The Victorian Reading Group @ Western presents:
“The Victorianists’ Workshop:
New Approaches to Archives, Methods, and Pedagogy”
Saturday, April 6, 2013 – Western University, London, Ontario
The developments of new critical methodologies, archival resources, and pedagogical practices have radically transformed Victorian Studies. The digitization of newspapers, penny dreadfuls, pamphlets and other forms of print matter, the increased attention to new forms of media, including sound recordings and forms of early cinema, and a variety of new critical schools, from animal studies and eco-criticism to new formalism, book history, object theory and disability studies, have changed the means and methods by which we understand the literature and culture of Victorian Britain. This day-long series of workshops will seek to answer a variety of questions: How do these new resources, methods, and approaches change how we read and what we read? What authors or texts do they bring into view for the first time, or return to view? What issues, cultural, political, economic, are valorized by these approaches and why? How do these changes benefit our field in the coming decades? What opportunities do these new methods present to emergent scholars entering the field now? How do our recent developments in Victorian Studies inform our understanding of contemporary culture?
Keynote Speaker:
DENNIS DENISOFF
Professor of English Literature, Ryerson University
Author of Aestheticism and Sexual Parody (2001), Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film (2004), The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture (2008) and
Dissipating Nature: The Eco-Pagan Vein of British Decadence (forthcoming)
Co-Editor of The Yellow Nineties Online and Nineteenth-Century Studies
“Dickens’ Dream” – Robert William Buss
Submission Details:
As an interdisciplinary workshop, we encourage topic of interests from all disciplines: art, art history, cultural studies, education, film, history, geography, law, literary studies, linguistics, media studies, medicine, music, natural sciences, philosophy, political science, religious studies, etc.
Participants should submit a “Topic of Interest” (in Microsoft Word format; no more than one page) to Madison Bettle (victorianistworkshop@gmail.com). This one page document may include methodological approaches to research and/or teaching pedagogy relating to the Victorian period. At the top of the submission, please include the scholar’s name, home institution, email address/contact information, brief biographical statement, and any audio-visual or technological equipment needed in your assigned workshop.
Submissions are due on January 15, 2013. You will receive the committee’s decision by February 1, 2013. Once a topic has been accepted, participants will be asked to transform their TOI into a 2-3 page discussion paper. They will then be asked to send this paper to the above address by March 15, 2013. This document will then be made available to all participants in the applicant’s assigned workshop.
Our current sponsors include: Victorian Studies Association of Ontario (VSAO), The Victorian Reading Group @ Western, Western’s English Department, and Western’s Graduate English Society.
Victorians and Edwardians 