Dickens Day 2018: 'Dickens, Families and Communities'

Programme

9 – 10:00 am Registration, coffee and opening remarks

10 – 11:15 am Plenary panel
Lillian Nayder (Bates College), 'Better to be Cain than Abel'
Mary Shannon (University of Roehampton), 'Space, Place, and Dickens's Networks'
Cathy Waters (University of Kent), 'Celebrating the brotherhood of the pen: George Augustus Sala on "Dickens and Thackeray"'

11:15 – 11:30 am Readings organised by Tony Williams of the Dickens Fellowship

11:30 – 12 pm Coffee

12 – 1:15 pm Parallel panels

Care: Physical and Philanthropic 
Heather Tilley (Birkbeck, University of London), 'Engendering care or cruelty? The paralysed body in Dickens's Fiction'
Adelene Buckland (King's College London), 'Dickens and the Artificial Mother'
Joanna Hofer-Robinson (University College Cork), 'Putting Dickens to Work: "at least, that is her plan of Gampaign"'

Dickens and Mutual Friends
Katie Jackson (Royal Holloway, University of London), 'Controlling Cutlery: Objects of Anxiety, Humiliation and Identity'
Logan Browning (Rice University), 'The Bad Host in Dickens'
David Namie (University of California, Santa Cruz), '"Only to see that there's no look-out when he's up there": Authorizing Normativity and its Alternatives in Our Mutual Friend'

1:15 – 2:30 Lunch (own arrangements)

2:30 – 2.45 pm Readings organised by Tony Williams of the Dickens Fellowship

2:45 – 4 pm Parallel panels

Nation and Community
Lucy Whitehead (Cardiff University), '''Dickens ... hoisted the French colours: National Community in Dickens Biography'
Jungmin Yoo (Sogang University, South Korea), '"Yes, my poor sister; to the last": Sacrificing for Fraternity in A Tale of Two Cities'
Jacqueline Stamp (Canterbury Christ Church University), 'Dickens's Arctic Communities'

Gender and Familial (Dis)Regulation
Jennifer Miller (University of Leicester), 'Domesticity and the Fallen Woman Plot in Victorian theatrical adaptations of David Copperfield'
Justin Jones (University of North Texas), 'Brave Fools: The Community of Masculine Heroes in Dickens's Dombey and Son'
Cory Sampson (University of Ottawa), 'Nobody's Family: (Pseudo) Familial Relationships and Emotional Labour in Little Dorrit'

4 – 4:30 pm Coffee

4:30 – 5:15 pm  Plenary
Holly Furneaux (Cardiff University) 'Lighthouse Keeping'

We look forward to seeing you! Register here

Call for Chapters - Posthuman Pooh: Edward Bear after 100 Years

Deadline for Submissions: August 31, 2017

Full name / Name of Organization: Jennifer Harrison, East Stroudsburg University, USA

Contact email: jharriso11@esu.edu

I am currently seeking chapter submissions for an edited volume celebrating the centenary in 2026 of A. A. Milne's The World of Pooh. As classics from the "golden age" of children's literature, Milne's Pooh stories have received considerable attention from critics and fans over the years; however, less critical attention has been devoted to the continuing relevance of the Pooh phenomenon in contemporary children's culture. As recent critics have discussed, the Pooh stories are complex and multifaceted, written in many different modes and employing a vast array of different narrative styles and techniques; they have also undergone transformation and adaptation into a plethora of related cultural artefacts.

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of The World of Pooh, therefore, this volume will explore Pooh in light of cutting-edge children's literature and culture theory, with a particular focus on the stories as addressing the fundamentally modern posthuman concern with interrogations of the boundaries between the human and the non-human, the material and the immaterial.

Submissions of an interdisciplinary nature are particularly welcome, as are submissions which examine the relationship between the texts and modern adaptations and artefacts. Some potential areas of exploration might include:

• The blurring of human-animal-toy boundaries
• Explorations of space and place within the stories
• Adaptations for film and TV
• The marketing of the Pooh franchise
• Explorations of time within the stories
• Material culture and artefacts within the stories
• Bodies and identity within the stories
• Postcolonial and ecocritical readings

However, this list is nowhere near exhaustive and I am happy to consider any submission which focuses on the Pooh stories and their role in modern children's culture.

I hope to include chapters by authors from a variety of disciplines and viewpoints, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of current studies in children's literature and culture, as well as the diverse relevance of the Pooh stories in modern children's culture. Please submit a 500-word chapter abstract and a biography of no more than 250 words by August 31, 2017, to:

jharriso11@esu.edu

You can also see a digital version of the CFP at: http://quantum.esu.edu/faculty/jharrison/2017/06/20/call-chapters-posthuman-pooh-edward-bear-100-years/.

All proposed abstracts will be given full consideration, and submission implies a commitment to publish in this volume if your work is selected for inclusion. If selected, completed chapters will be due by December 30, 2017.

All questions regarding this volume should be directed to:

jharriso11@esu.edu

I look forward to what I hope will be a stimulating and exciting array of submissions on this fascinating topic!

Talk - Natural Histories and New World Fictions

Talk - Fantasy Worlds with Frances Hardinge

Wednesday 8th February, 6 – 7pm followed by a drinks reception

G07, Percy Building, Newcastle University

Join us for an exclusive event with Frances Hardinge, as she discusses the borders between fantasy and reality and her inspiration for her writing with Aishwarya Subramanian from Newcastle University’s Children’s Literature Unit. Her latest novel, The Lie Tree, described as ‘a Victorian Gothic mystery with added paleontology, blasting powder, post-mortem photography and feminism” won the Costa Book of the Year 2015 and audiences will also be treated to a reading from the outstanding novel by Frances as part of this very special event.

This event is hosted by Newcastle University’s School of English Literature, Langauge and Linguistics with Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books.

Free event. Please book online in advance at: http://www.sevenstories.org.uk/whats-on/events/122952/fantasy-worlds-with-frances-hardinge

This event complements the Children’s Literature Unit’s Postgraduate Visit Day, which will be hosted earlier that day for prospective Masters and PhD students. For more information and to book, visit: http://forms.ncl.ac.uk/view.php?id=11282

Call for articles - 'The "Heart" and "Science" of Wilkie Collins and Contemporaries'

Deadline for Abstracts: 28th February 2017; Deadline for Articles: 31st May 2017

‘“Why can’t I look into your heart, and see what secrets it is keeping from me?”’

The protagonist of Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883), surgeon Ovid de Vere, laments the difficulty in deciphering hidden emotions and secrets. Yet the language suggests his medical background, striking a note with the novel’s supposedly anti-vivisection message and highlighting contemporary debates into the nature of experimental medicine, observation and epistemology. What is the best way of uncovering secrets, and what part does knowledge of the body play in this? Can medical training benefit from a thorough understanding of emotion? And does gender play a part in this? Issues of ‘heart’ and ‘science’ reverberate across Collins’s work, from the Major’s collection of women’s hair in The Law and the Lady (1875) to Ezra Jenning’s solution to the crime of The Moonstone (1868). This conference takes as its focus the proliferation of “heart” and “science” throughout Collins’s work.

We welcome both abstracts and full article submissions on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883) and/or any of Collins’s work
• The Body: As a scientific subject, as a site of emotion, bodily representations, and the body in forensics, news reportage and the home.
• The Victorian origin of disciplines: Collins as an interdisciplinary figure, the divide (or not) of “heart” and “science”, the definition of sensation in literature and/or science.
• Medicine and anatomical science: vivisection, taxidermy, anatomical atlases and the nineteenth-century doctor and/or scientist.
• Psychology and psychiatry: the physicality of mental illness, hysteria, the asylum, treatment and therapeutics.
• Gender: the gendered body, representations of gender, the gendered connotations of “heart” and/or “science”.
• Sensation: As genre, as sense or emotion, as subjective.
• Detection: forensics, interrogation, the body as clue, the science of detection, and crimes of the heart.
• Relationships: Romantic, familial, or otherwise.
• Neo-Victorian Approaches to “Heart” and “Science”
• Work by other contemporary sensation writers

Submissions are not limited to papers on Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science but to “heart” and “science” at work in the full range of Collins’s fiction. The WCJ are also interested in related authors and sensation fiction more broadly, hence papers on authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade, Charles Dickens, Ellen Wood, Florence Marryat and other sensation writers will also be considered. Interdisciplinary perspectives are welcome.

Email abstracts to jo.parsons@falmouth.ac.uk and V.Burke@pgr.reading.ac.uk by 28th February 2017.

Call for suggestions - novels, politics and technology

Georgina Voss has a post on the Guardian website today asking for suggestions of 'the best fiction books with something to say about the politics of science and technology'. Read it (and contribute) here.

Stories about science: exploring science communication and entertainment media

A research symposium at the University of Manchester
Thursday 4 and Friday 5 June 2015
We are now in a golden age for science in entertainment. Academy Award winning films such as Gravity and The Theory of Everything, and television ratings titans like The Big Bang Theory, have proved that science–based entertainment products can be both critically acclaimed and financially successful. In fact, many high profile scientific organizations including the US National Academy of Sciences and the Wellcome Trust in the UK now believe that science communication can, and perhaps should, be both informative and entertaining.

These groups have embraced movies and television as legitimate vehicles for science communication by developing initiatives to facilitate scientific involvement in the production of films and television programs. Science communication scholarship on entertainment media has been slow to catch up with the enthusiasm shown by these scientific organizations, as science communication studies of science in mass media still predominantly focus on news media and factual documentaries.

This Wellcome Trust-funded two-day symposium brings together scholars from across disciplines to explore the communication of science through entertainment media in order to uncover new ways of approaching, understanding, and theorizing about this topic. Our exciting range of speakers will explore science communication and entertainment media from a variety of disciplinary and global perspectives as it is practised and experienced by a diverse array of publics.

The event will run from Thursday 4 to Friday 5 June 2015 and is organized by the Science and Entertainment Lab research group within CHSTM, comprised of David A. Kirby, William R. Macauley, and Amy C. Chambers. There is no cost for attending the symposium, but spaces are limited.

Please contact the organizers if you are interested in attending, or if you would like further details: storiesaboutscience@manchester.ac.uk

CFP - International Conference on Science and Fiction

Barcelona, Institut d’Estudis Catalans, September 2-4, 2015.
Vilanova i la Geltrú, Biblioteca-Museu Víctor Balaguer, September 5th, 2015.

'Science and Fiction: A Creative Exploration of Real and Fantastic Worlds', is an International conference hosted by the Catalan Society for History of Science and Technology and the Catalan Society for SF and Fantasy. The main goal of the conference is to analyze and discuss the relations between science and fiction (literature, theatre, cinema, arts…), introducing them in the topics of the Catalan academic environment.

Topics proposed
Science & Fiction. 2. SF in university academics. 3. SF and genre writing. 4. SF in the international scene. 5. SF outside the books.

Proposals should include an abstract of 200 words, the author’s name, a short CV, and a tentative title. Please submit abstracts via e-mail to inscripcions.CienciaiFiccio@gmail.com by March 31st, 2015.

The official languages of the Conference are English and Romance languages.


Further details here.

Report - Histories of the Future workshop

Very interesting write-up here of a recent workshop on Histories of the Future.

Fiction Meets Science - report

See here for a report by Amy Chambers from the recent 'Fiction Meets Science' event.