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

Please find below details of a call for papers for the upcoming Victorian Studies Association of Ontario conference,

“Light in Dark Places: Victorian Animals and Human Interventions,” to be held at Glendon College, Toronto, 25 April 2020.

Keynote Speakers:

Jody Berland, York University

Susan Hamilton, University of Alberta

From Queen Victoria’s beloved dachshund, Dash, to Lewis Carroll’s furry feline, Dinah, pets were an integral part of the Victorian domestic world, while thousands of working animals laboured outside the home in transportation, farming, mining, and other industries. As the century went on, the rise in animal welfare agencies and the anti-vivisection movement focused the public’s attention on the exploitation of and cruelty to animals. Imperialist and colonialist big game hunters killed hundreds of animals for trophies to display back home in Britain. A burgeoning reading public reacted in various ways to Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and Descent of Man, both of which suggested deep connections between humans and other species. As a result, there was a shift in Victorians’ perceptions of animals and their relationship(s) to human beings. Ever since Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in Victorian England (1989), scholars have increasingly looked at questions surrounding animal rights, the consumption and representation of animals, and changing attitudes towards animals in the nineteenth century.

We welcome papers that explore Victorians and the biological creatures that inhabited their historical moment. How did Victorians understand and represent animals in popular culture and in various media, including the fine arts, literature, advertising, and political cartoons? What effects might we trace in the use of animals for entertainment: on the stage, in zoos and circuses, and on the street? How did Victorians consume animals and animal products for food, fashion, and housewares? What role did animals play in constructing both British colonialist and imperialist agendas?

Possible themes might include but are not limited to:

• fictional representations of animals
• anthropomorphism
• evolutionary, post-humanist, and Anthropocene theories and studies
• print culture and animals, illustrations, cartoons, poetry
• consumption of animal and animal products
• animals in visual culture, paintings, sculpture, advertising
• children’s literature and animals
• anti-vivisection
• photography and animals
• taxidermy
• animals and natural history museums and museum studies
• zoos, circuses, and menageries
• hunts and hunting cultural histories
• animals in sport
• anatomical studies
• capitalism, empire, and animal labour
• animals and colonialist and imperialist histories and representations
• medical and scientific discourses involving animals
• veterinary practice
• animal products in the fashion industry
• endangered and extinct animals of the era

Please send an email attachment of your 300-to-400-word paper proposal, and 100-word biographical statement to: Lin Young (l.young@queensu.ca) & Emily Rothwell (ejrothwell@gmail.com) by 5 February 2020.

September 2017 Newsletter

1. President’s Message
2. VSAO-ACCUTE Panel
3. New Titles by VSAO Members

1. President’s Message

A warm welcome to new and returning members of the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario. The Association celebrated its 50^th year in grand style throughout 2017, including a successful April conference “New Intimacies: Changing Interactions in the Victorian World” and two anniversary-themed panels at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences: “Many Happy Returns: The Anniversary in Victorian Britain” and a roundtable on “The Future of Interdisciplinary Victorian Studies.” Many thanks to outgoing VSAO President Dr. Tina Choi, for her impeccable leadership and for her efforts in organizing special events for the anniversary year.

As the VSAO enters its sixth decade, we hope to continue the Association’s work promoting research in Victorian Studies across a range of disciplines. The upcoming annual conference in April 2018 will have an interdisciplinary focus, featuring keynote addresses by Dr. Alison Syme (University of Toronto), author of A Touch of Blossom: The Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siècle Art (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), who will speak on her current research on Edward Burne-Jones, and Dr. Deborah Lutz (Morton Endowed Chair, University of Louisville, KY), author of The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (W.W. Norton, 2015) and Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge UP, 2015). Please watch for the upcoming CFP for the morning panel for the conference and read the sample reviews and descriptions of their work by clicking on the embedded links!

Please also consider sharing with the VSAO Executive your thoughts on bringing new members into the Association and encouraging graduate student membership and participation in the VSAO. Please contact me personally or any member of the Executive.

Here’s to a productive and stimulating year!

Suzanne Bailey

President, Victorian Studies Association of Ontario
Professor, Department of English Literature, Trent University
Director, English MA “Public Texts” program, Trent University
Chair, Dept. of Gender and Women’s Studies, Trent University

2.  VSAO-ACCUTE Panel

The VSAO will be sponsoring a panel at the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) at the May 2018 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Regina. Please view the call-for-proposals below.

VSAO-Sponsored ACCUTE Joint Session, “Victorian Spaces: Real and Imagined”

The Victorian Studies Association of Ontario (VSAO) and the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) invite papers for a jointly sponsored session on Victorian Spaces: Real and Imagined. From haunted attics, to enchanted flower beds, to housing reform, Victorians were deeply preoccupied with new conceptions of space. Their penchant for exploring the shifting role of the production of space can be seen as deriving from historical spatial forms, such as architecture, urban philanthropic projects and social-improvement publications. In another sense, such spatial conceptions can be seen as having been represented culturally, whether through the imagined landscapes of Alice’s wonder-filled garden afternoon, Pip’s navigation of London, or the Pre-Raphaelites’ reconceiving of medievalist spaces as contemporary portals. The Victorian Studies Association of Ontario invites papers that consider the ways in which space was imagined, represented and conceived during this historical moment, exploring the ways in which both real and imagined spaces often converged on a proverbial continuum of representations. Papers might examine how real or physical spaces were manifested, planned and represented by Victorians as they conceived of and interacted with spatial theories and formations in myriad modes and discourses. Others may inquire as to the ways in which the spaces Victorians imagined are potentially seen as cultural representations of their collective affective lives, their utopian forecasts, their escapist dreamscapes and their socio-political and imperial constructions and agendas. Possible themes might include but are not limited to:

• Social, legal, and/or political histories of space, both urban and rural
• Spatial theory
• Genre and space (social reform novels, sentimental fiction, popular press narratives, children’s literature, Romantic painting, utopia/dystopia, etc.)
• Visual and print culture’s imagined spaces such as traditional visual forms (photography, architecture, painting) and non-traditional visual forms (ephemera, cartography, games, advertising, etc.)
• Landscapes, gardens, ecocriticism
• Medical, corporeal and scientific histories
• Architectural spaces
• Factories, social reform, cultural geography
• Supernatural spaces: occultist practices, haunted houses, séance rooms, afterlives
• Film, video, digital and new media criticism as well as criticism on contemporary visual artists and writers whose historically-minded practices engage with Victorian conceptions of space
• Spaces of Empire: race, travel, histories, transnational and translocal contexts
• Interior design histories and design print culture (catalogues, pamphlets, journals, magazines)

[CFP now closed.]

3.  New Titles by VSAO Members

We’re pleased to announce these recent book publications by our members. Congratulations to these authors!

Ablow, Rachel. Victorian Pain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.

Science Museums in Transition: Anglo-American Cultures of Display in the 19^th Century. Eds. Bernard Lightman and Carin Berkowitz. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017.