EVENT 2024: Call for Papers

While all papers bearing on the period 1832-1910 will be considered, at the University of Konstanz we particularly invite investigations of Victorian energy cultures. Energy, as a physical concept, is a Victorian coinage, originally used to make sense of and scientifically investigate processes of fossil fuel combustion. The Victorians shaped both energy usage and energy imaginaries, which continue to reverberate today and are of particular relevance in the global and environmental context of this flightless conference. With our hub, we seek to establish a critical dialogue about the nature and legacy of Victorian energy cultures and literatures.

Topics for discussion may include:

• energy concepts in literature, science and technology
• literary and cultural constructions of different kinds of energy (solar, fossil, biomass, wind, spiritual, mesmeric, etc.)
• extractive ecologies, resource sustainability and the climate crisis
• electrification
• energy and social politics (energy economies and labour, gendered and racialised energy imaginaries)
• energy and pollution
• energy and literary form
• energy as metaphor and symbol
• global and imperial dimensions of Victorian energy cultures
• reflections and re-imaginations of energy in Neo-Victorian fiction
• new materialist explorations of coal, oil and other material resources of energy

The Seoul hub follows the general call for papers. All talks that explore the period 1832-1910 will be considered.

The Cardiff hub is interested in explorations of all of the ‘Events’ topics, including proposals that investigate the Victorian in relation to the contemporary.

For enquiries please contact: Ann Heilmann (HeilmannA@cardiff.ac.uk)

The Lancaster hub is interested in explorations of all of the ‘Events’ topics, including proposals that investigate the Victorian in relation to: the working classes; religion; the environment; and adaptation. For enquiries please contact: Jo Carruthers (j.carruthers@lancaster.ac.uk). 

The Atlanta hub follows the general call for papers. All talks that explore the period 1832-1910 will be considered.

The Boulder hub follows the general call for papers. All talks that explore the period 1832-1910 will be considered.

In keeping with the expansive conception of “event” outlined in the central CFP, we hope this flightless conference will provide a chance to ground Victorian studies in our region. Hence, while we welcome papers on all aspects of Victorian studies, we particularly invite presenters to to think locally, as well as globally, asking what it means to bring Victorians studies to Earth here, in Cascadia, on the Salish Sea at the edge of the Pacific, on the shared lands and waters of the Coast Salish people who have inhabited them since time immemorial. 

To that end, we will be hosting a plenary roundtable on the topic “Victorians in/and/on the Pacific,” in conjunction with the UC-Davis Hub. We also hope to include (optional!) field excursions as part of the conference program. Finally, in addition to more traditional research papers, we also welcome more experimental presentations, or those focused on strategies for teaching Victorian materials in our region. 

Such engagements might include (but are not limited to): 

• The Pacific world and/or Trans-Pacific approaches to the nineteenth century
• American settler archives and connections between Victorian Britain and this region
• Work engaging Native American, Alaskan Native, and Pacific Islander literature and culture and/or methods drawn from Indigenous Studies
• “Blue humanities” projects engaging with the global ocean and/or bioregional approaches
• The afterlives of Victorian artifacts in contemporary Asia 

To be clear, we also welcome papers that do not have an explicitly regional focus, and indeed hope that part of what will make this conversation generative is finding ways to think about the relationship between research and teaching in place and our often-deterritorialized objects of study.   

Since papers will also be available in written form, we ask presenters to keep their spoken remarks relatively brief (7-8 minutes) so as to allow for larger panels and plenty of time for discussion.