CONF: Victorian Tactile Imagination - 19-20 July 2013
The Victorian Tactile Imagination Conference
19-20 July 2013
Birkbeck, University of London
PROGRAMME
19 JULY 2013
9:00-9:30am
Registration - MAL 415
9:30-9:45am
Welcome - MAL 421
9:45-10:45am
PLENARY 1 - MAL 421
Professor William Cohen (University of Maryland),
"Arborealities: The Tactile Ecology of Hardy's Woodlanders"
Chair: Professor Hilary Fraser (Birkbeck, University of
London)
10:45-11:00am
Coffee - MAL 415
11:00am-12:30pm
SESSION 1
A. Psycho-Physiological Touch - Chair: James Emmott
(Birkbeck, University of London) - MAL 421 Dr Marie Banfield (Independent
Researcher), "Mid-Victorian Psychology and the Aesthetics of Touch:
Alexander Bain and the Experimentalism of George Meredith"
Professor Pamela K. Gilbert (University of Florida),
"The Human Touch:
the Hand as Instrument of the Human"
Dr Roger Smith (Lancaster University / Institute of
Philosophy and the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences),
"Touch, Movement and Causal Relations"
B. Gender, Sexuality and Ghostly Touches - Chair: Dr Dewi
Evans (Cardiff
University) - MAL 416
Ji Won Chung (University of Warwick), "Touching
Bodies, Touched Bodies:
Carnal Interactions in Victorian Spiritualism"
Dr Ann Gagné (Seneca College), "'The Sense that
Feels': Narrating the Gender Politics of Touch"
Dr Royce Mahawatte (Central Saint Martins, University of
the Arts, London), "'Sometimes I felt myself touched': the Supernatural
Male Body"
C. Pedagogy and Play - Chair: TBC - MAL 251 Mark
Blacklock (Birkbeck, University of London), "Tactile Geometry:
Gifts, Cards and Cubes"
Dr Vanessa Smith (University of Sydney), "The Memory
of Touch: the Brontes and Stevenson in the Land of Counterpane"
Dr Rachel Snow (University of South Carolina Upstate),
"Touching
Illusions: the Language of Tactility and
Nineteenth-Century Stereo Photography"
12:30-1:45pm
Lunch - Keynes Library, School of Arts
There will be an opportunity to view the exhibition
Touching the Book:
Embossed Literature for Blind People in the Nineteenth
Century in the Peltz Room, School of Arts
1:45-3:15pm
SESSION 2
A. (In)animate Bodies - Chair: Dr Nicola Bown (Birkbeck,
University of
London) - MAL 421
Dr Anna Henchman (Boston University), "Soaked,
Shorn, and Punctured:
Making Sheep Sheepy in Far from the Madding Crowd"
Dr Jenny Pyke (Mount Holyoke College), "Sensation of
the Touchable in Victorian Taxidermy"
Dr Claire Wood (University of York), "Handling
Mortality: Feeling the Death of Little Nell"
B. Sculpture - Chair: Dr Victoria Mills (University of
Cambridge) - MAL 416 Dr Vicky Greenaway (Royal Holloway, University of London),
"Robert Browning, Sculptor"
Rebecca Kummerfield and James Lesh, "Tokens of Taste
or Stony Seduction?
Sculptures in an Antipodean Pleasure Garden"
Dr Patricia Pulham (University of Portsmouth), "Eyes
that Trace like
Fingers: Vision and Tactility in Victorian
Statue-Love"
C. The Medical Touch - Chair: TBC - MAL 251 Sarah L.
Berry (Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York), "Touchless
Treatment: Harriet Martineau's Gynecological
Revolution"
Dr Holly Furneaux (University of Leicester),
"Battlefield Care: Gender, Tactility and the Restorative Touch in the
Crimean War"
Dr Louise Hide (Birkbeck, University of London),
"Delusion, Illusion,
Confusion: Perceptions of Pain in Men with tabes
dorsalis, London c. 1900"
3:15-3:30pm
Coffee - MAL 415
3:30-5:00
SESSION 3
A. Touching Text and Image: the Rossetti Circle - Chair:
TBC - MAL 421 Beatrice Bazell (Birkbeck, University of London), "Touched
by the Text:
Goblin Market and the 'Palpitating' Consumer"
Professor Susan Jaret McKinstry (Carleton College,
Minnesota), "Tempting
Touch: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Fleshly Metaphors"
Professor Wendy Parkins (University of Kent), "Hand
in Glove: The Art of Touch in the Relationship of Marie Spartali Stillman and
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt"
B. The Dickensian Tactile Imagination - Chair: Dr Holly
Furneaux (University of Leicester) - MAL 415 Professor Karen Chase (University
of Virginia), "A Touch of the Fidgets"
Emma Curry (Birkbeck, University of London), "Table
Legs and Walking
Sticks: The Handy Object in Great Expectations"
Dr Stephanie Polsky (Goldsmith's College, University of
London), "Hand in Glove: the Perversion of the Domestic Economy in Hard
Times"
C. Haptic Screens and Surfaces - Chair: TBC - MAL 416
Nicole Bush (Durham University), "Feeling Vision: Making the Motion Image
with Mid-Century Technology"
Dr Duc Dau (University of Western Australia) and Dr
Caitlin McGuinness (University of Western Australia), "The Skin of Jane
Campion's The Piano"
Anthony Brand (University of Auckland), "To Live
without Leaving Traces:
Haptic Geography through the Looking Glass of Victorian
Society"
D. Dirty and Dangerous Literary Touches - Chair: TBC -
MAL 251 Kimberley Cox (Stony Brook University), "Manual Intercourse: the
Dangerous Intimacy of Handshakes in Victorian Novels"
Dr Abbie Garrington (Newcastle University), "Beasts
with Five Fingers: A Genealogy of the Severed Hand Story, Victorian to
Modern"
Dr Sarah Ross (Durham University), "The Politics of
Touch in Gaskell's North and South"
5:00-6:00pm
PLENARY 2 - MAL 421
Professor Gillian Beer (University of Cambridge),
"Dream Touch"
Chair: Dr Santanu Das (King's College, University of
London)
6:00-7:30pm
Drinks Reception and Exhibition - Keynes Library, School
of Arts There will be an opportunity to view the exhibition Touching the Book:
Embossed Literature for Blind People in the Nineteenth
Century in the Peltz Room, School of Arts
7:45-10:00pm
Conference Dinner
Tas Restaurant, 22 Bloomsbury Street
Please note that pre-booking is required for this event,
for which there are limited spaces.
20 JULY 2013
9:15-9:45am
Registration - MAL 417
9:45-10:45am
PLENARY 3 - MAL 421
Dr Constance Classen (author of The Deepest Sense: A
Cultural History of
Touch), "Victorian Intimacies: Love, Death, and the
British Museum"
Chair: Professor David Howes (Concordia University,
Montreal; Concordia
Centre for Sensory Studies)
10:45-11:00am
Coffee - MAL 417
11:00am-12:30pm
SESSION 4
A. Empire and Race in the Multisensory Museum/Collection
- Chair:
Professor Elizabeth Edwards (De Montfort University) -
MAL 421
Mary Addyman (University of Warwick), "Collecting in
the Nineteenth
Century: A Tactile Alternative to Museum Display"
Dr Kathleen Davidson (Independent Researcher / Harry
Ransom Center,
University of Texas, Austin), "Connecting the
Senses: Natural History
and the British Museum in the Stereoscopic Magazine"
David Howes (Concordia University, Montreal), "The
Skin of the Savage:
the Primitive Body in Victorian Anthropology and
Society"
B. Female Touches - Chair: Dr Patricia Pulham (University
of Portsmouth)
- MAL 415
Molly Livingston (Georgia State University), "'The
caresses and kisses
of friendship': Affectionate Touch and Femininity"
Dr Gabrielle Malcolm (Canterbury Christ Church
University), "'A quarter
of an hour's run - very sharp': Tactility and Titillation
in the
'Tally-ho!' Letter, from the Private Correspondence of
Mary Braddon"
Dr Tara Puri (Warwick University), "Tactile
Pleasures: Needlework in
Victorian Women's Magazines"
C. Touching the Natural World - Chair: Dr Abbie
Garrington (Newcastle
University) - MAL 416
Alan McNee (Birkbeck, University of London), "The
Haptic Sublime and the
'cold stony reality' of Mountaineering"
Dr Kara Tennant (University of South Wales),
"Growing Desires: Ferns and
Femininity in the Nineteenth Century"
D. Blindness and Touch - Chair: Dr Heather Tilley
(Newcastle University)
- MAL 414
Professor Lillian Nayder (Bates College),
"Blindness, Prick Writing, and
Canonical Waste Paper: Reimagining Dickens in Harriet and
Letitia"
Dr Jan-Eric Olsen (Medical Museion, Copenhagen),
"Vision and Blindness
in Objects"
Dr Vanessa Warne (Manitoba University), "Dirty
Books: Blindness,
Finger-Reading and Contagious Disease"
12:30-1:30pm
Lunch - MAL 417
1:30-3:00pm
SESSION 5
A. Textured Visions: Writing, Painting, Photographing
Fashion - Chair:
Dr Kara Tennant (University of South Wales) - MAL 421
Clare Mullaney (University of Pennsylvania),
"Weaving Queer Narratives:
Employing Clothing to Refashion Temporalities"
Professor Lynda Nead (Birkbeck, University of London),
"Dressing the
Surface: Fashion and Aesthetics in Franz Winterhalter's
Portrait of the
Empress Eugénie Surrounded by Her Ladies of Honour,
1855"
Dr Sarah Parsons (York University, Toronto), "In
Praise of the
Overwrought: Reconsidering William Notman's Montreal
Studio Portraits"
B. Tactile Aesthetics: Shaping Class, Gender and
Sexuality in Art
Education - Chair: Dr Anna Henchman (Boston University) -
MAL 415
Dr Peter Bailey (The College of the Bahamas),
"Walter Pater and the
Tactile Poverty of the Professional Touch"
Professor Lucy Hartley (University of Michigan),
"Cultivating Hand and
Mind: Edward Poynter and the Slade Aesthetic"
Dr Kate Hext (University of Exeter), "Walter Pater's
Imaginative Sense
of Erotic Touch"
C. Tactile Authenticity - Chair: Dr Kate Nichols
(University of
Cambridge) - MAL 416
Dr Angie Dunstan (University of Kent), "Please Do
Not Touch: Victorian
Sculpture and the Imprint of Authenticity"
Laura Wood (Warwick University), "'His heart had
beat inside that coat,
and his brain had worked under that hat': Affirming
Identity through
Touch in Hardy's 'An Imaginative Woman'"
Dr Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton (Independent Researcher),
"Cruel Cities in
'Geoffrey's Wife' and 'The Fawn Gloves'"
D. From the Gaze to the Finger: Sensation and Detection
Fiction - Chair:
Kimberley Cox (Stony Brook University) - MAL 414
Dr Nadine Böhm-Schnitker (Friedrich-Alexander
Universitat,
Erlangen-Nürnberg), "Senses and Sensations: an
Aesthetics of Touch in
Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White"
Dr Dewi Evans (Cardiff University), "Fifty Shades of
Godfrey: Man
Handling in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone"
Erin Piotrowski (University of Toronto), "Touching
Thinking; Or, the
Case of Inspector Bucket's Whispering Forefinger"
3:30-3:45pm
Coffee - MAL 417
3:45-4:45pm
PLENARY 4 - MAL 421
Professor Hilary Fraser (Birkbeck, University of London),
"The Language
of Touch in Victorian Art Criticism"
Chair: Dr Heather Tilley (Newcastle University)
4:45-6:00pm
ROUNDTABLE - MAL 421
Professor Elizabeth Edwards (De Montfort University),
"Photographs,
Mounts and the Tactile Archive"
Sonia Solicari (Principal Curator, Guildhall Art
Gallery), "'The
Postman's Knock': Door Contact in Nineteenth-Century Art
and Culture"
Dr Nicola Bown (Birkbeck, University of London),
"Love Objects"
Chair: Dr Fiona Candlin (Birkbeck, University of London)
6:00-6:15pm
Conference Close
For more information or to register for the conference
(spaces are
limited), please visit the website at:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/research_cncs/our-events/the-victorian-tactile-imagination
Sincerely,
Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies
School of Arts
43 Gordon Square
London
WC1H 0PD