Friday April 10 – Sunday April 12, 2026 at Cornell University

Program

Download a pdf of the conference program.

Registration

Please register for the conference 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 owe before clicking submit!

We hope some of you take this opportunity to donate to NVSA so that we can continue to extend support to the organization and graduate student mentorship in particular.

Friday Night Dinners

Sign up for small group dinners at local restaurants here.

Venues

Friday: A.D. White House

Saturday and Sunday: Lecture Hall, Physical Sciences Building 120

Please let us know as soon as possible if you have accessibility needs of any kind.

Hotel

A limited number of rooms have been set aside at a special rate of $229/night at the Hilton Garden Inn, Ithaca (130 E. Seneca Street, Ithaca New York, near Ithaca Commons). To reserve, please call 607-277-8900 and ask for the NVSA group block. The rate will be only be available until March 28.

The hotel has free parking.

Transportation

From NYC and environs, there is the Cornell Bus which arrives on campus rather than downtown but is a fairly deluxe bussing experience. There is also Ourbus (pickup locations in NYC vary) which drops off very near the conference hotel. For Ourbus, there are some routes from Philadelphia to Ithaca, but not always in the other direction. For those coming from outside the New York City area, driving is probably easiest and almost certainly quickest. If you are in need of a ride, please contact Simon Reader or Mary Mullen directly to be put in touch with people who plan to drive and could potentially offer a ride.

At the conference:

Due to budget constraints this year we are unable to provide a full shuttle service (except for the banquet for which there will be a shuttle). For the weekend we will have a 12-seat van that can make runs between Ithaca Commons (where the conference hotel is located) and the venues on campus, and we will be connecting those with cars to those without to make sure everyone has an easy time of it.

The hotel and venues are about a 25-minute walk from one another.

There is an easy city bus (the #10) that leaves from the Commons to the Goldwin Smith Hall Stop on campus. The ride is about 10 minutes.

Banquet: the banquet is taking place at the lovely Heights Restaurant at 903 Hanshaw Rd, Ithaca, NY 14850, a short (under 10 minute) car ride from the hotel. There will be a full shuttle that evening to bring you to and from the restaurant.

Draft Program

FRIDAY, APRIL 10 – A.D. White House

1:15 – 2:00 (and following) Registration

2:00 – 2:15 Introduction

2:15 – 4:00 Panel 1: Reading Remnants

David Agruss, “Victorian Britain’s Silent Oriental Prehistory: Geology, Auto-Imperialism, Deep Time”

Kexin Song, “Deciphering the Silent Archive: Language as Weak Theory in Victorian Natural History”

Sarah Weaver, “The Schoolmaster and the Railroad: Silencing the Remnants of the Medieval in the Victorian Countryside”

4:00 – 4:15 Coffee

4:15 – 5:55 Panel 2: Tacit Relations

Erik Gray, “Mute Gestures: Michael Field’s Open Secrets”

Amy Huseby, “Secondary Help: The Gendered Silences of Ruskin’s Dead Birds”

Ellis Hanson, “Wilde Silencing”

6:00 – 7:00 Welcome Reception

7:30 Small Group Dinners (optional, sign-up link will be up the week before the conference)

SATURDAY, April 11 – Lecture Hall, Physical Sciences Building 120

9:00 – 10:00 Breakfast

10:00 – 12:00 Keynote Panel in Honor of Carol Silver

Chair: Simon Reader, College of Staten Island

Rachel Ablow, University at Buffalo

Jason Camlot, Concordia University

Priya Joshi, Temple University

12:00 – 1:45 Lunch Meeting

2:00 – 3:45 Panel 3: Pin-Drop Poetics

Justin Tackett, “Stethoscopic Poetics: ‘Silent’ Vessels in John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, and James Henry”

Mursal Sidiqi, “The Victorians’ Guide to Reading Persianate Poetry: Hafez, Anxious Translations, and the Anglo-Afghan Wars”

Herbert Tucker, “What Poets Made of Silence”

3:45 – 4:15 Coffee

4:15 – 5:45 Panel 4: Novel Attunements

Meghna Sapui, “Reality in the Image of Silence: Caste and the Case of Indian Realism”

Maria Al-Raes, “Maggie Tulliver’s ‘Dreamy Silences'”

Elizabeth Weybright, “‘While my ear follows to silence the hum’: Victorian Acoustic Science and Charlotte Brontë’s Impossible Sounds”

7:00 Banquet and Awards: The Heights Restaurant, 903 Hanshaw Rd, Ithaca, NY 14850

SUNDAY, APRIL 12 – Lecture Hall, Physical Sciences Building 120

9:15 – 10:00 Breakfast

10:00 – 11:30 Panel 5: Imperial Ellipses

Erin Cheslow, “Trucanini’s Multiple Selves: Surpassing the Colonial Silences of Text through Oral Storytelling”

Jungmin Yoo, “Fading into the Backstage of History: Rereading Kim through Transimperial Anxiety and the Rise of Japan”

Elizabeth Greeniaus, “Conrad’s Weird Ellipses”

11:30 – 12:00: Wrap Up

Diana Newby and Jonah Siegel

Facing image: Funeral Mute, Robert William Buss, 1830