VSAO Fall Evening Lecture 2022

You are warmly invited to join us for this year’s Fall Evening Lecture, Thursday 24 November 2022, at 6:30 PM in Sidney Smith Hall 2110, University of Toronto

Kathryn Davies (University of York, UK)

The legacy of Sacred and Legendary Art: Anna Jameson’s revolutionary guide to Christian iconography

Anna Brownell (Murphy) Jameson, undated, photograph from an engraving from the John Ross Robertson Collection (JRR 983). Toronto Public Library, Toronto, Canada.

Kathryn Davies is an AHRC (UKRI)-funded Art History PhD student at University of York, UK. Her research interests lie in Medievalism, Gothic Revival art and architecture, and the networks and modes of knowledge exchange that supported these cultural and artistic developments in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Davies’s PhD research focuses on the iconographic writings of Anna Brownell Jameson (1794-1860). Her series on Christian art had phenomenally broad appeal for over 80 years — it was read by aspiring middle-classes, artists, intellectuals and religious reformers alike — but Jameson has been excluded in all major studies of iconographers and art historians to date, and has yet to be adequately recognised as a key influence on public taste and understanding of the medieval. Davies aims to analyse and evidence her critical place within the Victorian Gothic Revival more broadly, and to demonstrate her pivotal role in the development of the modern disciplines of art history and iconography.

Victorian Experiments: Science, Technology, and Art

The nineteenth century saw the invention of the steam locomotive, the internal combustion engine, the first mechanical computer, the electric telegraph, practical photography, the telephone, the phonograph, the lightbulb, the bicycle, the zipper, and the x-ray, to name just a few technological innovations. As Victorian scientists and engineers changed life for most people, writers, musicians, and artists responded in multitudinous ways. The experimental model began to shape both the creation and consumption of art and literature. How did inventions like the telegraph and the telephone affect communication? How were communities altered by steam travel and the coming of early automobiles? What were the effects of photography and the development of moving pictures on the culture and social formation of Victoria’s Britain and its imperial holdings? VSAO invites proposals for papers on Victorian science and technology and their relationship with the arts and with daily life.

Papers might consider topics including, but not limited to:

• Domestic life changes through technology
• Servants and technology
• Political cartoons, photographs, paintings, or other visual representations of technology
• Sound reproduction, art, and literature
• Gender, science, and technology
• Photography and the fine arts
• Steam travel and art
• Leisure time and technology
• Metaphors of technology and/or science
• Spectacle and science or technology
• Dangers of new technology
• Embracing of or resistance to science and new technologies
• Inventors and authors, artists, or musicians
• Monarchy, science, technology
• Literary or artistic movements related to science and technology
• Fantasy, speculative fiction, and technology
• Book production and technology
• Empire and science and technology
• Marketplaces and science and technology
• Study of science and technology in schools, colleges, universities
• Technological manuals and/or scientific texts

The one-day conference will be held on Saturday 29 April 2023, at Glendon College, York University.

Please send a 300-word proposal and 50-word bio (as MS Word documents) by 15 January 2023, to Jo Devereux: jdevereu@uwo.ca 

 Saturday 30 April 2022

10:30am-4:00pm

10:30am-12:15pm     Morning Session   

Meghan Burry, “Confining the Fallen Woman: The Magdalen Hospitals, 1758-1890”

Melanie Byron, “‘Still the Jago rats bred’: Degenerative Eugenics in A Child of the Jago’s Slums” 

Virginia Lynn Grimaldi, “”The London Foundling Hospital: Challenging Fiscal-Military State Interpretations of Charity and Philanthropy”

12:30-1:40pm         Lunch Break                                                            

1:50-2:50pm           Keynote Address I  

Lesley Higgins, “Contrition, Correction—and ‘Perversion’?: the Victorian Confessional Revealed” 

3:00-4:00pm           Keynote Address II  

 Janice Schroeder, “Carceral Talk and Vocal Sound in the Victorian Prison”

VSAO Spring 2022 Conference: Spaces of Confinement, Correction, and Spectacle  

CFP  

During the Victorian period, the idea of space underwent radical change, from the widening expansion of empire to the narrowing confines of the prison cell. While the massive structure of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition in 1851 both enclosed and opened up the world to all classes of visitors, the restrictive, squalid spaces of “back-to-backs” in cities such as Birmingham and Manchester confined the working poor to the barest minimum of living spaces. Prisons like Pentonville kept the prisoners in miniscule cells, in solitary confinement, and under silence orders. In the world of entertainment, humans and animals were frequently confined and displayed, for example, in circuses, freak shows, and museums such as the Piccadilly Hall, all of which exploited the public appetite for sensation and spectacle.    

The VSAO warmly invites proposals for papers on confinement, correction, and spectacle. Papers might include but are not confined to:  

• Prisons, asylums, and other spaces of correction  
• Workhouses   
• Private hospitals and sanitoria  
• Circuses, sideshows, and freak shows  
• Anatomical and physiological museums  
• Zoos, zoological gardens, and public aquariums  
• Exhibitions, wax museums  

The one-day conference will be held on Saturday 30 April 2022, at Glendon College, York University.

Please send a 300-word proposal and 50-word bio (as MS Word documents) by 28 February 2022, to Jo Devereux: jdevereu@uwo.ca 

Greetings fellow Victorianists!

I hope you are well wherever you are and getting a chance to enjoy the merry month of May, even in this difficult time. The VSAO has been active since the start of 2021.

In January, we held our first ever online VSAO Winter Evening Lecture. Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite presented a wonderful talk on the pioneering Victorian cartoonist Marie Duval. The talk, held as a Zoom meeting, was very well attended, and we had a terrific discussion after Simon, Roger, and Julian’s presentation. Be sure to get a copy of their newest book, Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist (Manchester University Press, 2020): https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526133540/marie-duval/

As well, you can check out The Marie Duval Archive, a free image archive of Duval’s known work, created by Simon, Roger, and Julian, at www.marieduval.org.

In April, our Annual Spring Conference was held as a webinar, owing to continuing COVID restrictions. The conference this year, “Light in Dark Places: Victorian Animals and Human Interventions,” was held via Zoom, and featured four fabulous papers: Sandy Burnley (Michigan State University), “And Say the Animal Responded? Lewis Carroll’s Unsympathetic Exchanges”; Joanna Holliday (York University), “Fleecing the Flocks for Profit and Patriotism”; Matthew Rowlinson (Western University), “Towards a Theory of Species-Lyric: Darwin, Swinburne, Biopolitics”; and Asha Hornsby (Queen Mary University and UCL), “The Pen and the Scalpel: Representations of Painful Vivisection in Victorian Britain.” The papers encompassed a wide diversity of approaches and topics, even within the rubric of Victorian animal studies, and a lively discussion during the virtual sherry hour followed the presentations.

Our upcoming events include the two joint VSAO ACCUTE “Eco-Victorian” panels at Congress 2021, hosted by the University of Alberta this year. The panels will take place online on May 31^st at 9 am Mountain Time (11 am ET) and 11 am Mountain Time (1 pm ET) Please see details below:

Joint Panel with VSAO: ECO-VICTORIAN: WATER, LAND AND THE WORLD I

Chairs: Emily Rothwell, Carleton University, and Lin Young, Queen’s University

Presenters:

Marielle Lippmann, LARCA, University of Paris, “Terraforming England: Richard Jefferies’s Shifting Landscapes”

Alyce Soulodre, Queen’s University, “‘A land of swamps and evil things and dead old shadows’: Menacing Mires and Victorian Masculinity in H. Rider Haggard’s She and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles”

Molly Dawe, University of Toronto, “Folklore, Myth, and Ecological Forgetting in George Eliot’s Adam Bede”

Jeffrey Swim, Western University, “Victorian Eco-Pagan Legacies: Richard Jefferies’ After London and the Future Swamp of Modernity”

Joint Panel with VSAO: ECO-VICTORIAN: WATER, LAND AND THE WORLD II

Chairs: Emily Rothwell, Carleton University, and Lin Young, Queen’s University

Presenters:

Michelle Elleray, University of Guelph, “‘Whirling through North and South’: Faith in Victorian Atmospheric Science”

Nahmi Lee and Thomas Stuart, Western University, “Pictures and Fancies: Lizzie Hexam and the Thames’s Affective Flow”

Joanna Holliday, York University, “Tides and Transformations: The Narrative Ecology of the River in News from Nowhere by William Morris.”

The panels are open to members of ACCUTE only. For information on ACCUTE, please go to https://accute.ca/

To register for the conference, please visit https://congress2021.ca/about

I hope you are all well in these difficult times. Like so many other associations, the VSAO has had to postpone or alter planned events, including our annual spring conference for this year. Optimistic Victorianists all, we hope to be able to hold the conference in April 2021 at Glendon College. We think that the conference theme, “Victorian Animals and Human Interventions,” will be just as relevant in 2021—perhaps even more!—than in 2020.

During registration for the spring 2021 conference, members will be able to renew their membership and new members to join the association via Eventbrite. Please stay tuned for more information!

The fall 2020 evening lecture will be moving to an online format. This year, it will be long-time member Martin Danahay, who will be talking about “Arts and Crafts as a Brand.” His lecture had been planned for March and since it had to be cancelled then, we are pleased to be able to present the lecture via Zoom on Thursday, November 19^th, at 7 PM. More information on how to join the meeting will be coming soon.

Thank you as always to the brilliant and kind VSAO executive for all their help and support. I am so honoured to be part of this great association and look forward to some wonderful events in the coming months.

All the very best,
Jo Devereux
Assistant Professor, Department of English and Writing Studies, Western University
President, Victorian Studies Association of Ontario