April 2016:
Vicarious Victorians: Transmitting Experience in the Nineteenth Century
Keynote Speakers
Rachel Ablow (SUNY Buffalo): Wounded Trees, Abandoned Boots: Thomas Hardy and the Homelessness of Pain
Jules Law (Northwestern University): Virtuality at the Heart of Realism: Information and Animation in Middlemarch
Session Panelists
Danielle Barkley (McGill University & Bishop’s University): Receiving a Vicarious Education in Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife
Martin Danahay (Brock University): Transmitting War: Roger Fenton in Crimea, 1855
Erin Piotrowski (University of Toronto): Powers of the Virtual: Technology and Subjectivity in Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean
April 2015:
Race, Place, and Perspective in the Victorian Period
Keynote Speakers
Charmaine A. Nelson (McGill University): James Hakewill, Joseph Kidd, and Isaac Belisario: Representing Jamaica from Slavery to Apprenticeship
Susan Casteras (University of Washington): Seeing America through a Victorian Lens: British Constructions of Slavery and ‘That Accursed System’
Session Panelists
Victor Shea (York University): ‘Historical Research and Antiquarian Lore’: Translatio Imperii et Studii: Race and Place in the Empress of India Debates (1876)
Bassam Chiblak (University of Victoria): W. M. Thackeray and F. Walker’s The Adventures of Philip as Unionist Propaganda in Harper’s
Winnie Chan (Virginia Commonwealth University): Eminent Victorians, Neo-Slave Narratives, and British Heritage
April 2014:
Too Little, Too Late: Decadence and Incompleteness in the Victorian Era
Keynote Speakers
Stephen Arata (University of Virginia)
Decadent Form
Barbara Leckie (Carleton University)
Unfinished: An Incomplete Account of Victorian Procrastination
Session Panelists
Alison Chapman (Harvard University): Ornament and “Bad Form”: The Aesthetics of Inattention in the Victorian Novel
Aaron Donachuk (University of Toronto): Belated Distraction: Sensational Poetics, the Machinery of Attention, and Wilkie Collins’s 1860s Novels
Leslie Allin (University of Guelph): “It is Inexplicable, this delay”: News, Penetration, and Prowess in Gordon’s Khartoum Journals
April 2013:
Victorian Play(s): Excess and Expression
Keynote Speakers
Dennis Denisoff (Ryerson University)
“’A Disembodied Voice’: The Playful Spirits of Decadence”
Carolyn Williams (Rutgers University)
“Reading Melodrama”
Session Panelists
Ann Colley (Buffalo State College): “Excess and Empire at the Belle Vue Zoo, Manchester”
Simon Reader (University of Toronto): “@Oscar: The Play of Information in Wilde’s Notebooks”
Marlis Schweitzer (York University): “An ‘Unmanly and Insidious Attack’: Child Actress Jean Davenport and the Performance of Masculinity in 1840s Jamaica and Newfoundland”
April 2012:
Victorian Thresholds: Between Culture and Anthropology
Keynote Speakers
Kathy Psomiades (Duke University)
“Darwin and the Anthropologists revisited: Sexual Selection, Primitive Marriage, and Victorian Race Theory”
Audrey Jaffe (University of Toronto)
“Walk this Way: Adam Bede and the Production of Realist Space.”
Session Panelists
Martin Danahay (Brock University) and Deborah Reed-Danahay (University at Buffalo)
“The Boundaries of Social Space in Jekyll and Hyde: Between Literature and Anthropology”
Sherrin Berezowsky (University of Windsor)
“Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa and the Imperial Roots of Galton’s Narrative of British Progress”
Alisha Walters (University of Toronto)
“Affective Hybridities: Dinah Craik’s Olive and British Heterogeneity”
April 2011:
Manipulation: Victorian Variations on Hands, Handling, and Underhanded Behaviour
Keynote Speakers
James Eli Adams (Columbia University)
“The Dead Hand: George Eliot and the Uses of Inheritance”
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (Ryerson University)
“Hands of Art, Eyes of Science: Vestiges of Corpses in Pre-Raphaelite Poetry and Pictures”
Session Panelists
Peter Capuano (University of Nebraska)
“Thackeray’s (In)Visible Manipulation in Vanity Fair”
Gregory Brophy (University of Western Ontario)
“Unauthorized Autobiographies: Graphology and the Science of ‘Character’ in Stevenson’s Strange Case”
Aviva Briefel (Bowdoin College)
“Crimes of the Hand: Detection and the Belgian Congo”
April 2010:
Victorian Cultural Icons and Iconography, Then and Now
Keynote Speakers
Kate Flint (Rutgers University)
“Neo-Victorian Photography and Victorian Masquerade”
Bernard Lightman (York University)
“The Many Lives of Charles Darwin: Biographies and the Definitive Evolutionist”
Session Panelists
Ann-Barbara Graff (Nipissing University)
“Iconographies of Guilt: Three Façades of Eugene Aram”
Jo Devereux (University of Western Ontario)
“The Iconography of “Happy England”: Helen Allingham’s Domestic Genre Paintings”
Lesley Higgins (York University)
“Pater and the ‘Laws’ of Victorian Iconography”
April 2009:
Victorians and the Spectacular
Keynote Speakers
Ann Colley (English, Buffalo State University)
“Mountains and Mountain Climbing as Spectacle in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century”
Keith Wilson (English, University of Ottawa)
“Thomas Hardy and Drama as National Spectacle: ‘The Dynasts’ On and Off Stage”
Session Panelists
Stephanie McAllister (University of Toronto)
“’The daughter of my mind’: Hysterical Movement as Resistence in Tomorrow’s Eve”
Frederick D. King (English, University of Western Ontario)
“The Spectacle of the Occult and Sexual Dissidence: Positioning Passive Men in the Victorian Spiritualist Movement”
Rob Breton (English, Nipissing University)
“The Rhetorical Strategies of the Unstamped Press”
April 2008:
Victorian Interiors: Material and Metaphorical
Keynote Speakers
Janice Helland (Women’s Studies and Fine Art, Queen’s University)
“From Mud Cabin to Private Palace: Production, Display and Marekting of Craft in Ireland and Scotland, 1880-1900”
Matthew Rowlinson (English, University of Western Ontario)
“Foreign Bodies: Symptom, Race and Representation in Darwin and Freud”
Session Panelists
Jean Rosenfeld (History/Visual Arts, York University)
“‘A Noble House in the City’: The Victorian Ineriors of Elite Homes in Late-Nineteenth-Century Hamilton, Ontario”
D.M.R. Bentley (English, University of Western Onatrio)
“The Interior as ‘Common Property’ and ‘Uncontrollable Heart’ in Duncan Campbell Scott’s In the Village of Viger (1896)”
Mary Wilson Carpenter (Emerita, English, Queen’s University)
“Cow-heels and Water Drops: John Snow’s Metropolitan Interiors”
April 2007:
Bodies in Motion
Keynote Speakers
Marta Braun (Imge Arts, Ryerson University)
“Photography, Darwin, and Victorian Anthropology”
Paul Deslandes (History, University of Vermont)
“The Beautiful Man in Victorian Culture”
Session Panelists
Jaclyn Reid (Communications and Art History, McGill University)
“Sex for Sale: Mass Consumption of the Prostitute’s Body”
Constance Crompton (Communication and Culture, York University)
“‘We Admire Physical Strength and Beauty’: Eugene Sandow in the Public Eye”
Jo Devereux (English, University of Western Ontario)
“Acting Lady Audley: The Female Body ‘On and Off the Stage,’ 1860-1890”
April 2006:
Splendour in the Grass
Keynote Speakers
Martin Danahay (English, Brock University)
“John Ruskin’s Garden”
Joy Dixon (History, University of British Columbia)
“‘Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling’: Sexuality, Religion, and the Troubled History of ‘Secularization'”
Session Panelists
Barbara Leckie (English, Carleton University)
“Splendour and Squalor: Housing for the Poor in Harriet Martineau, George Eliot and Mary Ward
D.M.R. Bentley (English, University of Western Ontario)
“‘A Glorious Field upon which to Work’: Environmental Determinismin Post-Confederation Canadian Culture and Aesthetics”
Lisa Smith (English, University of Toronto)
“The Other Side of Physiology: Desire and Knowledge in The Lifted Veil”
Barbara K. Seeber (English, Brock University)
“Women and Nature: Jane Austen’s ‘Catherine, or the Bower'”
April 2005:
Pater, Periodicals, and the Weather
Keynote Speakers
Michael Wolff (English, University of Massachusetts)
“A Periodically Led Life: My 40 Years in the Field”
Katharine Anderson (Science, York University)
“Cloudy Wisdom: Local and Universal Knowledge in Victorian Weather Science”
William Whitla (Arts, York University)
“Rudyard Kipling, Horace, and Imperialism”
April 2004:
Poetry, Imperialism, and Homology
Keynote Speakers
Donald Hair (English, University of Western Ontario)
“Why Read Robert Browning?”
Victor Shea (Arts, York University)
“‘Pushing our way experimentally through an untrodden forest, where no white man’s axe has been before us’: Science, Adventure, and Imperial Authority in the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary”
Mary Winsor (History and Philosophy of Science, U of Toronto) “The Bull, its Killer, and the Killer’s Wings; or, How Two Ladies in Toronto Solved Richard Owen’s Mystery”
April 2003:
Railway Erotics, Gendered Ekphrasis, and Female Community
Keynote Speakers
Peter Bailey (History, University of Manitoba)
“Adventures in Space: Victorian Railway Erotics”
Sophia Andres (English, University of Texas)
“The Pre-Raphaelite Gendered Ekphrasis of the Victorian Novel”
Mary Arseneau (English, University of Ottawa)
“Recovering Female Community: Frances, Maria, and Christina Rossetti”
April 2002:
The “Nineteenth Century” and the Reorganisation of Knowledge
Keynote Speaker
Tilottama Rajan (English, University of Western Ontario)
“Prose of the World: Romanticism, the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ and the Reorganization of Knowledge”
Panel Discussants: “The Place of Periodisation in the Academy Today, or Whither Nineteenth-Century Studies in the New Millennium”
Katharine Anderson (Science and Society Program, York University)
Mary Wilson Carpenter (English, Queen’s University)
Stephen Heathorn (History, McMaster University)
William Whitla (Humanities, York University)
April 2001:
Disciplines and Narrative
Keynote Speaker
Leslie Howsam (History, University of Windsor)
“Discipline and Narrative: History Books for Victorian Readers”
April 2000:
Cultural Importation and Reproduction:
Britain in North America in the Nineteenth Century
Keynote Speakers
Laurel Brake (Literature, Birkbeck College, Univ. of London) “‘Globalization’ and the Press: The Nineteenth Century/ The ‘new journalism’/W.T. Stead”
David Latham (English, York University) “‘Count us by clay for them to fashion’: Pre-Raphaelite Refashionings in Canada”