exploring the important role that Severndroog plays in texts by
Charles Dickens, James Malcolm Rymer, Lucy Clifford and E. Nesbit, its popularity as a
nineteenth-century leisure attraction, and its implication within Victorian debates about class
and gender. A free wine reception will follow the talk. Free tickets will shortly be available
through Severndroog’s Evenbrite page: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/severndroog-castlebuilding-
preservation-trust-7458199485.
Directions to the castle can be found at
https://www.severndroogcastle.org.uk/visit.html#gettinghere.
Keynote Speakers: Pamela Fletcher Tapati Guha Thakurta In the nineteenth century the circulation of works of art developed into its recognisably modern form. The forces of increasingly globalized capitalism, imperial routes and new means of transport, coupled with the growing reach of advertising and the press caused an unprecedented movement of artists, goods and materials. …
A one-day interdisciplinary conference with keynote by Professor Mary Hammond (University of Southampton)
Keynote Speakers:
Professor Kate Flint, University of Southern California, Dana & David Dornsife College
Professor Mike Huggins, University of Cumbria
Professor Sir Christopher Ricks, Boston University
Opening Roundtable Speakers:
Edwina Ehrman, Victoria and Albert Museum
Dr Kate Hill, University of Lincoln
Professor Francesco Marroni, University of G. d’ Annunzio, Chieti-Pescara
This two-day conference, scheduled for the 10th to 11th August 2017, aims to re-evaluate the charge of ‘coarseness’ so often directed at the Brontë family. In early critical appraisals of the Brontës’ writings, accusations of ‘coarseness’ appear frequently. Although Jane Eyre(1847) was an instant bestseller, Elizabeth Rigby famously attacked the book as ‘coarse’ and accused Charlotte of …
A one day Symonsposium Keynote Speakers: Marion Thain (New York University) Nick Freeman (Loughborough University) Arthur Symons (1865-1945) is the dominant figure in English Decadent verse of the late nineteenth century. Some of his best poems had already perfected some of the techniques often attributed to the modernists, distilling the energy of the impression in …
This three day conference will be held from Wednesday 19th to Friday 21st of July 2017 in the Old Aberdeen Campus of the University of Aberdeen. It will explore all aspects related to the Scottish upbringing, education and heritage of the cleric, polymath and writer of fantastic literature George MacDonald. It aims to fathom the importance of this facet in his enduring …
A Victorian Popular Fiction Association (VPFA) NUI Galway Study Day
This day of talks, seminars and interactive displays, will focus on The Woodlanders, on the 130th anniversary of the publication of what Hardy once called his ‘best novel’
Omnipresent yet largely ignored, this one-day conference brings water in the long nineteenth century into focus
A two-day conference organised by the Cultural Currents (1870-1930) Research Group
A two-day conference that aims to bring together new research into Dickens’s afterlife and legacy, from his influence on Victorian literature, social reform and literary criticism to biographies, reminiscences and re-imaginings in the twentieth century and beyond.
A two-day conference exploring the intense fascination with ancient Egypt that permeated the cultural imagination in the nascent nineteenth century and beyond
A conference that is concerned with the complexity and diversity of Victorian consumer cultures and also seeks to consider our contemporary consumption of the Victorians.
Including a reception in the Impressionist galleries, with access to the Victorian art gallery, followed by an organ recital and conference dinner, National Museum Cardiff, and a house tour of Cardiff Castle, with interior decoration by Victorian architect William Burges.
A two-day conference exploring forgotten geographies in the fin de siècle