The Twentieth Century

Friday April 4 – Sunday April 6 2025 at Boston University

View the original call for papers.

Program

Friday Pre-Conference

12:00: Mentorship Program Caucus

Chandrica Barua, Preeshita Biswas, Ryan Carroll, Ailin Jain, Celine Vezina, Elizabeth Winter

FRIDAY, APRIL 4

1:30 – 2:00 (and following) Registration (1 Silber Way, 1st Floor)

2:00 – 2:15 Introduction

2:15 – 4:00 Panel 1: Poetics (Kenmore Room, 1 Silber Way, 9th floor)

Chair: Tricia Lootens (University of Georgia)

Jonathan Dick (University of Pennsylvania), “Colonial Mixed Metaphors”
Casie LeGette (University of Georgia), “Claude McKay’s History of the Morant Bay Rebellion”
Justin Sider (University of Oklahoma), “‘Any Ruin Has Its Surplus’: Aesthetic Poetry and the Midcentury Avant-Garde”

4:00 – 4:15 Coffee

4:15 – 5:45 Panel 2: The Discipline (Kenmore Room, 1 Silber Way, 9th Floor)

Chair: James Buzard (M.I.T.)

Haley Suh (University of California, Irvine), “What is (English) Literature? The Irreducible Distance between Literature, Bungaku, and Munhak”
Kevin King (Independent Scholar), “The Victorian(ist) Sage, Past and Present”
Emily Steinlight (University of Pennsylvania), “Presentisms Past: Victorian Studies’ American Century”

6:00 – 7:00 Welcome Reception, 610 Commonwealth Avenue

SATURDAY, APRIL 5

9:00 – 10:00 Breakfast, Eichenbaum Room Lobby (610 Commonwealth Avenue)

10:00 – 12:00 Keynote Panel in Honor of Carol Silver (Eichenbaum Room, 610 Commonwealth Ave)

Chair: Simon Reader (CUNY)

Kristin Mahoney (Michigan State University), “‘Ideals & Impulses That Will Reassert Themselves in Freedom’: India, Ireland, and Theosophy”
Nasser Mufti (University of Illinois, Chicago), “Britain’s Nineteenth Century, ca. 1963-4”
John Plotz (Brandeis University), “Time Travel’s Travels: Victorian Speculation in the Twentieth Century”

12:00 – 1:45 Boxed Lunch KENMORE ROOM, 1 Silber Way, 9th Floor

2:00 – 3:45 Panel 3: Futures (Eichenbaum Room, 610 Commonwealth Ave)

Chair: Sarah Gates (St. Lawrence University)

Ivan Kreilkamp (Indiana University), “Fascist Carlyle”
Ashley Miller (Albion College), “Victorians Unborn: Revisionist Futures in Turn-of-the-Century Spiritualism”
Simon Joyce (College of William and Mary), “No Parentage in Love: The Queer Victorian Roots of Modern Irish Nationalism”

3:45 – 4:15 Coffee

4:15 – 5:45 Panel 4: Childhoods (Eichenbaum Room, 610 Commonwealth Ave)

Chair: Jason Rudy (University of Maryland)

Michele Martinez (Boston University), “Julia Margaret Cameron and Twentieth-Century Idylls of Childcare”
Aaron Matz (Scripps College), “Victorian Childhood, Interwar Retrospect”
Abigail Droge (SUNY Cortland), “Millennial Scrooge”

7:00 Banquet and Awards: THE CASTLE, 226 Bay State Road

SUNDAY, APRIL 6

9:15 – 10:00 Breakfast, Eichenbaum lobby

10:00 – 11:30 Panel 5: Site Readings (Eichenbaum Room, 610 Commonwealth Ave)

Chair: Lindsay Katzir (Antioch University New England)

Olivia Lingyi Xu (Northwestern University), “‘Their Immortals Are Not Ours’: Misreading Tess in Early Twentieth-Century China”
Brandon Katzir (Smith College), “From New York to Warsaw: Victorian Afterlives in Yiddish”
Julia Chin (Yale University), “Drowning Ophelia: The Late Victorian & Reading Out of Order in Sōseki’s Kusamakura”

11:30 – 12:00: Wrap Up