Conference Programme - Water

The Northern Nineteenth-Century Network presents

Water, a one-day conference

7 April 2017

9.30-10.30                          Keynote address: Professor John Chartres, University of Leeds (chaired by Professor Karen Sayer)

10.30-10.45                       Refreshments

10.45-12.15                       Parallel panels

Cleanliness and Class

Claire Rennie                        Cleanliness in Early Nineteenth Century Health Regimens

Amanda Sciampacone        'Dirty Father Thames' and the Microscopic Grotesque: Cholera and Water after John Snow

Françoise Baillet                 Picturing the 'Submerged Tenth': Matt Morgan's Representations of Pauperism for the Illustrated London News as Discourse on Class Anxiety. The Example of 'A Soup-Kitchen in Ratcliff-Highway' (1867)'

Slavery and Liberation

Ciarán Rua O'Neill              Bearing Vessels of Lustration and Vases of Libation: Water Carriers in Nineteenth-Century Painting

Melissa Gustin                     Go Down, Moses: The Fountain Forms of Edmonia Lewis's Forever Free

Eva McGrath                        Crossing the River into Freedom: Borders, Form and Maternal Connection in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin

Water Stories

Haythem Bastawy               One Sea, Too Many Stories: The Thousand and One Nights in European Myths and Fairy Tales

Tess Somervell                    Sea Rocks and Inland Waters: Wordsworth's Ocean in Motion

Simon Rennie                       From 'sparkling rills' to 'ocean grave': Water Imagery in the Poetry of the Lancashire Cotton Famine, 1861-65

12.15-1.15                          Lunch

1.15-2.15                            Presentations by Light Vessels Project

Karen Sayer                          Between Water and Land: Illuminating Light Vessels in the Long Nineteenth Century

Elise Liversedge & Mary Hooper

LAST STATION: Artistic Responses to Bodies of Water & Waterways

2.15- 3.45pm                    Parallel panels

Policies of Water

Andrew McTominey          Two Bad Neighbours? The Civic Rivalry of Leeds and Bradford c.1850-1890

Rachel Hurley, James Rothwell & Jamie Woodward

Contaminated Cottonopolis: Legacies of Historical Industry in Manchester's River Network

Samuel Grinsell                   Constructing the Nile Valley: Empire, Environment and Building, 1880s-1920s

Writing Water

Marco Canani                       'One whose fate was writ in water': Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Water Sublime

François Ropert                   'The wave that breaks against a forward stroke': The Metronomics of Swimming in A.C. Swinburne's Sea Poems

Joan Passey                          The Sound of the Sea: Sonic Gothic Seascapes in Victorian Cornwall

Watering Places

Joe Davey                              Sailor Criminality in a Port City – Bristol 1850-1914

Joanne Knowles                   'Favourite and Popular Watering Places', Piers and Other Waterside Attractions

Martha Cattell                      Whale Watching: Vision and Visuality in Nineteenth Century Arctic whaling marine paintings

3.45-4.15 pm                    Refreshments

4.15 – 5.45 pm                 Parallel Panels

Transport and Industry

Helen-Frances Pilkington  "Being scientific"? Clouds in hot air balloon narratives in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Jodie Matthews                    Canals in Nineteenth-century Literary History

Richard Byroms                  William Fairbairn's Hydraulic Engineering

Dangerous Waters

Stephen Basdeo                   The Role of Water in GWM Reynolds' The Mysteries of London (1844-48)

Odile Boucher-Rivalain     The Ambiguity of Water in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Laura Ettenfield                   The Octopussy: Exploring Representations of Female Sexuality and Animality in Victor Hugo's The Toilers of the Sea (1866) and The Laughing Man (1868)

Close of conference

Supported by the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS)