Joint Meeting of MIVSS (Midlands Interdisciplinary Victorian Studies Seminar) and MRS (Midlands Romantic Seminar)
Friday 13 January 2012, 2pm–5pm (Loughborough University)
The next meeting of the Midlands Interdisciplinary Victorian Studies Seminar (MIVSS) will take place at Loughborough University on 13th January 2012 and will be held jointly with the Midlands Romantic Seminar. Our theme is ‘Borders’, which we hope to interpret broadly in both theoretical and practical terms, but with a particular focus on issues of periodicity, the borders between disciplines, and the many conceptual borders, boundaries, and thresholds that inform, challenge, and shape humanities research and teaching in the long nineteenth century. In addition to two keynote speakers, we would like to invite proposals for two additional papers on this theme. For further details, expressions of interest, or to offer a paper, please contact one of the MIVSS committee.
Anne-Marie Beller (a.m.beller@lboro.ac.uk), Holly Furneaux (hf35@le.ac.uk), Kate Hill (KHill@post01.lincoln.ac.uk), Rebecca Styler (rstyler@lincoln.ac.uk), Sarah Townley (aexst4@nottingham.ac.uk), Serena Trowbridge (serenatrowbridge@blueyonder.co.uk).

MIVSS is supported by BAVS:

A quick update on the MIVSS meeting on 24 June at Birmingham City University:

Birmingham City University (School of Art, Margaret Street, Birmingham, B3 3BX)

 Interdisciplinarity: Methods and Frameworks for Teaching the

Nineteenth Century

2.00 Rosemary Mitchell, Associate Principal Lecturer in History at Leeds Trinity and Director of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, ”A treasure hidden in a field’?: The Interdisciplinary Teaching of Victorian Studies’

2.45 Jane Hamlett, Lecturer in Modern British History, Royal Holloway, University of London, ‘Using Photography in Teaching History’

3.15 Coffee

3.45 Anthony Howe, Senior Lecturer, School of English, Birmingham City University, ‘Teaching G. M. Hopkins’

4.15 Discussion (led by Philippa Bennet) on teaching the Victorians

4.45 Plans for future events

5.00 Close.  Those who wish to continue the discussions might like to join us in The Old Joint Stock pub (opposite St Philip’s Cathedral).

Details of the venue, which is in Birmingham city centre, and directions can be found here:

http://www.bcu.ac.uk/about-us/maps-and-campuses/school-of-art-margaret-street

The event is free, but please register by emailing Serena Trowbridge (serena.trowbridge@bcu.ac.uk) before 1 June 2011.
There are a small number of travel bursaries of approx. £20 for postgraduate students attending the event, provided by funding from the British Association for Victorian Studies. These will be allocated on a first-come first-served basis, and priority is given to postgraduates who are already on our membership list. If you want to apply for this, please contact Kate Hill (khill@lincoln.ac.uk) stating your name, affiliation, and how much your travel costs will be.

Here is the draft programme for the conference. Registration is open, day rates are available, and Lincoln University staff should contact me (khill@lincoln.ac.uk) for a place.
Wed 13 July
11-11.30 Registration and coffee

11.30-12.30 Welcome and keynote 1 (EMMTEC auditorium)
Geoff Quilley, (Sussex) A wider circuit: art and travel in the mid-nineteenth-century Pacific

12.30-1.30 Lunch

1.30-3 Parallel sessions 1

The Idea of Europe
Charlotte Mathieson (Warwick), ‘The formation of a surface’: Travelling Bodies in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit
Paul Stock (LSE), Travel on the Edges of Europe: Greece and the Philhellenes in the 1820s
Hannah Sikstrom (Oxford), Journeys, Journals, and Gems: Susan Horner as a 19th-Century Intellectual Female Traveller in Italy

North America
Will Mackintosh (University of Mary Washington), Constructing Negative Tourist Archetypes in American Satire, 1800-1860
Marilyn Bisch (Indiana State University) & Joan Navarre (University of Wisconsin-Stout), Oscar Wilde’s Personal Impressions of America: Examining Wilde’s 1883-1884 British Lectures on the Advantages and Annoyances of Railway Travel Across America
Susan Birkwood (Carleton University), “[N]ew ideas of the Indian character suggest themselves”: Anna Jameson as explorer and cultural observer in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838)

Female Travellers in the Middle East
Mary Henes (King’s College London), Adventure and Propriety in Persia: The hybridity of Ella Sykes’ “Through Persia on a Side-Saddle” (1898)
Veronica Kalas (Albion College), Gertrude Bell: from Traveler to Archeologist
Anne Lockwood (Limestone College), Gentle Britannia: Victorian Women Travel Writers in the Middle East

3-4.30 Parallel sessions 2

Exploring Imperial Outposts
Ángel Tuninetti (West Virginia University), Travel Literature and National Cuisine in Nineteenth Century Argentina
Dhara Anjaria (independent), Explorer or Envoy? Curzon in the Pamirs, 1894
Najam Abbas (Institute of Ismaili Studies), Analysing Travel Accounts of T.E. Gordon during his 1874 Expedition to Central Asia

Female Travellers: Adventure and Necessity
Eleonora Federici (University of Calabria), ‘Why had I not Mr. Ruskin’s power to create landscapes with words?’: Sketching, Naming and Representing the Dolomites in Amelia Edwards’s Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys
Ann Hoag, Gender, Performance and Narrative in Women Adventurers
Jenny Pearce (Hull), Narrating Space, Locating Self: The Voice and Voyage of the Governess Traveller

Journeys, Landscapes and Transcendence
Brian Haman (Warwick), Walking in Circles: The Journey in Search of Transcendence in Ludwig Tieck’s Der Runenberg
Janike Kampevold Larsen (Oslo School of Architecture and Design), Tracing the material of nature in 19th century descriptions of Norway
Laurie Garrison (Lincoln), Visual Sensations and Subjective Responses: Narrating the Search for John Franklin through Robert Burford’s Panorama of Summer and Winter Views of the Arctic

4.30-5 Tea

5-6.30 Parallel sessions 3

Objects, Exhibitions and Authenticity
Elizabeth Rankin (University of Auckland), Subject(ivity) and Object(ivity): nineteenth-century life casts from the Pacific
Akiko Nambu (Exeter), Alfred Parsons’ Encounters with Japan
Conal McCarthy (Victoria University of Wellington), Travelling Maori – Nga Māori ki tāwahi: Ropata Wahawaha in Australia, 1874

Female Travellers in Britain
Andrew Smith (University of Melbourne), “The ordinary feelings which we bear about us in daily life”: Dorothy Wordsworth and the Picturesque Tour
Michelle Deininger (Cardiff), Intersecting Fictions: Women Writing Wales in the Nineteenth Century
Gillian Beattie-Smith (UHI Millennium Institute), The construction of the authentic self: The travel journal of Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt

Reliable and Unreliable Evidence
Kevin James (University of Guelph), The Hotel Book as Travel Narrative: The Gweedore Hotel, Co. Donegal, Ireland, 1842-55
Katarzyna Michalkiewicz (Université de Neuchâtel), Hotel Guest Books and Registers from Zermatt: A New Source of Scientific Information on Nineteenth-Century Travel in the Alps
Jim Cheshire (University of Lincoln), Church Tourism and Ecclesiology

6.30-7.30 Book launch and reception

7.30 Dinner (no dinner arrangements made, please see pack for suggestions for places to eat.)

Thursday 14 July

9.30-11 Parallel sessions 4

Travel Narrative and Visual Culture: Interaction and Exchange
Saskia Puetz (Hamburg University), The dispositif of the authentic other – The interrelation of image, autobiographical text, and object in Frederick Goodall’s visual depiction of the Orient
Veronica Hanabergh (Universidad de los Andes), The voyage to Italy and the voyage through Colombia: likenesses and variations
Sarah Longair (Birkbeck) ‘The untrammelled fancy of the scenic artist’: Imagining and encountering Zanzibar in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century

Military Travel
Neil Ramsey (Australian National University), The Suffering Traveller and the Nineteenth-Century War Memoir
Louise Tythacott (Manchester), Travels and collections in mid-nineteenth century China
Charlotte Mullins (Sussex), ‘Our Life in Japan’: encounters with Japan 1860-1880 as seen in photographic travel albums compiled by Royal Naval officers

Rethinking Traditional Patterns of Travel
Katalin Schober (Humboldt University, Berlin), Archaeological and architectural knowledge in Charles Robert Cockerell’s ‘The temples of Jupiter Panhellenius at Aegina and of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae’ (1860)
Kimberly Marsh (Oxford), Fanny Parks and the Vision of an Animated Picturesque
Ulrike Spring (University of Tromsø), Northern Tours: collecting culture and nature in 19th century Scandinavia

11-11.30 Coffee

11.30-1 Parallel sessions 5

Railway Travel
Matt Thompson (University of York), ‘The sufferer on the railway’: narratives of danger, disorder and anxiety on the railways c1840
Kara Tennant (Cardiff), A Restricted Ideal: Female Beauty in Transit
Di Drummond (Leeds Trinity), ‘The Greatest Improvement of man’s ingenuity’?: Complimentary and competing constructs of modernity in British and Indian narratives of the railway on the subcontinent, 1845-1900

Global Visions
Jude Piesse (Exeter), Dreaming across Oceans: Emigration and the Nation at Christmas
Philip Steer (Massey University), The Victorian Travel Narrative as Political Form: Touring and Theorising a Federated Empire in Greater Britain and Oceana
Gerd-Helge Vogel (University of Applied Arts, Zurich), Exploring the World with Eduard Hildebrandt (1817-1869): Artist – Scientist – Adventurer in the Circle of Alexander von Humboldt and the Prussian King

Travel and Technology I
Verity Hunt (Reading), Electric Leisure: Late Nineteenth-Century Dreams of ‘Telectroscopic’ Travel
Even Smith Wergeland (Oslo School of Architecture and Design), Circulate or perish: the 19th Century Utopian Landscape of Mobility
Willemijne Linssen (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), From Brussels To London And Back: Travelling Belgian Engineers

1-2 Lunch

2-3 Keynote 2: James Buzard (MIT), (EMMTEC auditorium), Travel’s Others.

3-3.30 Tea

3.30-5 Parallel sessions 6

Orientalism and the ‘Other’
Letitia Henville (University of Toronto), Text and Paratext: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Tahitian Translations
Alex Drace-Francis (Liverpool), “In short, we are civilized”: rewriting the Orientalist script in nineteenth-century Romanian travel writing
Jaimee Comstock-Skipp (Williams College, Massachusetts), Creating an Image: the American Swashbuckler Edwin Lord Weeks’s Sites of Representation

Travel with a Higher Purpose
Lily Arad (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Imagining Jerusalem: A Construction and Reconstruction in Visual Narratives
Clive Jolliffe, Travels With A Missionary: From Myth to Reality
Katharina Pink (Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich), “Their world is to thy soul as another planet of nature” – The construction of the spatially and temporally remote Other in Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888)

Travel and Technology II
Susan Shelangoskie (Lourdes College), Nerves of the Empire: Rhetorical and Literary Strategies in Technological Travel Narratives
Andrea Rehn (Whittier College), Isabella Bird Takes Flight: Photograph, Narrative, and Audience in the Asian Travel Books

5.30-6.30 Joseph Banks Conservatory open (The Lawn)
6.15 Tour of the Victorian stained glass of Lincoln Cathedral led by Dr Jim Cheshire, author of Stained Glass and the Victorian Gothic Revival (MUP 2004). Meet outside the cathedral at 6.15 or at the University at 6pm.
7.30 Conference dinner (The Lawn, Lincoln)

Fri 15 July

9.30-11 Parallel sessions 7

Approaches to Africa
Mathilda Slabbert (University of Stellenbosch), “When forty bullets had perforated his hide […] I resolved to expend no further ammunition”: Quills, Thrills and Guns: nineteenth century expeditions in the Northern Cape region, South Africa
Debbie Challis (Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology), Collecting ‘Racial Types’ from antiquity: Flinders Petrie and Francis Galton travel to Egypt
Marion Arnold (Loughborough), Views from an Ox Wagon: Thomas Baines, Victorian Artist in Southern Africa

Travel Writing in the Popular Publishing Market I
Clare Broome Saunders (Oxford), ‘Lady Traveller’ or ‘Learned Female’: Louisa Stuart Costello and the ‘individual’ traveller in the 1840s
David Bruce (University of the West of England), Interpreting Europe for train travellers: Baedeker and Murray as creators of modern heritage
Maureen McCue (Glasgow), Byron, Hawthorne and Anglo-American Aesthetic Tourism

Travel at Home
Ashley Fisher (Hull), On The Tramp: The Working-Class Traveller in the Fiction of Charles Allen Clarke
Markus Poetzsch (Wilfrid Laurier University), ‘Orchestral Parts’ in a Symphony of Motion; Or, the Aesthetics of Nineteenth-Century Coach Travel
Nicola Bishop (Lancaster) ‘What thought of “head Office” to one off his head?’: The Rambling Clerk in His Southern Idyll

11-11.30 Coffee

11.30-12.30 Keynote 3: Susan Pearce (Leicester), The Birth of the Object around 1800. Travel, Tourism, and the New Historicism (EMMTEC auditorium)

12.30-1.30 Lunch

1.30-3 Parallel session 8

From Narrative to Exhibition
Carolyn Tillman (University of St Thomas, Minnesota), William Bullock’s Six Months’ Residence and Travels in Mexico: Simulated Travel and British Perceptions of Mesoamerica
Renata Schellenberg (Mount Allison University), Moving towards the Museum in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Travel Writing in the Popular Publishing Market II
Peter Blake (Brighton), ‘There really is a world outside Fleet Street’: George Augustus Sala and the Rise of the Special Correspondent
Roger Eaton (University of Amsterdam), The Tourist as Detective: Mid-Victorian Accident Reporting from the Alps
Janine Hatter (Hull), The Parade of Identity: The Travelling Circus Performer’s Construction of Self

Travel Writing and Audience
C. R. Pennell (University of Melbourne), The audience of the travel narrative: official, scientific and personal and modern
Christiane Schwab (Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich), The travel narrative as a symbolic strategy of social criticism: “Letters from Spain” (1822) from José María Blanco White
Guillaume Evrard (Edinburgh), ‘Spectatum veniunt, veniunt spectentur ut ipsi’: Travelling, Universal Exhibitions and Bildungsroman

3pm Final remarks and close.

The next meeting of MIVSS will be on 24 June 2011 at Birmingham City University (in the afternoon). Papers and discussion will consider interdisciplinarity in research and teaching of the nineteenth century. Details to follow.