Download the 2011 Conference Programme (PDF)
Friday April 29
8:30-10
Questions of Contagion (Black Bear)
Moderator: Lisa Surridge
Vanessa Warne, Dirty Books: Blindness, Finger Reading and Contagious Disease
Daniel Martin, C-c-c-contagious Stuttering: Imitation and the Family Drama of Victorian Speech Rehabilitation
Megan McGrath, Crime and Disease in Early Victorian London: Contagion Anxiety in Oliver Twist
Disease and the Other (Pine)
Moderator: Peter Sinnema
Charn Jagpal, The Nautch Girl Infects the British Woman in Fanny Emily Penny’s The Romance of a Nautch Girl (1898) and Flora Annie Steel’s Voices in the Night (1900)
Leigh Dyrda, The Invasion of Britain by the “Plague” of Ancient Egypt
Robert O’Kell, “An Epidemic of Fear and Loathing: Christian Politics, ‘The Lustful Turk’ and Anti-Semitism During ‘The Eastern Question’.”
10-10:30 Break
10:30-12
The Optics of Epidemic (Black Bear)
Moderator: Vanessa Warne
Monika Piertzak-Franger, Visualizing Syphilis: Iconographic Transmutations
Elizabeth Ludlow, Catching Images: The affective gaze in Christina Rossetti’s poetics
Carla Manfredi, Over Damien’s Dead Body: Photograph of a Dying Leper
Animals and Epidemics (Pine)
Moderator: Claire McKechnie
Don Lepan, “Your suff’rings, sinless things”: Changing Attitudes Towards Non-Human Animals, and the Cattle Plague of 1865
Kristine Moruzi, “I shall die of hydrophobia, I know I shall!”: Fear, Bravery, and Disease in the Periodical Press
Lunch 12-1 (Chinook)
1-2:30
Writing and/as Epidemic (Black Bear)
Moderator: Laurie Lyda
Jillian Richardson, The Disease Narrative as Investigative Strategy in James Greenwood’s “A Night in a Workhouse”
Lisa Surridge/Mary Elizabeth Leighton, Amputated Diaries, Mutilated Letters: The Sensation Novel and the Detritus of Print Culture
Emma Francis, Swooning, Swaying, Flushing and Blushing: Pathological circulations of early Victorian poetry
Metaphors of Epidemic (Pine)
Moderator: Daniel Martin
Chris Kent, Pathologizing Victorian Society: Matt Morgan’s Cartoons in Tomahawk
Karen Stock, Breeding Ambiguity: Tissot’s Images of the Conservatory
Julia Skelly, Framing Addiction: Drunkenness, Disease and Pathological Desire
2:30-3 Break
3-4:30
Epidemic, Profession and Medical Narrative (Black Bear)
Moderator: Joy Dixon
Arlene Young, The Fruits of Failure: Epidemics and Victorian Medical Professionalization
Meegan Kennedy “An alarming epidemic”: The microscope, medical publishing, and the Milk-Panic of 1873
Christy Rieger, “The Business of the Powders”: Apothecaries and Retail Relief in Late-Victorian Fiction
Women, Writing and Epidemic (Pine)
Moderator: Kristine Moruzi
Gail Turley Houston “Mother-want,” the Symbolic Goddess, and the Victorian Woman Writer’s Search for Literary Foremothers”
Nadine Legier, “I Was Not Suffered to Write”: The Discourse of Illness and Disability in the Familiar Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Kala Hirtle, Grief, Gender and Authorship in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam
4:45-6 Plenary Address
Pamela Gilbert, Albert Brick Professor of English, University of Florida
“Epidemic Subjects”
Saturday April 30
8:30-10
Spatial Boundaries of the Epidemic (Black Bear)
Moderator: Charn Jagpal
Jeffrey Bibbee, British Russophobia and the Russian flu of 1889-1894
Ian Cawood/Chris Upton, ‘Divine Providence’: Birmingham and the Cholera Pandemic of 1832
Timothy Carens, African Pestilence and the Condition of England
Disease and Identity (Pine)
Moderator: Gail Turley Houston
Robin Fetherston, Killing Secrets in Dickens and the Early Pre-Raphaelites
Kylee-Anne Hingston, Disease, Disability and the Fractured Self: Esther’s Narrative in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House
Aaron Percich, “Invisible Scribes”: the Irish/Jewish Vampire as Imperial Anti-Self in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
10:00-10:30 Break
10:30-12
Airbourne Epidemics: Consumption and Miasma (Black Bear)
Moderator: Peter Sinnema
Carolyn Day, The Emulation of Consumption: The Fashioning of the Respectable Female Body in Early Victorian England
Erin Gore-Wilson, The Exchange of Air: Tuberculosis and Bonds Between Women in Victorian Fiction
Alexandra Lewis, An ‘atmosphere unpropitious to life’: Trauma, Miasma and the Brontëan Body
Disease and the Language of Degeneracy (Pine)
Moderator: Whitney Wood
Sherrin Berezowsky, Cause or Cure?: Love and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle
Noa Reich, “Feeding Upon the Lives of Others”: Metissage, Disease, and Degeneracy in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire
Claire McKechnie, Rabies, the Gothic and Darwin’s Evolution in Victorian Britain
12-1 Lunch (Chinook)
1-2:30
National Identity and National Health (Black Bear)
Moderator: Adrienne Fitzpatrick
Stephenson, Ryan “The Greatest Plague of Life”: National Health and the Victorian Domestic Service Epidemic in Gissing and The Mayhews
Lynn Shakinovsky, The Epidemiology of Hospitality: Charlotte Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe
Elizabeth Scott, “Rejected, on Account of His Eyes:” Canadian Medical Inspection and Emigrant Selection amongst London’s Labouring Poor, 1890 – 1908.”
Writing Pain and Trauma (Pine)
Moderator: Robin Fetherston
Anne Koval, Disease and Denial: the Art and Life of J.M. Whistler
Kate Lawson, The English Sickroom and the Foreign Patient in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley
Anne-Marie Beller, “Queerish in his head”: Brain Fever, Sensation, and Contagion in the novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon
2:30-3 Break
3-4:30
Women’s Health and Illness (Black Bear)
Moderator: Kristen Guest
Whitney Wood, “Delicate Women” and the Ordeal of Childbirth: The Construction of Women’s Pain in Late-Victorian North America
Ana Kerbabian “The ‘Unwomanly’ Womanhood as Disease:” Social Responsibility and Gender in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House
Laurie Lyda, A Prescription for Health and Morality: Victorian Medical Rhetoric’s Construction of the Contagious Prostitute
Banquet: 6-9