New short study course in Victorian entertainment at Goldsmiths

Starting January 2021. See below.

Short Course – Victorian Entertainment | Goldsmiths, University of London

Virtual Symposium: Irish Women’s Writing Network 4-5 September 2021

The period 1880-1940 was marked by the emergence of a diverse range of Irish women writers into both the public sphere and public consciousness. This development was not accidental but was instead fostered by a variety of networks and collaborations that connected Irish women to one another across space and time. Katharine Tynan and Dora Sigerson, for instance, hosted literary gatherings at their family homes that facilitated wider networks of influence, while collaborative writing efforts forged by Irish women during the period stretched from the works of Somerville and Ross through to the transnational publishing efforts of the Ladies’ Land League and into educational and journalistic endeavours in which Irish women played central roles. These included the foremost Irish literary periodical of the day, The Irish Monthly, in which women writers featured regularly, and the Irish Fireside Club, whose central ‘Uncle Remus’ role was fulfilled by two Irish women writers (Rose Kavanagh and Hester Sigerson). Meanwhile, the efforts of women editors including L. T. Meade, whose London-based periodical Atalanta promoted Irish authors abroad, and family-based connections from the widely known (Constance and Markievicz and Eva Gore-Booth) to the more obscure (M. E. Francis, Agnes Castle and Margaret Blundell) were central to Irish women’s creativity and innovation.

With close attention to both individual collaborations and wider networks, the symposium will direct attention to how women writers endeavoured to tell, share and publish their stories. Recognizing the need for research in the field of Irish women’s writing that moves beyond the single-author approach, we are particularly interested in work that considers new critical perspectives on women writers’ creative innovations through collaboration across genres and media and their personal networks and strategies to establish themselves as writers within a rich web of personal connections alongside institutional and infrastructural possibilities, both at home and in transnational contexts.

This symposium will feed into a double issue of English Studies.

Prospective contributors are invited to submit 300-word abstracts for max. 15-minute papers for the one-day symposium. Topics might include but are not limited to the following:

§ collaborations between literature and other forms of production (ie. co-authoring; text and image; dramatists and theatre makers)

§ cross-media storytelling

§ collaborative work and activism

§ collaborations across genres

§ collaborations across media

§ women writers and their private and public networks

§ collaborations between networks

§ self-promotion (memoir/autobiography; travel writing; journalism)

§ salons, “At Homes”, reading groups

§ learned societies and associations

§ alternative networks and spaces (incl. National Library of Ireland; British Library; the Society of Women Journalists etc)

§ networking through paratexts (dedications; prefaces etc)

§ writers and their publishers

§ writers, editors, periodicals and print cultures

§ national and transnational collaborations and networks

§ writing women’s literary history in the period

§ protegées and mentors

§ women writers’ archives and archive networks

§ methodological approaches and challenges

Format

In keeping with the theme of ‘Collaborations and Networks’, the symposium’s structure will follow a more engaged format to focus on time for dialogue between participants. Speakers will be invited to submit short papers of 2500 in advance, which will form the basis of a 10-15 minute presentation to be followed by facilitated discussions via a respondent. Presenters will be encouraged to prepare some questions and/or flag areas where they would like specific feedback. Given this format, there is a 2-stage submission process:

1. Please submit your 300-word abstract for 15 mins presentations with title and a short biography to collaborationsandnetworks@gmail.com by 31st March 2021.

2. Accepted papers of max. 2,500 words are due by 31st July 2021.

Publication

For the publication of the double-issue of English Studies, we seek to invite a selection of symposium contributors to submit an extended article of max. 10,000 words by 31st January 2022. All submissions considered for publication will be subject to peer review.

We look forward to receiving your abstracts.

New BAVS Prize for a Second Monograph

**Please note: these revised rules of 4 September 2020 replace those circulated previously.***

The British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) is delighted to announce its new Book Prize!

Unlike other book prizes, this is specifically intended to honour the work of mid-career Victorianists in all disciplines who publish a monograph in 2020. The Prize will draw the attention of the Victorian Studies community to important new work which will be celebrated at the BAVS conference. The Prize also represents a celebration of the monograph as a form. Full rules are below.

Judges: Dr. Charlotte Boyce, Professor Rohan McWilliam (Chair), Dr. Jo Parsons.

Rules

This is a prize awarded by the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) which is intended for mid-career scholars. The winning book will be the second book by a scholar.

Eligible contenders must have published a scholarly work in Victorian Studies between 1 January 2020 and 31 January 2021. In order to submit, an author has to be a paid up member of BAVS on 1 February 2021. This will be checked. Members of BAVS outside the UK can enter books for the prize. Applicants for the prize do not need to have a university post.

The work needs to be a scholarly monograph in Victorian Studies (multi-authored books of articles will not be acceptable but joint-authored monographs will be and the prize can be shared). We will not accept scholarly editions of Victorian texts, neo-Victorian novels or websites.

We will accept monograph studies devoted to the long nineteenth century (broadly defined) but will also accept texts that deal with neo-Victorian Studies as well. The work in question does need to have some post-1830 content (up to 1914). The prize is open to scholars in any discipline that deals with nineteenth century Britain (including Britain’s relationship with the wider world).

Publishers or authors may nominate a book. A covering letter (either by the author or the publisher) must indicate the name and publication details of the author’s first book. We accept that the author’s first book may not have been in Victorian Studies: they simply have to have published an earlier book. If publishers or authors wish to check if a work is eligible or not, they should email rohan.mcwilliam@anglia.ac.uk before 31 January 2021. The covering letter should be attached to an email to the Chair Rohan McWilliam at the above address. The judges will need to be provided with THREE hard copies of the nominated work (paperback copies are acceptable). The postal addresses of the three judges will be forwarded upon receipt of the cover letter.

The final deadline for receipt of books is 15 February 2021. Volumes received after that date will not be eligible and will not be returned. It is the responsibility of authors to make sure that publishers send over copies of the book. We do not expect authors to pay for copies and take no responsibility for this. Books sent for consideration will not be returned. Dispatch of the books by authors or publishers grants BAVS ownership of them.

The prize winner will be announced in mid-May and will be expected to attend the following BAVS conference (conference fee, accommodation and travel expenses will be paid by BAVS). A panel will be devoted to the prize winning book. A number of people will offer responses to the volume and the author will respond.

The cash prize: £500. If a monograph is joint-authored, the prize money will be divided between the authors.

All judges are required to declare any conflict of interest.

The Judges’s decision is final.

Persianisms: Cultural Encounters in the Anglophone World Call for Papers

We invite proposals for an interdisciplinary colloquium on the topic of Persianisms: Cultural Encounters in the Anglophone World to take place virtually at the University of York across the dates of 10-12 December 2020.

This colloquium is underpinned by our conviction that the relationship between Iran and the West is as important and urgent as ever. It aims to explore the range and depth of the exchanges and encounters that connect Anglophone and Persian cultures across centuries of contact from antiquity to the present-day manifest in poetry, diplomacy, religious polemic, scholarship, travel narratives, material culture, art, and curatorship.

We invite proposals from all disciplines and all career stages, including postgraduate, and early career researchers. We welcome proposals for traditional short papers, or for presentations that exploit the online format in other ways, e.g. short discussions of single images, objects, or texts, or group roundtable discussions. As a guide, the contribution of any individual should not exceed 20mins.

In particular, we solicit proposals that speak to, or cross over, our three main themes: literature and language, material culture and political culture, including the following:

● The roles and functions that “Persia” (as it was known by Europeans before the 1930s) has played in the imagination of English-speaking writers, scholars, commentators, and artists.

● How notions of Persia and Persian have shaped the English language and its cultures.

● Representations of Iran in English poetry, fiction and travelogues.

● The influence of Persian and Islamic models in the history of the English book.

● Cultures of scholarship including Orientalisms, Islamic studies and Indo-European philology.

● The expressions and legacies of Persian culture in the Anglophone world through collectors and curators and the role of galleries, libraries, museums, and archaeological collections.

● The extent of ‘Persian’ distinctiveness within spheres of material exchange and interaction across the Middle East and India and between those regions and Europe.

● The histories of encounters between Anglophone and Persianate political and economic interests including the reception and representation of Persian history over time.

● Conflicts, revolutions, flashpoints and radical change, from the Mongol invasions to the Great Game, oil and the 1979 Revolution.

● Cultural and historical expressions of Perso and Islamo-phobia and -philia.

● Histories of religious and political polemic.

● The cultural life of Islam in its various forms, including Shi’ism and Sufism, in the Anglophone imagination.

● The dynamics of gender, race, sexuality, and power at work in cross-cultural encounters and exchanges.

Confirmed speakers include Prof Lloyd Ridgeon (Reader in Islamic Studies, University of Glasgow) and Dr Nur Sobers-Khan (Lead Curator, South Asian Collections, British Library).

Please send proposals of no more than 200 words to persianisms@gmail.com by Saturday 15 August. Proposals should be accompanied by a 50-word biography, and an indication (if known at this point) of your availability between 10-12 December.

Joanna de Groot (History/Centre for C18th Studies)

Shazia Jagot (English/Centre for Medieval Studies)

James Williams (English/Centre for Modern Studies)