Have a contribution to our presentist pedagogy series, or a percolating essay about Victorian culture in the C21? Get in touch! With the New York Times’ and New Yorker’s exposés of Harvey Weinstein nearing their one-year anniversary, press coverage of #MeToo has begun to settle into a familiar set of narrative conventions. In his recent—and …read more
V21’s Collations: Book Forum welcomes Dustin Friedman, Ellis Hanson and Tara Thomas in conversation about Daniel Wright’s lively, pleasurable (or perhaps pleasure-full) and discerning new work, Bad Logic (Hopkins, 2018), which begins, appropriately enough, with this incitement: “it can seem a kind of magic to put into language the vagaries of desire” (1). Wright’s book …read more
The Northeast Victorian Studies Association announces a new Diversity Mentorship Program for 2018-19 that seeks to enrich the field of Victorian studies by paving the way for a more inclusive professoriate that is representative of the populations we teach and serve. The program is geared towards graduate students of color, first-generation college students, students with …read more
V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Anna E. Clark, Tara K. Menon and Daniel Wright in conversation about Jonathan Farina’s insightful new work, Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2017). Far from quotidian in its claims, Everyday Words explores what it regularly names as “rudimentary” and “common” words and phrases—“as if,” “but” and “that sort …read more
V21 is delighted to announce our fourth (!) annual Summer Reading Group series. This year’s topics are Work, Blackness, and Sex. As is traditional for our summer syllabi, each cluster mixes primary Victorian, secondary critical, and theoretical/philosophical texts. The Chicago area group will meet June 21, July 20, and August 21, 3pm-5pm at the DePaul Library …read more
The V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Alex Bove, Racheal Fest and Nathan Hensley in conversation about Bruce Robbins’s most recent publication The Beneficiary (Duke, 2017). Robbins’s The Beneficiary offers a history of humanitarianism that encompasses a wide range of writers, artists and pundits from the nineteenth century forward, concluding that “whatever our political principles, we …read more
The American Society for 18th Century Studies annual meeting this week features a roundtable on ASECS and V21, concerning the special dix-huitièmiste relationship to historicism, presentism, formalism, theory, and manifestos, as well as infrastructures like Collations and Summer Reading Groups. V21 is grateful for these chances to reflect on long durée inquiry, comparativism, conceptually-driven scholarship, …read more
V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Daniel Kasper, Rithika Ramamurthy, and David Womble in conversation about Emily Steinlight’s splendid new book Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life (Cornell, 2018). Steinlight deftly surveys the literary forms wherein writers responded to exponential population growth by “radically rearticulat[ing] what it means to belong to …read more
V21 welcomes Will Glovinksy (Columbia), Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb (Williams College), and Bruce Robbins (Columbia) in conversation about Nasser Mufti’s Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture (Northwestern, 2018). In exploring the modern understanding of “civil war,” Mufti’s boldly challenges dominant conceptions of civilization, civility, modernization, and nationalism. He offers a persuasive …read more
If anything is to survive the 21st century, collective agency will be paramount. Come practice togetherness at the 3rd annual V21 MLA happy hour! Thursday 4 January, 5pm-7pm, at Faces And Names, 159 W 54th St, just neighboring the Sheraton. We’ll be raising a special glass to Bruce Robbins, in celebration of his new book …read more