London Victorian Studies Colloquium and Sally Ledger Memorial Lecture 2022

The LVSC is an annual residential colloquium for postgraduates and postdocs working in Victorian Studies. The Colloquium is an informal event, combining postgraduate papers, training and professionalisation workshops, and time for networking in the beautiful Victorian surroundings of Royal Holloway. 

This year’s keynotes will be given by Dr Ushashi Dasgupta (Oxford) and Professor Lauren Goodlad (Rutgers), in collaboration with the Sally Ledger Memorial Lecture.

Full details of this year’s LVSC programme can be found here. 

Please follow this link https://onlinestore.rhul.ac.uk/product-catalogue/events-and-conferences/department-of-english/victorian-studies-colloquium to purchase your ticket. Please note that booking closes on the 28th of March 2022.

Sally Ledger Memorial Lecture 2022

Professor Lauren Goodlad (Rutgers University)
‘Victorian “Artificial Intelligence”: or How George Eliot’s Fiction Helps us to Understand Statistical Modelling’

5:30pm Thursday 7^th April, Online and in-person

This event will take place in a hybrid format. A number of tickets are available for in person attendance, but registration is essential as these are limited. For those not able to attend in person, we will be streaming the lecture on Teams. To register for in person or online attendance, please follow this link to the Eventbrite page: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sally-ledger-memorial-lecture-2022-tickets-293102235677

Sally Ledger was a celebrated scholar of nineteenth-century literature and culture, whose publications on fin de siècle writing, the radical tradition, and gender politics reshaped the field of Victorian Studies. She was also an inspiring teacher, and a generous and much-missed colleague. Having held posts at Exeter, Bristol and Birkbeck, Sally was the Hildred Carlisle Chair of Victorian Studies at the time of her death in 2009. The Sally Ledger Memorial Lecture is held to commemorate her groundbreaking research, and to continue her commitment to the democratic possibilities of education, and the rich interdisciplinarity of nineteenth-century literature and culture. This year, the lecture is being held in conjunction with the London Victorian Studies Colloquium for PGR students and recent ECRs, reflecting Sally’s tireless support not only of her own graduate students, but early career scholars across the profession. Having been on hiatus during the pandemic, we are especially pleased to invite colleagues to rejoin us in 2022 to remember Sally and continue her legacy. 

Lauren Goodlad is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. A specialist in Victorian and nineteenth-century literature and culture, Goodlad also has research and teaching interests in genre studies; critical, feminist, postcolonial, and political theory; television and seriality studies; Big Tech and artificial intelligence; as well as literature in relation to liberalism, globalization, and financialization.  Her publications include The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty and Transnational Experience (Oxford, 2015, 2016) and Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Johns Hopkins, 2003), and she has recently edited special issues and collections including, “Worlding Realisms,” a 2016 special issue of Novel; Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke UP, 2013) and “The Ends of History,” a 2013 special issue of Victorian Studies. As part of her new work in histories and theories of artificial intelligence, she is also a founding editor of the new journal Critical AI.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact Anya Eastman (CVS Assistant Director) on anya.eastman@rhul.ac.uk.