Image from Wikipedia

Link the First:

Queen Victoria’s Journals on-line resource. If you are in the UK, you can participate virtually. Click here for further information (event information courtesy of NAVSA).

If you are on Twitter, I recommend following Queen Victoria Tweets, which tweets Queen Victoria’s authentic diary entries on the day they were written from her Coronation onwards. My favourite tweet so far: “@QueenVicTweets: Walked. Felt very sulky and cross.”

Link the Second:

One last link before the long weekend. Check out this new blog post from the Journal of Victorian Culture Online about reading Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities in weekly instalments. Time for a weekend read-a-long?

As always, If you have a CFP or event you would like share on this website, please contact Caley Ehnes via e-mail (cehnes@uvic.ca) or Twitter (@CaleyEhnes)

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For the Week of May 13, 2013:

If you are attending the NAVSA BAVS AVSA conference in Venice (lucky you!), you may want to prepare for your journey by joining the Stones of Venice reading group at the Journal of Victorian Culture Online. Click here for more information.

Check out Daniel Martin’s recent post on melancholia and the digitization of Victorian culture, inspired (in part) by the recent VSAWC conference.

Finally, a few less serious pieces:

via Twitter–a nineteenth-century image of Victorian lady academics. Enjoy!

via The Hairpin–thoughts on reading Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White.
My personal favorite has to be number three: “Decided that someone should make a TV show in which Wilkie Collins and Dickens fight crime – supernatural crime”

Victorian Humanity and Its Others VSAWC 2013

Congratulations to Alison Hurlburt (University of Alberta), winner of the 2013 Founders’ Circle Award for the best paper presented at the VSAWC conference by a graduate student or emerging scholar. Alison has won the award for her conference paper titled, “Arnold Bennett: Clay as Other to Inhabitants of the Five Towns.” Award adjudicators (Kristen Guest, Grace Kehler, Kristin Mahoney, and Vanessa Warne) admired the paper and its delivery: one of them described it as “fascinating, engaging, nicely paced.” As another remarked, Alison “did a wonderful job presenting the paper and fielding questions afterwards.”

Congratulations to Alison and to all Founders’ Circle Award entrants, whose work was very strong. We look forward to welcoming you back to next year’s conference in Banff in May!

For further information on the Founders’ Circle Award, click here.

Image from Engines of Our Ingenuity

If you have a chance, check out the @JofVictCulture survey on academic journals and social media. While online, you should also check out their website , which includes posts on social media, specifically twitter and blogging.

The Journal of Victorian Culture also as a Graduate Student Essay prize for those interested.

Deadline for proposals is 28 March 2013.

Follow BAVS 2013 on Twitter @bavs2013

Check out “On the Cruelty to Animals Act, 15 August 1856″ by Susan Hamilton.

The essay, which must be no longer than 7000 words in length (including notes), may be on any aspect of Victorian culture appropriate for the scope of the journal (this embraces literature and history, including cultural, intellectual, social, political, economic and religious history; the history of music, science, technology, medicine, theatre and visual culture; historical geography).

The editorial board welcomes essays that adopt an interdisciplinary approach to their subject matter. However, the board also encourages essays which, while focusing on one sub-discipline, reflect on the implications of their argument for other Victorian studies constituencies. Authors should keep in mind this question: how is this research of interest to other Victorianists?

Essays must not be under consideration for publication elsewhere, and should not be submitted to any other journal until the outcome of the competition is known.

Applicants who are completing doctoral degrees are advised to check with their institutions any regulations covering the publication of material extracted from their theses prior to the submission of the whole thesis.

Prize: Publication of the winning essay in JVC; £100 cash prize; a free year’s subscription to JVC.

Requirements: Word limit: maximum of 7000 words, plus an abstract (250 words) and a word count.

Evidence is central to all our work: we use texts, images, objects, the built environment to support our arguments. We also interpret, select, arrange, and juxtapose such evidentiary material. The Victorians strenuously looked for evidence to support their assumptions, beliefs, and investigation. Our program will include optional workshops at the Getty Research Institute and material culture sessions at the Huntington. Conference attendees will be able to enter the Huntington and its wonderful gardens free of charge.

Proposals for individual papers or panels should be submitted electronically by March 1, 2013. Proposals for individual papers should be no more than 500 words; panel proposals should include 500-word abstracts for each paper and a 250-word panel description. Applicants should submit a one-page cv.

Conference threads might include:

What is evidence? How do different disciplines identify and use evidence? How does the use of
evidence draw boundaries and bridges between disciplines? How does interdisciplinary work deal
with evidence?
How has the use of evidence changed (new evidence and new ways to use old evidence)?
Evidence and the humanities: interpretation, analysis, scientific and historical method,
supporting arguments
Digitization and the changing nature of the archive, museum and library
Teaching and evidence: sources, assessment, pedagogies
Lost evidence: wars and other research inconveniences
Imagined evidence and historical fictions
Science: method, demonstration, essentialism/Social Darwinism
Religion: belief, faith and intuition
Personal evidence: autobiographies, letters and diaries
Visual evidence: photography, painting, theater, film and other displays
The building, the city and the village: architecture, urban planning and historic preservation
Archaelogy, fossils, bone, tracks, spoor
The body as evidence
Material culture: clothes, pottery, and other everyday objects
Crime and Justice: police, detectives, witnesses and the press
Politics: parliamentary inquiries, select committees
Ghosts and revenants: evidence of the supernatural and of the afterlife
The press: scandal and public opinion
Evidence and the colonial project

Details: http://dornsife.usc.edu/conferences/navsa/call-for-papers

Nov. 14-16, 2013 at the Courtyard by Marriott, Portland City Center in Portland, Oregon

“Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly.” – Oscar Wilde

VISAWUS 2013 explores the Victorians’ enthusiasm and apprehension regarding modern progress and innovation.We encourage papers across all disciplines, including (but not restricted to) art history, literature, gender, history of science, history, material culture, political science, performance, life writings, journalism, photography, popular culture, and economics.

Since the publication of Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society (1992), sociologists and historians have interrogated the frequency of risks of all kinds in modern life: railway accidents, colliery explosions, natural and industrial catastrophes, spills, fires, and collisions, among countless others. However, the emergence of risk as a sociological and economic reality of everyday life in the nineteenth century still lacks significant scholarly theorizing in the humanities. Current scholarship about Victorian contributions to a modern “risk society” requires a sustained dialogue about how the Victorians conceived of accidents, disasters, catastrophes, and risks of all kinds beyond the limited scope of the local. For this issue, we seek papers that address such a dialogue through analysis of Victorian culture’s fascinations with and anxieties about risky activities, behaviors, industries, legalities, philosophies, and forms of expression.

In general, risks have a peculiar temporality. To “run a risk” is to operate in that space between the historian or statistician and the prophet or sage, to exist in a present moment that requires a continual reconsideration of simple linear or chronological time. Risks mark themselves off against past accumulations of data and past accidental phenomena, but they also anticipate spaces and developments for future prevention. We seek original essays that attempt to situate such theoretical and abstract notions of risk within literary, historical, and cultural contexts. We are especially interested in essays that draw connections between specific risk events and Victorian theorizing about the constantly accumulating risks and accidental phenomena of modern life.

Interested scholars may wish to develop their ideas according to the following topics:

Risk and the Victorian railway network

Representations of accidents in the Victorian press

Risk and Victorian theories of temporality

The subjectivity/performance of risky activities and behaviors

Victorian insurance and the origins of risk management

Insurance frauds and risky business

The phenomenology of bodies at risk

Risk, athletics, and bodily performance/techniques

Risk and the limits of the body

Risky bodies and the origins of statistical personhood

Rethinking, revising, reevaluating the notion of a “risk society”

Risks in their local and global contexts

Genres of risks and genres of the accidental

Risk and the periodical press

Danger, affliction, and disability

Transformations in Victorian concepts of space and time

Industrial or human-made disasters and catastrophes

Risk and catastrophic thinking in Victorian social theory

Risk and decadence/ the aesthetics of risk

Please submit abstracts of 500 words or address enquiries to Dr. Daniel Martin (dmartin@wlu.ca) by Sept 1, 2013. Final essays will be due by Feb 1, 2014.