April 8-10, 2022 at Johns Hopkins University

***Here is the official NVSA PROGRAM RECOVERY 2022.***

Conference participants may sign up for Friday dinners via the QR code in the Official Program above or through this link: Sign up for a Friday group dinner here.

*All panels will take place in Maryland Hall 110, 3400 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD*

The conference will feature a keynote panel with Rachel Adams (Columbia), Talia Schaffer (Queens College, CUNY), and Arden Hegele (Columbia) and a special “Fieldwork” roundtable on “Engaging with Difficult Materials in Victorian Studies,” co-chaired by Jason Rudy (Maryland) and Adrienne Munich (Grad Center, SUNY). Both of these panels and our array of great papers promise to be timely and brilliant.

For everyone’s safety and comfort, we ask that all attendees at the conference be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 (unless they have valid medical reasons that prevent them from being able to receive the vaccination). The panels will be held in a high-ceilinged, amphitheater-style lecture room, and weather permitting we will make use of outdoor areas for breaks between panels. We will of course follow JHU safety protocols, which may change between now and then, but we will have masks available.

Please register here. The Google Form will redirect you to the NVSA PayPal site for donations to make your payment, so please calculate and remember what you will owe before clicking submit! Please note that, thanks to the ongoing generosity of our members and savings from last year, we have dropped the registration fee substantially, especially for retirees, contingent faculty, and graduate students. We hope those of you who can afford to do so will take this opportunity to donate to NVSA so that we can continue to extend savings to those who need it most. 

A limited number of hotel rooms are available at the Inn at the Colonnade Baltimore, a DoubleTree By Hilton Hotel. The link will take you directly to the site to make your reservation. Given the various contingencies of the pandemic, we were only permitted to block rooms with double queens and the block expires March 11, so please reserve now! And, if you feel comfortable doing so, consider sharing the room with a colleague.

Conference participants may sign up for Friday dinners via the QR code in the Official Program above or through this link: Sign up for a Friday group dinner here.

***Here is the official NVSA PROGRAM RECOVERY 2022.***

Draft Program

Friday, April 8
2:00pm   Welcome
2:15–4:15pm Panel 1: Recovery from Imperialist Gender NormsSimon Reader (CUNY-Staten Island), Chair

Sourav Chatterjee, “Basantak or the Bengali Punch and Making of New Image-Texts in Late Colonial Bengal”

Natalie McGartland, “Land-based feminisms in Australian women’s writing”

Meghna Sapui, “Educating Colonial Tastes: Young Bengal’s Gastropoetical Mimicry”

4:15–4:30pm   Coffee

4:30–6:00pm   Panel 2: Medical Humanities

James Eli Adams (Columbia University), Chair

Haejoo Kim, “The Syphilitic Child and the Fiction of the Individual vs. the Public in Victorian Anti-vaccination Debates”

April Patrick, “’Recovery is Very Rare’: Victorian Doctors on Breast Cancer Outcomes”

Kristin Samuelian, “Waste: Disordered Eating, Anxiety, and Recovery in Great Expectations”

Tamara Silvia Wagner, “Dangerous Signs of Recovery: Representing Relapses in Victorian Popular Fiction”

Dinners on your own. Attendees can sign up at the conference for group dinners at various local restaurants.

Saturday, April 9
10:00am–12:00pm   Keynote Panel in Honor of Carole Silver
Jonathan Farina (Seton Hall University), Chair

Arden Hegele (Columbia)

Talia Schaffer (Queens College, CUNY)

Rachel Adams (Columbia)

12:00-1:45pm Lunch Meeting

Elijah Cummings Room, Busboy and Poets, 3224 St Paul St, Baltimore, Maryland, 21218

2:00–4:00pm   Panel 3: Politics of Recovery

Maeve Adams (Manhattan College), Chair

Shyam Patel, “The Loss of Loss Itself’: Utilities of Suffering in Oscar Wilde’s Prison Writings”

Greg Vargo, “Dramatizing Crisis and Recovery: The Dorchester Labourers and the Politics of Mutual Aid”

Deborah Denenholz Morse, “Frederick Douglass and ‘The House of Trauma’: A Reparative Reading of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as Transatlantic Abolitionist Text”

Diana Rose Newby, “Harriet Martineau’s Vitalist Turn”

4:00–4:30pm   Coffee

4:30–6:00pm   Panel 4: Acts of Recovery 

Jonah Siegel (Rutgers University), Chair

Jacob Romanow, “Pyrrhic Canonicity: Thackeray and Failed Revivalism”

David Russell, “On Getting Better: Ruskin, Stokes and Milner”

Herbert Tucker, “Recovery Intransitive and Transitive: Tennyson and Browning”

7:00–9:00pm   Predinner Book Celebration of Communities of Care (Princeton UP) by Talia Schaffer and Dinner Banquet with Award Announcements
Woodberry Kitchen, 2010 Clipper Park Rd Suite 126, Baltimore, MD 21211

Sunday, April 10

9:00–10:15am Fieldwork: Engaging with Difficult Materials in Victorian Studies
Jason Rudy (U Maryland College Park) and Adrienne Munich (SUNY Stonybrook), Co-Chairs

Jacqueline Barrios (University of Arizona at Tucson)
Manu Chander (Rutgers Newark)
Jessie Reeder (SUNY Binghamton)
Erin Spampinato (Southern Maine)

10:15–10:30am Coffee

10:30–12:00pm Panel 5: Colonial Time and Decolonization

Esther Hu (Boston University), Chair

Nasser Mufti, “Disciplining and Punishing Victorian Studies”

Shannon Neal, “Demanding Stories: Settler Colonial Guilt in the Face of Indigenous Australian Silence and Trauma”

Brian Reinken, “‘It was no more fossil than I am’: Fossil Recovery and Renewable Energy in Late-Victorian Fiction”

Oishani Sengupta, “Africa Redux: The Victorian Legacies of Chander Pahar”

12:00–1:00pm   Conference Wrap-Up

Debra Gettelman (Holy Cross)

Check out the CFP! Proposals of 500 words are due by October 15, 2021 to the Mimi Winick, Chair of the Program Committee, at mwinick@hds.harvard.edu.