Conference Program

The Northeast Victorian Studies Association will host its 2018 conference, “Unfinished Victorians,” at the University of Pennsylvania, April 13-15. Among the conference highlights will be a plenary panel featuring Jonathan Grossman, Meredith Martin, and Andrew Miller. Program details below.

We gratefully acknowledge the support and co-sponsorship of the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences, the University Research Foundation, the Penn English Department, and the Villanova English Department.

To register for the conference, please click “Registration” on the green bar above.

Friday, April 13

All panels will be held in Rose Recital Hall
(419 Fisher-Bennett Hall at 3340 Walnut Street)

12:30-1:30pm Exhibition and tour of Victorian materials with John Pollack, curator

Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts at the Lea Library (a precise reconstruction of the amazing nineteenth-century personal library of Henry Charles Lea) on the 6th floor of Penn’s Van Pelt Library (3420 Walnut Street)

1:00 and following: Registration
Fisher-Bennet Hall room 224 (second floor)

2:00pm Welcome

2:15-4:15pm Panel I: Processing the Social
Cornelia Pearsall (Smith), Chair

  • James Buzard (MIT): “Landless: Authority and the Incomplete in The Mystery of Edwin Drood”
  • Thomas Joudrey (Penn State): “Once Tyrannized, Now Autonomous: The Unfinished Person”
  • Barbara Leckie (Carleton): “Impedimenta: Forms of Incompletion and Delay in Ruskin, Marx, and Mayhew’s Calls for Social Change”
  • Greg Vargo (NYU): “‘Let no man write my epitaph’: Chartist Performance and ‘The Trial of Robert Emmet’”

4:15-4:30pm Coffee

4:30-6:00pm Panel II: Excesses of Criticism
Simon Reader (Staten Island, CUNY), Chair

  • Sean Hughes (Rutgers, New Brunswick): “How does Open-Endedness become a Virtue?”
  • Elizabeth Greeniaus (Rutgers, New Brunswick): “Vernon Lee’s Unfinished Text: ‘Various, Fluctuating, Inscrutable Form’”
  • Mark Taylor (Stanford): “Movements of Mind: Action and Inaction in Matthew Arnold’s Poetry and Criticism”

6:00-7:00pm Opening Reception

7:00pm Optional group dinners
Various neighborhood restaurants

Saturday, April 14

9:00-10:00am Breakfast

10:00am-12:00pm Keynote Panel in Honor of Carole Silver
Tanya Agathocleous (Hunter College, CUNY), Chair

  • Jonathan Grossman (UCLA)
  • Meredith Martin (Princeton)
  • Andrew Miller (Johns Hopkins)

12:00pm-1:45pm Lunch (at which next year’s conference topic will be determined)
Zavino Restaurant at 3200 Chestnut Street

2:00-4:00pm Panel III: Futures Past and Present
Kyle McAuley (Rutgers), Chair

  • Devin Griffiths (USC): “Petrodrama: Geopower and the Victorian Stage”
  • Sarah Crofton (King’s College London): “The Posthumous Turn: Spiritualism, Repair, and the Legacy of Great Writers”
  • Lech Harris (Rutgers, New Brunswick): “Composition as Investigation: The Genre of the New York Edition”
  • Beverly Taylor (U of North Carolina) and Marjorie Stone (Dalhousie): “Unfinished Business: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Unpublished Honeymoon Poem on Petrarch’s Vaucluse”

4:00-4:30pm Coffee

4:30-6:00pm Panel IV: Aesthetics of Unfinishedness
Michael Gamer (U of Pennsylvania), Chair

  • Amy Huseby (Florida International): “Augusta Webster’s Unfinished Forms”
  • Riley McGuire (U of Pennsylvania): “‘No Ending-Up’: Unfinished Vocal Normalization in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno”
  • Herbert Tucker (U of Virginia): “Unfinishing School: Victorian Poetics of Imperfection”

7:00-9:00pm Dinner Banquet
CoZara Restaurant at 3200 Chestnut Street

Sunday, April 15

8:00-9:00am Breakfast

9:00-10:15am Pedagogy session
Teaching Under Trump: Who, What, How?
Jason Rudy (U of Maryland), Chair

  • Manu Chander (Rutgers, Newark)
  • Olivia Moy (Lehman College, CUNY)
  • Mary Mullen (Villanova)
  • Natalie Prizel (Bard)

10:15-10:30am Coffee

10:30-12:00pm Panel V: Individual Fragments and Fragmented Individuals
Sarah Gates (St. Lawrence), Chair

  • Sierra Eckert (Columbia): “Henry James and the Logic of the Donnée”
  • Annael Jonas-Paneth (Boston U): “Gradation versus Outline: Turner, Millais, and the Controversy of Individuation”
  • Will Glovinsky (Columbia): “Unfinished Antagonists: Mill’s Corrigibility, Trollope’s Slope”

12:00-1:00pm Conference Wrap-Up

  • Sebastian Lecourt (U of Houston)
  • Kate Thomas (Bryn Mawr)

Conference Program

The Northeast Victorian Studies Association will host its 2018 conference, “Unfinished Victorians,” at the University of Pennsylvania, April 13-15. Among the conference highlights will be a plenary panel featuring Jonathan Grossman, Meredith Martin, and Andrew Miller. Program details below. We gratefully acknowledge the support and co-sponsorship of the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and… Continue reading Conference Program