Victorian Systems and Archives

University of Maryland, College Park

 

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 ObscenityOb 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)