Doctoral scholarships in Victorian Literature at University College Dublin

UCD Centre for Cultural Analytics is seeking applications for a number of doctoral scholarships to commence in the academic year 2021-22 as part of the ERC funded project, European Migrants in the British Imagination: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture (VICTEUR). See here for more: https://www.ucd.ie/englishdramafilm/newsandevents/phdscholarshipsinculturalanalytics/

Enemy Encounters Online Conference 19th-20th July 2021

Hosted by the IWM Institute for the Public Understanding of War and Conflict and the Car-diff University AHRC funded project ‘Strange Meetings: Enemy Encounters 1800-2020’, this event seeks to explore views of enmity and allegiance in modern warfare. The confer-ence focuses on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries but we also welcome proposals relating to the nineteenth century which look forward to that era. We are interested in a broad, interdisciplinary range of approaches to experiences and representations of the en-emy, with a particular focus on how the ‘other’ side is presented in museums, in first per-son writings, journalism, literature, art, performance, film and photography.

While the 1914 Christmas truces have a mythological status in British culture, fraternisa-tion between outposts and during ceasefires was a familiar component of 19th-century war-fare in which opposing sides regularly found more commonality than otherness. This con-ference seeks to explore that history and to consider how far fellow feeling for enemy sol-diers and civilians persists in differently structured wars, such as counterinsurgency opera-tions. It looks at how feeling for the enemy is shaped by competing ideals of nationalism, patriotism and cosmopolitanism, and at limits to recognitions that “they are just like us” structured by nationality, race, religion and class. We also seek to scrutinise asymmetries of power in enemy encounters, including by gender, sexuality, economic security or pre-carity.

The boundary between an enemy and an ally has always been a shifting one, as alle-giances change, and the debate continues about whether civilians as well as military per-sonnel and irregulars can be considered as enemies. In our current moment concepts and non-human entities – ‘terror’, ‘drugs’, ‘virus’ – are postulated as enemies in place of other populations. Given the difficulty of identifying enemies in many current theatres of war, and the movement of individuals and populations between positions of enemy and ally, how valid now is the concept of an enemy? How do first person and creative responses help to reframe understandings of the enemy, past and present? What happens when we bring ideas about the enemy from different sides into dialogue?

Topics and approaches might include but are not limited to:

* Curating the enemy: representing the enemy in museums, and in community and co-pro-duced responses

* The enemy in life writing, journalism, literature, art, performance, film, photography

* Material traces: objects plundered, gifted, exchanged

* Emotional responses to the enemy: fellow feeling, admiration, compassion or pity versus anger, resentment, fear

* Differences between propaganda and experience; strategies of denigration and dehu-manisation

* Truces and fraternisation

* Medical cross-sides encounters, and exchanges/appreciation of technology and exper-tise.

* The status and treatment of prisoners of war; prisoners’ interactions with their captors, guards and civilians

* Irregular combatants, insurgents, terrorists, resistance and freedom fighters

* Officially sanctioned and unacceptable encounters, or safe and dangerous forms of frat-ernisation

* Gender and fraternisation

* Intimate encounters, and sexual and gender violence

* Relations between occupying forces and local populations

* Reconciliation, repatriation

* Healing, justice and international law

We welcome presenters of all backgrounds. The conference will take the format of short 10 minute papers in panels with time for lots of discussion. Please send short abstracts (250 words) for individual papers or panels to the convenors, Holly Furneaux and Matilda Greig, at enemyencounters@cardiff.ac.uk, by 10 May 2021. Please also feel free to contact us with any further questions, by email or through our Twitter page, @Ene-myEncounters.

BAVS Annual General Meeting 25 Feb 2021

Notice is hereby given that the virtual Annual General Meeting of the British Association for Victorian Studies will be held onThursday 25^thFebruaryat 3pm, via Zoom:

Topic: BAVS AGM Feb 2021

Time: Feb 25, 2021 03:00 PM London

Join Zoom Meeting:

https://zoom.us/j/98596848136?pwd=aEQ0NkVOcGdXQkU5TWRPTHQxYmdDZz09

Meeting ID: 985 9684 8136

Passcode: 242351

All members are welcome to attend. There is a short formal agenda, and then an opportunity for ‘Any Other Business’ to be discussed. It is expected that the meeting will last around 45 – 60 minutes.

Meeting agenda: BAVS AGM Agenda Feb 2021

BAVS Annual Report Feb 2021

MINUTES BAVS AGM 2019

Pre-raphaelites exhibition at the Ashmolean, Oxford, this Spring

The Ashmolean’s new exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings and Watercolours will open in Spring 2021. On display together for the first time are a wide selection of works from the Ashmolean’s superlative collection of Pre-Raphaelite works on paper. Normally held in the Western Art Print Room, this exhibition makes it possible to see a wide range of these fragile works together for the first time. They offer an intimate and rare glimpse into the world of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the artists associated with the movement. The exhibition includes works of extraordinary beauty, from the portraits they made of each other, studies for paintings and commissions, to subjects taken from history, literature and landscape.

THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

DRAWINGS & WATERCOLOURS

Spring 2021

From sketches on the back of envelopes to grand, elaborate chalk drawings, our upcoming exhibition offers an opportunity to view our internationally-renowned collection of Pre-Raphaelite works on paper. Explore the enormous range of techniques and media used by the artists that made up this movement – as well as the intimate and often complex friendships and love affairs between them.

For more info, go to https://www.ashmolean.org/exhibitions

New Dissertation Prize for Scholars Working on Victorian Periodicals – Apply Now

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals happily announces the creation of a new $1000 prize named in honor of Sally Mitchell for her pioneering research and invaluable contributions to our society. If you defended a dissertation in the calendar year of 2020, and if it explores the 19th c British periodical press (including magazines, newspapers, and serial publications of all kinds) as an object of study in its own right (and not simply as a source of material for other topics), please consider applying. Dissertation projects may range from a variety of disciplinary perspectives focused on any aspect of the periodical press within Britain itself, or in the many countries within and outside of the empire where British magazines and newspapers were bought, sold, and read during the ‘long nineteenth century’ (ca. 1780-1914). More information and submission guidelines can be found at http://rs4vp.org/awards/the-sally-mitchell-dissertation-prize/. The portal opens for applications on 1 February 2021 and closes on 1 March 2021.