Travel and hotel information may be found here.
Download the conference registration form here.
Download a PDF copy of the program here.
Access the NVSA main page here.
PLEASE NOTE: revised public transportation guide here. Very important details for those of you arriving by public transport, as well as those of you parking on campus.
Program
All panels and the pre-conference session will take place in Ulrich Recital Hall, located on the first floor of Tawes Hall. Download a UMD campus map here.
Friday, April 15
2:00-4:30 p.m. Registration (Tawes Hall foyer)
3:00-4:15 p.m. Special Pre-conference Session: Martha Nell Smith (U Maryland), Moderator
• Andrew Stauffer (U of Virginia), “Digital Archives and Victorian Studies”: A seminar on NINES and other digital resources for nineteenth-century scholarship. All are welcome: no pre-registration required.
4:15 p.m. Welcome
4:30-6:00 p.m. Systems of Literary Criticism: Anna Henchman (Boston U), Moderator
• Evan Horowitz (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study), “Victoriametrics: A Systematic Criticism?”
• Jonathan Farina (Seton Hall U), “The Gay System and the Archive of Pleasure”
• Allison Wee (California Lutheran U), “The Victorian Home Office: Defining Literary Obscenity Ob Skene”
• John MacNeill Miller (Rutgers U), “As Chancery Would Have It: Fighting Systematic Paranoia in Bleak House”
6:00-7:00 p.m. Welcome Reception, co-sponsored with the Georgetown Department of English (Tawes Hall roof deck)
7:00-9:00 p.m. Optional dinner off-campus; buses will transport participants to and from Tiffin, a local Indian restaurant (advance reservations required).
Saturday, April 16
Book Exhibit (Tawes 2115, open all day)
8:00-9:00 a.m. Breakfast and Registration (Tawes Hall foyer)
9:00-11:00 a.m. Keynote Panel: George Levine (Rutgers U), Moderator
• Bernard Lightman (York U)
• Paul Saint-Amour (U of Pennsylvania)
• Catherine Robson (NYU)
• Nicholas Daly (University College Dublin)
11:00-11:15 a.m. Coffee break
11:15 a.m.-12:45 p.m. Archives—Definitions/Limits: Eileen Gillooly (Columbia U), Moderator
• Christopher Keep (U of Western Ontario), “An Aversion to Records: Information and the Mid-Victorian Archive Crisis”
• Michael Riordan (Oxford U), “‘A Great Republic of Workers’: Stubbs, Selection, and the Organization of Victorian Archives”
• Marjorie Stone (Dalhousie U), “The Archival Turn, Victorian Poetical Manuscripts, and the Thomas Wise Forgeries”
1:00-2:30 p.m. Lunch (Stamp Student Union, Prince George’s Room)
The NVSA business lunch, a convivial event at which topics are proposed and voted on for the following year, is a long-standing tradition; everyone is warmly encouraged to attend and participate.
2:45-4:15 p.m. Disciplines: Jonathan Loesberg (American U), Moderator
• Alice Jenkins (U of Glasgow), “Deductive Systems: Euclidean Geometry and Victorian Interdisciplinarity”
• Devin Griffiths (U of Pennsylvania), “Pairing the Past with Owen and Arnold: Comparative Method and Victorian Historiography”
• Michael Klotz (Wake Forest U), “Manufacturing Fictional Persons: The Victorian Novel and the System of Social Statistics”
4:15-4:30 p.m. Coffee break
4:30-6:00 p.m. Scientific Systems: Rachel Ablow (SUNY Buffalo), Moderator
• Vanessa Ryan (Brown U), “Close Thy Darwin, Open Thy Spencer: Towards a Systems Theory of Mind”
• Erika Behrisch Elce (Royal Military College of Canada), “‘Enlightened Zeal’: Systematizing Amateur Science in the Admiralty’s Manual of Scientific Enquiry, 1849”
• Katherine E. Young (U Maryland), “Mary Anning’s Monster: Science, Spectacle, and the Plesiosaur”
6:15-6:45 p.m. Reception (Stamp Student Union, Prince George’s Room)
6:45-8:00 p.m. Dinner Banquet
8:00 p.m. Victorian Magic Show – Eric Henning, an award-winning magician and historian of magic will perform from his repertoire of nineteenth-century magic.
Sunday, April 17
Book Exhibit (Tawes 2115, open all day)
8:00-9:00 a.m. Breakfast
9:00-10:30 a.m. Archive, System, & Materiality: Mary Wilson Carpenter (Queens U), Moderator
• Veronica Alfano (Princeton U), “Systems of Discontinuity: Photography, Fin de Siècle Poetics, and the Digitization of Transience”
• Janice Schroeder (Carleton), “His Master’s Voice: Schoolroom Writing and the Archiving of Children’s Spoken Words”
• Caroline Lieffers (Independent Scholar), “Managed Meals: Systematizing Nineteenth-Century Middle-Class Cookery”
• David Pike (American U), “The Victorian Street in Space and Time”
10:30-10:45 a.m. Coffee break
10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m. Systems & Archives of Race & Empire: Aaron Worth (Boston U), Moderator
• Sebastian Lecourt (Yale U), “Richard Burton in the Body of the Believer”
• Jessica Ratcliff (U of Illinois), “The Observatory Archive: Constructing a Universal Science in the Age of European Imperialism”
• Greg Vargo (City College), “‘A double-barrelled infernal machine’: The Colonial System in the Chartist Archive”
12:15-1:00 p.m. Conference Wrap-Up
• Amanda Claybaugh (Harvard U)
• William Cohen (U of Maryland)