Thursday, April 17, 2014

CFP: Anxious Forms (5/15/2014; 8/22/2014)


Anxious Forms: Bodies in Crisis in Victorian Literature and Culture
The University of Glasgow
August 22, 2014 
Deadline: May 15, 2014

Anxious Forms is a one-day interdisciplinary conference which seeks to engage with the Victorian era as a period of anxiety manifested in physical form, be it the human body, national, ideological, and scientific bodies, or literary and artistic forms. Recent criticism of the long nineteenth century has viewed the period as one of crisis: a collection of critical moments which are framed as decisive, paradigmatic shifts. Criticism frequently considers the physical manifestations of anxieties surrounding industrial progress, imperial expansion, and scientific and medical advancements, as well as shifting concepts of gender, religion, race, class, and sexuality.

However, some scholars have started to question the basis of such a reading, asking to what extent this is a contemporary application of the concept of 'anxiety'. This conference intends to open up this debate and stimulate discussion across disciplines. 

Confirmed speakers include Dr Nicholas Daly (University College Dublin), Dr Christine Ferguson (University of Glasgow) and Dr Megan Coyer (University of Glasgow). Through this conference we wish to highlight the University of Glasgow as a major centre for multidisciplinary Victorian research and intend this to be the first annual nineteenth-century conference hosted by the University, with an accompanying published collection of papers.

Topics for papers might include, but are not limited to:
  • Bodies of publication
  • Narrative Forms
  • Identity crises
  • Objectified, pornographic or voyeuristic bodies
  • Bodies of commodification and consumption
  • Spiritual, supernatural and spectral bodies
  • Bodies politic, national and foreign bodies
  • Environmental, geological and archaeological bodies
  • Medicine and the medical humanities
  • Biological, mechanical and prosthetic bodies
  • Forms of cartography and travel writing
  • Art, illustration, film and photography
  • Collected and classified bodies
  • Neo-Victorianism
  • Bodies of knowledge

We welcome proposals from postgraduate and early career researchers, as well as from more established academics. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words for 20-minute conference papers, together with an academic CV, to arts-anxiousforms2014@glasgow.ac.uk by May 15, 2014. Successful applicants will be notified by the end of the following week.

The conference is free to attend for both speakers and non-speakers; please contact us (Abigail Boucher and Alexandra Foulds at arts-anxiousforms2014@glasgow.ac.uk) to register.