Call for Papers on Victorian Classes and Classifications for the North American Victorian Studies Association Conference 2014
Call for Papers on Victorian Classes and Classifications
for the North American Victorian Studies Association Conference 2014
November 13-15, 2014 London, Ontario, Canada
Victorian Britain belonged to the classifying age.
Imperial expansion and new techniques of observation and production confronted
Britons with an expanding universe of natural and man-made phenomena. In response, scientists, writers, artists,
and educators sought to articulate some underlying sense of order through ever
more complex systems of organization, arrangement, and tabulation. Natural
philosophers vastly extended and revised the taxonomies of Linnaeus. Medical
professionals developed new diagnostic tools and coined a broad range of new
pathologies and diseases. Criminologists gathered biometric data that allowed
them to constitute and apprehend criminal types. Literary critics debated the
rise of new classes of literature, from the penny dreadful and sensation
fiction to the naturalist novel. Librarians set out the protocols for indexing
the classes and sub-classes of literature that resulted from the vast
outpouring of printed matter. Teachers began to organize their classrooms into
distinct groupings of students by age and ability. But with these efforts came,
too, a new concern and fascination for that which exceeded classification, the
anomalous, the mutation, the hybrid, the monstrous, and class struggle emerged
as a theory of history and as a basis for political organization.
The organizers of the North American Victorian Studies
Association’s
2014 conference welcome papers studying any aspect of the
Victorians’
self-organization, organization of culture, and
organization of the natural world. Proposals for individual papers or panels
should be submitted electronically by March 1, 2014. Proposals for individual
papers should be no more than 500 words; panel proposals should include
500-word abstracts for each paper and a 250-word panel description.
Applicants should submit a one-page CV.
Conference threads might include:
Varieties, species, genera, and types of living organism
and inanimate object
Literary genres, parts, classifications, and forms of
publication
Social class and its material embodiment in modes of
travel, commodity culture, fashion, and the built environment
Pedagogy and the classroom
The sciences and pseudo-sciences of human classification:
racial science, criminology, and sexology.
Character types and body types
Breeding, rank, and class
Museums, exhibitions, shops, libraries, schools, and
other sorting institutions
Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and the organization of
knowledge
Varieties of religious experience and affiliation