Columbia University in the City of New York

April 13-15, 2012

All panels will take place in the Auditorium of the Northwest Corner Building (^6th Floor), 550 W. 120^th St. (Click on the link to access a campus map.)

Download a registration form for the conference here.

Hotel information may be found on the registration form.

Friday, April 13

2:00-4:30 pm Registration (hallway outside the Northwest Corner Building Auditorium)

3:15 pm Welcome

3:30-5:00 pm Eminent Victorianist Clichés: Jonathan Loesberg (American U), Moderator

• Justin Sider (Yale U), “‘I Am fragments’: Matthew Arnold and the Failure of Poetry”
• Cara Murray (U of Houston, Downtown), “Self-Help and the Helpless Subject”
• Aeron Hunt (U of New Mexico), “Methodological Orthodoxies and the Business of Victorian Character”
• Aaron Matz (Scripps College), “Hardy and the Vanity of Procreation”

5:00-7:00 pm Welcome Reception (Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 6^th Floor, Butler Library)

7:00-9:00 pm Optional small-group dinner off campus (please sign up on registration form)

Saturday, April 14

Book Exhibit (hallway outside the Auditorium)

8:00-9:00 am Breakfast and Registration (hallway outside the Auditorium)

9:00-10:45 am Keynote panel: Seth Koven (Rutgers U), Moderator

• Nicholas Dames (Columbia U)
• Yopie Prins (U of Michigan)
• James A. Secord (U of Cambridge)

10:45-11:00 am Coffee Break 

11:00 am-12:30 pm  Theorizing Cliché and Orthodoxy: Anna Henchman (Boston U), Moderator

• Barbara Leckie (Carleton U), “Opinion and Doxa: The ‘Sanitary Idea’ in the 1850s”
• David Russell (Harvard U), “Two Versions of Heresy”
• Jordan Bear (U of Toronto), “Standard Views: The Referential Logic of Victorian Photographic Clichés” 

12:45-2:30 pm Lunch (Heyman Center for the Humanities, Common Room).

The Saturday lunch, a long-standing tradition, is a convivial event at which topics are proposed and voted on for the following year.

2:45-4:15 pm Victorian Cultural Clichés: Aviva Briefel (Bowdoin College), Moderator

• Erika Behrisch Elce (Collège militaire royale du Canada), “Dispelling the ‘terrible shadow’: Sir John Franklin, Cannibalism, and Reclaiming Arctic Heroism through Cultural Cliché”
• Richard Bonfliglio (Sogang University, Korea), “The Lady before the Lamp: Nightingale Iconography in the Geopolitical Aesthetic”
• Joseph Lavery (University of Pennsylvania), “Wealth and Life Revisited: the Biopolitics of the Tokyo Ruskin Library”

4:15-4:30 pm Coffee Break 

4:30-6:00 pm Social and Ethical Orthodoxies: Eddy Kent (U of Alberta), Moderator

• Gregory Vargo (City College of New York), “Can a Social Problem Speak? Or, the Other Nation Reviews Its Condition”
• Sarah Maurer (University of Notre Dame), “Caring for Strangers: The Sketch Writer and the Parish Visitor”
• Matthew Sussman (Harvard University), “De-Moralizing Victorian Moralism”

6:30-9:00 pm Dinner Banquet (Pisticci Restaurant, 125 La Salle Street, between Broadway and Claremont)

9:30  pm Postprandial Potations (meet for a drink at Le Monde, 2885 Broadway, between 112th and 113th Streets)

Sunday, April 15

8:00-9:00 am Breakfast

9:00-10:30 am Clichés in Language and Literature: Vanessa Ryan (Brown U), Moderator

• Danny Wright (Columbia U), “Engaged, Therefore Engaged: Bad Logic in The Egoist”
• Veronica Alfano (Indiana U), “‘Others, I am not the first’”:  A. E. Housman’s Self-Censoring Clichés”
• Sarah Weaver (Cambridge U), “Victorian Philology and the Problem of ‘long familiar use’ in the English Language”

10:30-10:45 am Coffee Break

10:45 am -12:15 pm Adventures in Orthodoxy:  Sarah Balkin (Rutgers U), Moderator

• Louetta Hurst (Rutgers University), “Dismissing All That: Carlyle on the Quran”
• Michelle Boswell (University of Maryland), “An Unconventional Scientific Pedagogy in Margaret Gatty’s Parables from Nature”
• Tyson Stolte (New Mexico State University), “‘The Infinite within the Finite’: Victorian Prosody and Orthodox Theories of Mind”

12:15-1:00 pm Conference Wrap-Up

• James Eli Adams (Columbia University)
• Jason R. Rudy (University of Maryland)