V21 is delighted to spread the word about the new Northeast Victorian Studies Association (NVSA) annual prize for essays that expand the geographic, ethnic, racial, and methodological diversity of scholarship in the field. The award will recognize work that foregrounds nineteenth-century texts, contexts, perspectives, and insights by or about British colonial subjects residing outside the metropole, …read more
V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Adam Fales, Heidi Smith, and Devin Griffiths in conversation about Megan Ward’s fascinating new book, Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character (Ohio State Press, 2018). In this provocative work, Ward proposes “a new genealogy of realist character” (2) as a corrective to the historical preference for subjective interiority. …read more
Join V21 for our 4th annual MLA social hour, Friday 4 January, 6pm-10pm! This year we’re lucky to have an affiliate house near the convention. Come early, come late, take the Blue Line from MLA hotels or on your way in from OHare. If you haven’t already received the address in an invite, drop us …read more
The V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Kathleen Frederickson (UC Davis), Sara Lyons (U of Kent, Canterbury), and Scott Thompson (Temple) in conversation about Sebastian Lecourt’s inspired and inspiring—or perhaps reservedly “hope[ful]” (199)—new work Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, & the Secular Imagination (Oxford, 2018). Locating in Victorian anthropology an understanding of religion as “a …read more
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