NVSA 2025: The Twentieth Century – 50th Anniversary Conference
deadline for submissions:
October 15, 2024
full name / name of organization:
Northeast Victorian Studies
contact email:
seckert@wesleyan.edusource:
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/08/07/nvsa-2025-the-twentieth-century-%E2%80%93-50th-anniversary-conference
The Northeast Victorian Studies Association 2025
50th Anniversary Conference
April 4-6, 2025
Keynote panel with Kristin Mahoney, Nasser Mufti, and John Plotz
View the full call here >>
https://nvsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/call-for-papers-nvsa-2025-1.pdf The Northeast Victorian Studies Association seeks proposals on the theme “The Twentieth Century” for its annual conference at Boston University. A product of the twentieth century, NVSA held its first official meeting on “The Victorian Family” at Assumption University in 1975. Fifty years later, we invite you to join us in celebrating an organization that has been a pillar of the field across the decades.
There is a paradox in a Victorianist conference organized around the twentieth century. How did the desires and needs of the twentieth century lead to the invention of our field of study? What got dragged, kicking and screaming, into twentieth century from the nineteenth? We welcome submissions that probe such contradictions and anachronisms: the lingering presence of one era in another, as well as more conceptual approaches to the idea of the literary period as such. Where do scholarly commitments to periodization stand now?
From work in reception history, adaptation studies, intellectual history, and disciplinary history, what versions of the Victorian have been mobilized, returned to, or remade in its wake? What supposedly “Victorian” ideas, concepts, and genres owe their origin to their close descendants? Does the line between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries feel harder or softer than it did for previous generations? And why do so many scholars of the Victorian period extend their interests forward rather than backward in time?
Submissions are also encouraged that consider both the afterlives and immediate adjacencies of the Victorian period. We invite papers that explore specific forms, authors, genres, media, movements, and ideas of modernity that emerge across and between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: late Victorian realism and genre fiction, aestheticism, fin-de-siècle media (especially film and photography), imperial networks of circulation, and shifts in the conceptualization of national, ecological, aesthetic, colonial and biopolitical categories at the century’s turn.
Our hope is that scholars who have joined us before (in this century or the last) will return by one of two traditional paths: submitting an anonymous abstract for the consideration of the programming committee, or attending simply to enjoy.
Proposals (no more than 300 words) are due by Oct. 15, 2024(email only, in Word format). Submit them to Sierra Eckert, Chair, Program Committee:
seckert@wesleyan.edu. Please note: all submissions to NVSA are evaluated anonymously. Successful proposals will stay within the 300-word limit and make a compelling case for the talk and its relation to the conference topic. Please do not send complete papers, and do not include your name on the proposal. Include your name, institution, email address, and proposal title in the body of the email. Papers should be 15 minutes long.
For more information on recommended topics, travel grants, and essay prizes please see:
https://nvsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/call-for-papers-nvsa-2025-1.pdf Last updated August 8, 2024
