“Looking Outward”
NAVSA 2018
St. Petersburg, Florida
October 11-14, 2018
The Conference Committee invites proposals for papers, panels, and special sessions on the theme of “Looking Outward.” Proposals are especially invited on Victorians and the Caribbean or Latin America, or considering those regions in the British Victorian context, but we welcome a broad range of interpretations of the theme.
Plenary speakers include Erika Rappaport (UC Santa Barbara), Belinda Edmondson (Rutgers), and Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford).
Topics may include:
- Victorians and Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa, Australasia
- Imperialisms: formal and informal, external and internal, diplomacy, war
- Victorians and the universe: space, science, time
- New frontiers of vision: touch, taste, sound, scent, clairvoyance
- Feeling outward: affect and expansion, sensation, sentiment
- Looking at others, at home and abroad: race, ethnicity, class
- The foreign and the exotic: fashion, foodways, art, literary form
- Forms, functions, and transformations
- Travel and travel writing, immigration and emigration
- Outside the individual: from psychology to sociology, anthropology, culture
- Land and sea: island, peninsula, sea, the maritime, vital materialism
- Looking upward: weather, storms, pollution
- Looking back: history, geology, deep time, the anthropocene, neo-Victorianism
- Looking outward from other locations: the view of Britain from other locales
- Looking beyond the human: animals, automata, posthumanism, the supernatural
- Suspicion and oversight: spying and intrigue, surveillance, discipline, policing local, regional, national borders
- Optical technologies and visual aids, visual projection, blindness, barriers, and impairments
- Ethical vision: seeing the self in relation to others, social justice, charity, philanthropy, religion and spirituality
- Looking outside the field: problematizing or redefining “Victorian Studies,” new techniques of reading, Victorian Studies from other disciplinary vantage-points
- Nature: gardens, farmlands, wilderness
For individual papers, submit 500-word paper proposals, along with a one-page CV. For entire panels and roundtables, submit the above for each paper, as well as a one-page summary of the panel or roundtable. Submissions portal: http://navsa2018.english.ufl.edu/
The deadline for paper, panel, and roundtable submissions is Monday, March 26, 2018.