Call for Papers

The Call for Papers for BAVS 2022 closed on 25 April. The conference committee will review the proposals and will be in touch with those who submitted in the coming weeks. The CFP remains posted below for your information.

Queries or comments? Reach the conference organisers at bavs2022@contacts.bham.ac.uk

We are delighted to announce the keynote speakers and Call for Papers for BAVS 2022:

Joseph Bristow, Distinguished Professor of English, UCLA on
“On Making Mistakes and
Committing Errors in Victorian Studies”

and

Jane Hamlett, Professor of History, Royal Holloway, and
Julie-Marie Strange, Professor of History, Durham University, on
“Pet Revolution: How the Victorians created Modern Pet Culture”

Founded in 2000, the British Association for Victorian Studies has grown in both numbers and reach to provide researchers in Britain and beyond with an important forum through which to promote and advance Victorian Studies. In 2022 (1st-3rd September) BAVS travels to Birmingham: the University of Birmingham welcomes delegates to a city steeped in Victorian history and brimming with Victorian resources and archives. Surrounded by Art and Industry, we will celebrate how the field has developed over the last two decades and look forward to how it will continue to innovate in the years ahead. 

For the first time in its history, the conference will not have a theme. We invite submissions for papers, panels (3-4 speakers, 20 minutes long) and roundtables (5-7 speakers, 5 minutes long) from across the disciplines that address any aspect of Victorian Studies, its past, and its future; those that are related to the strands listed at the bottom of this CFP are especially welcome.

We encourage submissions to two new Forums: the Digital Forum and the Pedagogy Forum. The Digital Forum, curated by Professor Michaela Mahlberg (UoB), will include a session of flash-talks followed by digital presentations of leading Digital Humanities projects in the field of Victorian Studies today. The Pedagogy Forum is a dedicated space to share good practice, reflect on contemporary challenges in teaching Victorian Studies, and develop collaborative teaching opportunities and programmes. 

Topics could include:

  • Authorship and Reception; Form and Genre; Publishing and Reception
  • Art and Industry
  • Capitalism, Crashes & Speculation
  • Biography, Celebrity & Childhood
  • Colonial Aesthetics; Cosmopolitanisms
  • Disability & the Victorians
  • Fake News; Victorian Mistakes
  • Forbidden Desires; Gender, Sex & Bodies
  • Forgotten Victorians
  • Journalism & the press
  • Architecture;  Materiality and aesthetics
  • Medicine, Science and Technology
  • Music, Noise & Theatre; Visual & Popular Culture
  • Natural History; Time & the Past; The Future, Utopias & Dystopias
  • Technologies of Seeing; Spectacles of Desire & Fantasy 
  • Transatlantic, Transnational & Transregional Victorians; Europe & the Victorians
  • Transimperial Victorians
  • Travel & Tourism; Victorian Seas & Oceans
  • Undisciplining Victorian Studies 
  • Victorian Afterlives & Neo-Victorianisms; The Supernatural
  • Victorians & their Animals
  • Victorian Birmingham
  • Victorian Ecologies
  • Victorians, Race and Empire
  • Victorian Studies Then and Now: 20+ years of BAVS
  • Victorian Sustainability  

For more information follow @bavs_2022 and visit https://bavs2022.com/.