Des femmes et des fleurs ? Réinvestir les fleurs au prisme du genre, années 1840 – années 1930

Of Women and Flowers? Re-examining flowers through the lens of gender, 1840s–1930s

Colloque organisé les 22 et 23 octobre 2026, à Montréal

Conference to be held on 22 and 23 October 2026, in Montreal

Depuis quelques décennies, l’histoire sociale de l’art nous invite à reconsidérer l’omniprésence des fleurs non seulement dans les arts visuels, mais aussi, plus généralement, dans nos vies et dans nos sociétés. Les fleurs ont ainsi pu être examinées comme des marqueurs de classe sociale (Chansigaud 2014 ; Le Foll 2023) ou abordées en considérant les coûts environnementaux et coloniaux directs et indirects de leur production (Zinnenburg Caroll 2017 ; Blais 2023). Le rôle des femmes dans les sciences naturelles et la botanique a quant à lui été étudié, quoique plutôt pour des périodes antérieures. Pourtant, la place des fleurs ornementales, produites ou « sauvages », sous le prisme du genre, des études féministes et queer reste sous-étudiée. Ce colloque a donc pour ambition de préciserles rapports entretenus, imposés ou choisis, réels ou fictionnels, entre les femmes et les fleurs au cours de la période allant de la décennie 1840 aux années 1930, en France et en Grande-Bretagne, ainsi qu’au Canada et aux États-Unis, dans une perspective résolument interdisciplinaire, interrogeant autant la botanique ou l’art floral que la littérature ou les arts visuels.

Les années 1840 semblent constituer un moment important dans la représentation et l’étude des fleurs, de part et d’autre de l’Atlantique. Elles correspondent à l’essor de l’horticulture industrielle et au développement de la Société d’Horticulture de Paris, créée en 1827 et qui est à partir de 1841 doublée de la Société Nationale d’Horticulture de la Seine. Notons que ces sociétés botaniques, à l’instar des disciplines scientifiques qui leur sontassociées, sont fermées à leurs débuts à l’entrée des femmes, malgré leur participation effective à la « floristique », notamment au sein de réseaux de sociabilité féminine (Pépy 2018 ; André et Philippe 2020). C’est en 1840 que les Kew Gardens reçoivent l’appellation officielle de « Jardins botaniques nationaux » et sontréorganisés sous la houlette du botaniste William Jackson Hooker, avec notamment la création d’un herbier. Les années 1840 représentent également une décennie fondatrice dans le contexte colonial du développement territorial et identitaire du Canada et des États-Unis, accompagné des deux côtés de la frontière par une volonté de valoriser le développement national des sciences, dont celui de la botanique. La création de la Commission géologique du Canada en 1842 témoigne de l’urgence perçue de créer un inventaire des ressources naturelles du territoire, notamment de la flore. De façon similaire, l’American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) est mise sur pied aux États-Unis en 1848. En 1840 paraît la Flora Boreali-Americana de William Jackson-Hooker, ouvrage portant sur la flore nord-américaine auquel plusieurs Canadiennes ont contribué (Shteir et Cayouette2019). Ces années voient également l’importance prise par les femmes dans les illustrations botaniques (Priscilla Susan Bury, Anne Pratt pour la Grande Bretagne). La place des femmes dans l’illustration botanique reste le plussouvent restreinte à des positions subalternes, dans un domaine de recherche majoritairement masculin (Chansigaud 2016). Dans le même temps, après que la peinture florale a connu une large féminisation dans les années 1830 (Sofio 2007), elle perd du terrain au Salon face à la peinture de paysage, même si l’illustration botanique reste encore largement affaire de femmes. D’autres médiums, photographiques notamment, sont également envisagés à l’image des cyanotypes d’Anna Atkins (1843-1853).

À l’autre extrémité de notre période, la transformation du monde matériel de la fin du XIXe siècle, accélérée par le modernisme de l’entre-deux-guerres (Sparke 1995, 2021), touche la place des fleurs dans les pratiques décoratives, où la rationalisation et la géométrisation des formes succèdent à l’abondance de motifs floraux que l’Art nouveau associe souvent à des figures féminines. En témoigne par exemple la fin de l’enrichissement des planches botaniques de l’Encyclopédie Florale d’Henri Bergé dans les années 1930. La peinture florale comme genre pourrait également paraître démodée. Du côté britannique cependant, le design floral et l’art des jardins évoluent, notamment sous l’action de Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932). La décennie de sa mort correspond également à une période faste pour le design floral. Le nom de la fleuriste Constance Spry (1886-1960), aux compositions audacieuses, est quant à lui associé à la création de la Constance Spry Flower School,qu’elle fonde en 1929 et qui marque un point de départ pour la professionnalisation de sa discipline.

Si les liens entre les femmes et les fleurs portent évidemment des enjeux différents au Canada, aux États-Unis, en France et en Grande-Bretagne, si les chronologies ne coïncident évidemment pas parfaitement de part et d’autre de l’Atlantique, certaines ressemblances culturelles semblent néanmoins lier ces quatre nations et justifier leur étude comparée au sein de ce colloque. Ces ressemblances tiennent en partie à la proximité géographique entre les paires de pays de chaque côté de l’Atlantique. Mais elles tiennent également aux liens coloniaux qui les unissent en puissances impérialistes. La colonisation a non seulement été l’un des pivots d’une rivalité politique, scientifique et artistique entre la France et la Grande-Bretagne, mais a aussi profondément façonné les territoires aujourd’hui connus comme le Canada et les États-Unis. Du XIXe siècle au début du XXe siècle, la période a été marquée par un colonialisme intense, autant pour le Canada, qui s’y construit comme une nation autonome, que pour les États-Unis, qui agrandissent et remodèlent leur territoire. Les rapports coloniaux unissant ces pays ont engendré des liens culturels et épistémologiques, maintenu des échanges de connaissances scientifiques et portédes tendances artistiques et littéraires, qui trouvent évidemment écho dans la place faite aux fleurs, et aux correspondances entre les femmes et les fleurs. Face aux modèles scientifiques occidentaux, les nations autochtones du territoire ont néanmoins réussi à préserver leurs savoirs et leurs relations au plus-qu’humain – notamment des rapports entre femmes et fleurs qui ne correspondaient pas aux tropes occidentaux – grâce à leurs propres modes d’apprentissage et de transmission des connaissances (Kimmerer 2013 ; Joseph et al. 2022).

Des siècles d’une culture visuelle, littéraire et religieuse, notamment chrétienne, lient les plantes à fleurs au genre féminin et irriguent les imaginaires dans ces quatre nations. De telles associations essentialistes et essentialisantes ont simultanément cantonné les femmes dans un cadre les définissant comme passives, et encouragé leur accès à certains domaines, comme la peinture de fleurs à l’aquarelle et l’horticulture (Biagioli 2008 ; Shteir 2022). Les femmes et les fleurs, ainsi que leur relation, ont été largement étudiées comme objets de représentation (Stott 1992), mais méritent d’être analysées autrement. De fait, nous refusons une approcheessentialiste pour visualiser la dimension socialement construite de ce qui rapproche femmes et fleurs. Les femmesseront ici examinées non plus comme objets de représentation passifs, « objets de décoration » en un sens comme les fleurs, mais plutôt comme agentes, créatrices de sens, de matière et de savoir enlien avec les fleurs. L’évolution de leur rapport aux fleurs dans le contexte géographique et temporel choisi sera considérée sous le prisme de différentes disciplines, afin d’en circonscrire notamment les composantes historiques, anthropologiques, sociologiques, scientifiques, artistiques et littéraires. Plutôt qu’une simple approche pluridisciplinaire, il s’agira ici de proposer une vraie réflexion méthodologique pour comprendre comment ces différents champs se sont nourris les uns les autres, dans une perspective réellement interdisciplinaire.

Nous fixons comme trame l’exploration des processus allant de la culture, de la cueillette et de l’étude des fleurs vivantes jusqu’aux conditions de leur représentation par le biais de divers médiums, puis à la conservation et à l’exposition des objets qui les intègrent. Les contributions pourront ainsi porter sur des personnes (naturalistes, peintres, illustratrices, herboristes, jardinières, responsables de jardins ornementaux privés, colporteuses et marchandes ambulantes…), des objets (herbiers, tableaux, gravures, ouvrages de botanique, teintures…) et/ou sur leur survivance (expositions, enjeux de conservation, d’archivage, etc.). Nous encourageons les approchestransdisciplinaires et les formats d’intervention variés (communication individuelle ou à plusieurs voix, atelier, etc.). Nous invitons donc les chercheur·euses de toutes disciplines, botanistes, bibliothécaires, artistes visuel·les et conservateur·ices d’institutions muséales à explorer les différents contextes suivants, de façon non exhaustive :

Sciences de la nature et histoire des sciences : La place des femmes dans une botanique en voie de professionnalisation et de masculinisation est un angle d’étude riche. Différents enjeux en lien avec la présence des femmes dans les archives scientifiques peuvent être explicités, notamment leur invisibilisation, leur morcellement dans des fonds archivés sous le nom de botanistes masculins, ou les difficultés de recherche engendrées par les changements de nom des femmes après leur mariage. Des questions spécifiques à la période étudiée peuvent aussi servir de point d’ancrage, par exemple : comment a évolué l’accessibilité des femmes au travail de terrain pendant cette période ? Pourquoi certains domaines, comme l’illustration botanique, l’édition et la confection d’herbiers, étaient-ils plus perméables à la participation des femmes ? Les livres eux-mêmes, utilisés par des femmes pour presser des fleurs séchées, peuvent aussi être des objets d’étude. La pratique de pressage de fleurs entre les pages de livres peut aussi mener à des enjeux de conservation : doit-on préserver les spécimens séchés que l’on retrouve entre les pages de livres anciens dans les collections des bibliothèques ?

Arts visuels, études visuelles et histoire de l’art : Comment les femmes usent-elles d’agentivité dans la création d’œuvres d’art et/ou de jardins, dans un contexte où leurs représentations sont liées à celles des fleurs ?Comment s’emparent-elles d’un genre, la nature morte florale, qui était considéré comme leur étant “naturellement” attaché ? Comment usent-elles d’agentivité alors même que l’association femme-fleur semblait les cantonner à la passivité du modèle ? La pratique de la peinture de fleurs est-elle vécue comme une contrainteou peut-être elle une porte d’entrée pour faire sa place dans le monde de l’art ? Quelle est la place des fleurs dans le travail de femmes artistes issues de nations autochtones ?

Littérature : Quelles formes littéraires peuvent être investies par les autrices pour faire intervenir les fleurs dans leurs écrits ? Comment la relation entre les femmes et les fleurs est-elle abordée par les autrices ? Les associations sémantiques entre femmes et fleurs peuvent-elles être réappropriées et détournées par les autrices pour leur donner un nouveau sens ?

Contexte colonial : Existe-t-il des associations entre femmes et fleurs dans les traditions de différentes nations autochtones ? La place des femmes dans la botanique coloniale, utilisée à la fois comme véhicule idéologique et physique (par le biais de l’importation de spécimens « exotiques »), mérite d’être discutée. Par exemple, quel est le rapport des femmes botanistes colonisatrices aux savoirs autochtones dans leurs ouvrages ? Quel rôle ont joué les colonisatrices canadiennes et états-uniennes dans l’exportation de fleurs américaines vers l’Europe et, inversement, d’espèces européennes vers l’Amérique ? Comment les femmes des nations autochtones utilisent-elles et transmettent-elles les savoirs botaniques ancestraux ?

Ce colloque est organisé dans le cadre du projet de recherche GATES (Grenoble ATtractiveness and ExcellenceS) « FLOWER – Floral Legacies: Observing Women’s Eco-artistic Representations » de l’Université Grenoble Alpes.

Les propositions de communication (sous la forme d’un résumé de 300 mots et d’une biobibliographie, en français ou en anglais pour une communication de 20 minutes) sont à envoyer avant le 18 mai 2026 à l’adresse suivante :flower.projetgates@gmail.com, en mettant en copie noemie.cadieux@umontreal.ca et alienor.bautruvalois@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

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In recent decades, the social history of art has invited us to reconsider the ubiquity of flowers not only in the visual arts, but also, more generally, in our lives and societies. Flowers have thus been examined as markers of social class (Chansigaud 2014; Le Foll 2023) or approached by considering the direct and indirect environmental and colonial costs of their production (Zinnenburg Caroll 2017; Blais 2023). The role of women in the natural sciences and botany has also been studied, albeit primarily for earlier periods. However, the place of flowers through the lens of gender, feminist and queer studies remains under-researched. This conference therefore aims to clarify the relationships—whether maintained, imposed or chosen, real or fictional—between women and flowers during the period from the 1840s to the 1930s, in France and Great Britain, as well as in Canada and the United States, from a resolutely interdisciplinary perspective, examining botany and floral art as much as literature and the visual arts.

The 1840s appear to mark a significant turning point in the representation and study of flowers on both sides of the Atlantic. This period coincides with the development of the Paris Horticultural Society, founded in 1827 and which, from 1841, was joined by the National Horticultural Society of the Seine. It was in 1840 that Kew Gardens received the official designation of ‘National Botanic Gardens’ and were reorganised under the leadership of the botanist William Jackson Hooker, notably with the creation of a herbarium. The 1840s also represent a formative decade in the colonial shaping of territorialial expansion and national identity in both Canada and the United States, a period marked on both sides of the border by efforts to advance the national development of the sciences, including botany. The establishment of the Geological Survey of Canada in 1842 reflects the perceived urgency to compile an inventory of the territory’s natural resources, particularly its flora. Similarly, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was founded in the United States in 1848. In 1840, WilliamJackson Hooker’s Flora Boreali-Americana was published, a work on North American flora to which several Canadian women contributed (Shteir and Cayouette 2019). These years also saw women gaining prominence in botanical illustration (Priscilla Susan Bury and Anne Pratt in Britain). At the same time, after floral painting had become largely a female domain in the 1830s (Sofio 2007), it lost ground at the Salon to landscape painting, although botanical illustration still remained a largely female occupation. Other mediums were also explored, such as Anna Atkins’ cyanotypes (1843–1853).

At the other end of our period, the transformation of the material world in the late nineteenth century, accelerated by the modernism of the interwar period (Sparke 1995, 2021), affected the place of flowers in decorative practices, where the rationalisation and geometrisation of forms replaced the abundance of floral motifs that Art Nouveau often associated with female figures. This is evidenced, for example, by the end of the expansion of the botanical plates in Henri Bergé’s Encyclopédie Florale in the 1930s. Floral painting as a genre might also appear to have gone out of fashion. In Britain, however, floral design and garden art were evolving, notably under the influence of Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932). The decade of her death also coincided with a golden age for floral design. The florist Constance Spry (1886–1960), known for her bold arrangements, is associated with the founding of the Constance Spry Flower School in 1929, which marked a turning point in the professionalisation of the discipline.

While the relationship between women and flowers clearly raises different issues in Canada, the United States, France, and Great Britain, and while the chronologies obviously do not coincide perfectly on either side ofthe Atlantic, certain cultural similarities nevertheless seem to link these four nations and justify their comparative study within this conference. These similarities stem in part from the geographical proximity between the pairs of countries on either side of the Atlantic. But they also stem from the colonial ties that united them as imperialpowers. Colonisation was not only a key factor in the political, scientific, and artistic rivalry between France and Great Britain, but also profoundly shaped the territories now known as Canada and the United States. The period from the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth was marked by an intense process of colonialisation, both in Canada, which was establishing itself as an autonomous nation, and in the United States, which was expanding and reshaping its territory. The colonial ties uniting these countries gave rise to cultural and epistemological links, sustained exchanges of scientific knowledge, and fostered artistic and literary trends, which are clearly reflected in the prominence accorded to flowers and the parallels drawn between women and flowers. In the face of Western scientific models, the Indigenous nations of the territory nevertheless succeeded inpreserving their knowledge and their relationships with the more-than-human—particularly forms of relations between women and flowers that did not correspond to Western tropes—thanks to their own modes of learning and transmitting knowledge (Kimmerer 2013; Joseph et al. 2022).

Centuries of visual, literary and religious culture, particularly Christian culture, have linked flowering plants to the feminine and shaped the collective imagination across these four nations. Such essentialist and essentialising associations have simultaneously confined women to a framework defining them as passive, while encouraging their access to certain fields, such as watercolour flower painting and horticulture (Biagioli 2008; Shteir 2022). Women and flowers, as well as their relationship, have been extensively studied as objects of representation (Stott 1992), but deserve to be analysed differently. Indeed, we reject an essentialist approach so as to make visible the socially constructed nature of what brings women and flowers together. Here, women will beexamined not as passive objects of representation, but as agents, creators of meaning, material, and knowledge in relation to flowers. The evolution of their relationship with flowers within the chosen geographical and temporal context will be considered through the lens of various disciplines, in order to identify, in particular, its historical, anthropological, sociological, scientific, artistic and literary components. Rather than a simple multidisciplinary approach, the aim here is to propose a genuine methodological reflection tounderstand how these different fields have fed into one another, from a truly interdisciplinary perspective.

We have set as our framework the exploration of processes ranging from the cultivation, gathering and study of living flowers to the conditions of their representation through various media, and on to the conservation and exhibition of the objects that incorporate them. Contributions may thus focus on people (naturalists, painters, gardeners, illustrators, herbalists, etc.), objects (herbariums, paintings, engravings, botanical works, dyes, etc.)and/or their survival (exhibitions, issues of conservation, archiving, etc.). We encourage transdisciplinary approaches and a variety of presentation formats (individual or group presentations, workshops, etc.). We therefore invite researchers from all disciplines, botanists, librarians, visual artists and museum curators to explore the following contexts, among others:

Natural sciences and history of science: The place of women in the field of botany at the time of its professionalisation and masculinisation is a rich area of study. Various issues relating to the presence of women in scientific archives can be explored, notably the ways they were rendered invisible, their fragmentation across collections archived under the names of male botanists, or the research difficulties caused by women changing their names after marriage. Questions specific to the period under study can also serve as a starting point, for example: how did women’s access to fieldwork evolve during this period? Why were certain fields, such as botanical illustration and the creation of herbariums, more open to women’s participation? The books themselves, used by women to press dried flowers, can also be subjects of study. The practice of pressing flowers between the pages of books can also raise conservation issues: should we preserve the dried specimens found between the pages of old books in library collections?

Visual arts, visual studies, and art history: How did women exercise agency in the creation of artworks and/or gardens, in a context where their representations are linked to those of flowers? How did they take ownership of a genre, the floral still life, which was considered ‘naturally’ associated with them? How did they exercise agency even as the woman-flower association seemed to confine them to the passivity of the model? Was the practice of flower painting experienced as a constraint, or was it perhaps a gateway to carving out a place for oneself in the art world? What is the place of flowers in the work of female artists from Indigenous nations?

Literature: What literary forms did female authors employ to incorporate flowers into their writing? How did female authors address the relationship between women and flowers? Can the semantic associations between women and flowers be reappropriated and subverted by female authors to give them new meaning?

Colonial context: Are there associations between women and flowers in the traditions of different Indigenous nations? The role of women in colonial botany, used as both an ideological and physical vehicle (through the importation of ‘exotic’ specimens), merits discussion. For example, what is the relationship of female colonial botanists to Indigenous knowledge in their works? What role did Canadian and American women colonisers play in the export of American flowers to Europe and, conversely, of European species to the Americas? How do women from Indigenous nations use and pass on ancestral botanical knowledge?

This conference is organised as part of the GATES (Grenoble ATtractiveness and ExcellenceS) research project “FLOWER – Floral Legacies: Observing Women’s Eco-artistic Representations”.

Proposals for papers (in the form of a 300-word abstract and a bio-bibliography, in French or English, for a 20-minute talk) should be sent by 18 May 2026 to the following address: flower.projetgates@gmail.com, copying noemie.cadieux@umontreal.ca and alienor.bautruvalois@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

Date de tombée : 18 mai 2026

Notification d’acceptation : mi-juin 2026

Comité d’organisation
Aliénor Bautru-Valois (Université Grenoble Alpes) Noémie Cadieux (Université de Montréal)

Ersy Contogouris (Université de Montréal) Marie Gispert(Université Grenoble Alpes)

Comité scientifique
Rachel BOUVET (études littéraires, UQAM)

Valérie CHANSIGAUD (histoire des sciences, CNRS – Université Paris-Cité)

Joséphine LE FOLL (histoire de l’art, chercheuse indépendante)

Valérie MORISSON (études anglophones, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3)

Rolland DOUZET(biologie et botanique, Université Grenoble Alpes, jardin du Lautaret)

Stephanie POSTHUMUS (littérature française, Université McGill)

Denis RIBOUILLAULT (histoire de l’art, des jardins et du paysage, Université de Montréal)

Ann B. (Rusty) SHTEIR (études de genre/feminist plant studies, York University)

Lindsay WELLS (histoire de l’art, de l’architecture et du design d’intérieur, UCLA Extension)

Émilie-Anne PÉPY (histoire moderne, Université Savoie Mont Blanc)

Erika WICKY (histoire de l’art contemporain, Université Grenoble Alpes)

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« The Politics of Popular Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century »,

organisée par Eleanor Parkin-Coates,

jeudi 9 avril à Nancy (salle 324, site Libération).

Lien de connexion Teams pour suivre la JE à distance : The Politics of Popular Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century | Meeting-Join | Microsoft Teams

Le programme figure ci-dessous et le livret des résumés est consultable via ce lien : https://idea.univ-lorraine.fr/sites/default/files/2026-03/livret%2009_04_0.pdf

Programme

9:00 | Welcome coffee

9:15 | Introduction and Opening Remarks

Nathalie Collé, director of IDEA, 

Stéphane Guy and Eleanor Parkin-Coates

9:30 | Panel 1 – Novels and Music: A Means to Gender and Class Empowerment

Moderation: Céline Sabiron

9:30 | Antonella Braida Laplace (University of Lorraine) – Mary Shelley’s and Frances Trollope’s observation of and engagement with the lower classes in Italy and Britain

9:55 | John Mullen (University of Rouen Normandy) – British Music Hall Song and Politics 1890-1914

Discussion  

10:45 – Coffee break  

11:15 | Keynote Speaker

Moderation: Pauline Collombier

Emma Griffin (Queen Mary, University of London) – The Making of Working-class Politics in Nineteenth-century Britain 

Discussion  

12:30 – Lunch 

14:00 | Panel 3 – Appropriation and Perceptions of Popular Culture

Moderation: Eleanor Parkin-Coates

14:00 | Richard Somerset (University of Lorraine) – Joseph Ritson: Folklorist, Radical and Eccentric

14:25 | Matthew Smith (University of Lorraine) – The imaginary dangers of popular religious movements and contrived popular religious movements: perceptions of Methodism and Anglican Evangelicalism during the British Regency period.

14:50 | John-Erik Hansson (University Paris Cité) – “Revised and Improved”: Pedagogical Politics in Mid-19^th-century Editions of William Godwin’s Books for Children

Discussion

15:45 – Coffee break 

16:15 | Keynote Speaker

Moderation: Stéphane Guy 

Rohan McWilliam (Anglia Ruskin University) – Theatrical Celebrity and the Coming of the Picture Postcard, 1890-1914

Discussion 

17:30 | Closing Remarks

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Who Cares? International Conference
History of Psychiatry in the English-speaking world
#2 Theories & Policies
19-21 mars 2026

Salle des conférences du Bâtiment Max WEBER
Université Paris Nanterre
200 avenue de la République
92000 NANTERRE

Conference programme

DAY 1: Thursday 19 March 2026
8.45 Welcome & registration
9-9.15 Opening speech, Françoise KRÁL (director of the CREA research laboratory, Université Paris Nanterre)
9.15-10.15: Keynote 1: Pr Andrew Scull (Emeritus Professor in Sociology, University of California San Diego): 
 “A Psychiatric Revolution”
Chair: Marie Derrien (Université de Lille)
10.15-10.30 Coffee break
10.30-12.30: PANEL 1: Decision-making and/in psychiatry
Chair: Charlotte Gould (Université Paris Nanterre) 
Susan Barrett (Senior lecturer in British studies, Université Bordeaux Montaigne): “‘From a topic in itself uninviting and dry’ to the ‘burning injustices of mental health’: the evolution of the language around mental health used by British politicians, 1845-2025”
Louise Hide (Senior Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London) “From political resistance to opening the floodgates: what can we learn from NHS hospital inquiry records from the late 1960s-1970s?”
Susan Hogan (Professor in Arts and Health, University of Derby), “Social prescribing:  policy and practice” 
Elisabeth Fauquert (Senior lecturer in American studies, Université Paris Nanterre), “Peers not Police: US Psychiatric First Response Reform since the creation of 911”
12.30-2: Lunch break (buffet)
2-3: PANEL 2: Psychiatry, decolonisation and racial bias
Chair: Michel PRUM (Université Paris Cité)
Rory Du Plessis (Associate Professor, School of Arts, University of Pretoria): “British theorising on Boer insanity during the South African War”
Cécile Birks (Senior lecturer in British and Commonwealth studies, Université Paris Nanterre): “The eugenic interlude in South African mental health institutions, 1900-1948”
3.-3.20 Coffee break
3.20-4.20 : PANEL 3: Religion
Chair: Claire LABARBE (Université Paris Nanterre) 
Samuel Binkley (Professor of Sociology, Emerson College), “The Inner Light of Christ and the Medical Personage: A Quaker Reading of the Birth of the Asylum”
Rachel Ditchfield (PhD candidate, University of Liverpool/Imperial War Museum), “Ministering to the mind diseased: the role of the chaplain in medico-moral model of late-nineteenth-century asylum”
4.20-5: Psychopathological artworks in translation – a virtual exhibition by Master’s students in Translation Studies from Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
5.15-7.30 : Cocktail / Poster presentations: French translations of a selection of poems from Rory Du Plessis’s collection I See You by Master’s students in Translation Studies from Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

DAY 2: Friday 20 March 2026
9.15-10.45: Guided tour of the medical library at Sainte-Anne Psychiatric Hospital: Bibliothèque Henri Ey , 1 rue Cabanis 75014 Paris
12-1.30: Back to Nanterre Lunch break (buffet) 
1.30-3.10: PANEL 4: Psychiatry, politics and crime
Chair: Julie LE GAC (Université Paris Nanterre, IUF)
Helen Goodman (Postdoctoral researcher, Bath Spa University): “Assassination and attempted regicide: the certification, treatment, and punishment of criminal insanity in Britain and in the US, from Queen Victoria to JFK”
Laurence Dubois (Senior lecturer in British studies, Université Paris Nanterre): “‘It is unjust to ordinary patients to associate them with persons branded with crime’: the political and medical debate on the necessity of establishing separate asylums for criminal lunatics in mid-Victorian Britain”
Alice Béja (Associate Professor in US-American studies, Sciences Po Lille): “‘There is comradeship in the depths’: mental health and the politics of care in US anarchist communities at the turn of the 20th century”
3.10-3.30 Coffee break
3.30-5.30: PANEL 5: Diagnosis and treatment
Chair: Fabienne MOINE (Université Paris-Est Créteil)
Hilary Marland (Emeritus Professor in History, University of Warwick): “ ‘She resembles both a puerperal & an alcoholic confusion’: insanity, childbirth and diagnosis at Rainhill Asylum, Liverpool, c. 1900
Will Slauter (Professor in Anglophone studies, Sorbonne Université): “Reminiscence Therapy: Origins, Applications, and Controversies”
Nicolas Schwalbe (ATER adjunct lecturer in the Department of Psychoanalytic Studies, Université Paris Cité, and psychoanalyst), “Patient testimony as political theory: James Frame, no-restraint, and the politics of nineteenth-century Scottish psychiatry”

Dinner in town 

DAY 3: Saturday 21 March 2026
9.15-9.30 Welcome (back) coffee
9.30-10-30: Keynote 2: Professor Erika Dyck  (Canada Research Chair in the History of Medicine, University of Saskatchewan), “Psychiatry, the RCT, and Drug Policy: the Case of Psychedelics”
Chair: Elisa Chelle (Université Paris Nanterre) 
10.30-10.45 Coffee break
10.45-11.45: PANEL 6: (Dis) placement in British psychiatry 
Chair: Elisa Chelle (Université Paris Nanterre)
Léna Monème (PhD candidate in history, University of Luxembourg): “The refugee and immigrant dichotomy in British psychiatry, 1945-1965”
Claire Deligny (Senior lecturer in British studies, Université Paris Nanterre): “War from the wards: the Lancashire asylums and the Great War (1914-1922)”
11.45-12: Closing speech, by the Who Cares committee members
———————————————————————————————–
Conference organisers:
Cécile Birks, Claire Deligny, Laurence Dubois (Observatoire de l’aire britannique, Université Paris Nanterre), Elisabeth Fauquert (ORUS, Université Paris Nanterre) and Laetitia Sansonetti (Prismes, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle).
Scientific committee :
Cécile Birks, Claire Deligny, Laurence Dubois and  Elisabeth Fauquert (Université Paris Nanterre)
Elodie Edwards-Grossi (Université Paris Dauphine-PSL & Institut Universitaire de France)
Hervé Guillemain (Le Mans Université)
Anatole Le Bras (Université Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines)
Julie Le Gac (Université Paris Nanterre & Institut Universitaire de France)
Fabienne Moine (Université Paris-Est Créteil)
Michel Prum (Université Paris Cité)
Laetitia Sansonetti (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)

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Showing Death in the Nineteenth Century:

Bodies, Matter, Representations

National Academy of Medicine, Paris

26 March 2026

9.00-9.10 : Jérôme van Wijland (Library of the National Academy of Medicine), Clémentine Guiol (Alexandre-Koyré Centre), Noémie Robert (Alexandre-Koyré Centre), Laurence Talairach (Alexandre-Koyré Centre /Institut Universitaire de France/University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès), Introduction

9.10-10.00 : Keynote / Conférence plénière

Chair / Modératrice :  Clémentine Guiol (Alexandre-Koyré Centre)

Anne Carol (AMU-TELEMMe), De l’ossuaire au dispositif d’attraction : les enjeux de l’exposition des morts aux Catacombes de Paris

Panel 1 / Atelier 1

Chair / Modératrice :  Anne Carol (AMU-TELEMMe)

10.00-10.20 : Victoria Laurent (Centre Norbert Elias), Restes à charge : matérialité criminelle et exposition des corps coupables au XIX^e siècle

10.20-10.40 : Emmanuelle Brugerolles (conservatice générale honoraire du patrimoine, EPHE) et David Guillet (conservateur général honoraire du patrimoine), Triqueti à la Charité : dessins conservés aux Beaux-Arts de Paris

10.40-10.50 : Discussion

10.50-11.10 : Refreshment Break / Pause-café

Panel 2 / Atelier 2

Chair / Modératrice :  Clémentine Guiol (Alexandre-Koyré Centre)

11.30-11.50 : Charlotte White (Newcastle University), Beyond the Beauty of Beata Beatrix: Consumption and the Corporealisation of a ‘Good Death’

11.50-12.10 : Philippe Charlier (UVSQ Paris-Saclay), Montrer la mort (et s’en souvenir). Une anthropologie de la photographie post-mortem

12.10-12.30 : Jennifer Wallis (Imperial College London) et Jason Bernard (chercheur indépendant/Independent researcher), Posting images of death in 19th-century China and beyond

12.30-12.45 : Discussion

12.45-13.45 : Lunch Break / Pause déjeuner

13.45-14.35 : Keynote / Conférence plénière

Chair / Modératrice :  Noémie Robert (Centre Alexandre-Koyré)

Éloïse Quétel (Sorbonne-Université), Une histoire matérielle des collections médicales et d’anatomie pathologique de Sorbonne Université

Panel 3 / Atelier 3

Chair / Modérateur :  Michael Sappol (Visiting Researcher, Uppsala University).

14.35-14.55 : Cat Irving (Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh), Dissection, Dancing Skeletons, and Books Bound in Human Skin: The Murder Act in Britain

14.55-15.15 : Onni Gust (University of Nottingham), Through Glass Jars, Darkly: ‘monstrous’ bodies in natural and anatomical museums in nineteenth-century Britain

15.15-15.25 : Discussion

15.25-15.45 : Refreshment Break / Pause caf

Panel 4 / Atelier 4

Chair / Modératrice :  Noémie Robert (Centre Alexandre-Koyré)

15.45-16.05 : Jessica Dandona (Minneapolis College of Art and Design), Life Born from Death: Vasseur-Tramond’s Models of the Female Reproductive System, ca. 1880–1900

16.05-16.25 : Eva Åhrén (Karolinska Institute, Stockholm), Seeing the Body from the Point of View of Death: Visualizations and materiality in the Pathological Anatomy of Cholera

16.25-16.45 : Zara Evans (Aberystwyth University), Travelling with the Dead: Cemetery Railways and the Sanitation of Victorian Death

16.45-17.00 : Discussion

17.00-17.10 : Comfort Break / Pause

17.10-18.00 : Conférence plénière / Keynote

Chair / Modératrice :  Laurence Talairach (Alexandre-Koyré Centre /Institut Universitaire de France/University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès)

Michael Sappol (Visiting Researcher, Uppsala University), ‘Endangered Specimens’, the cultural politics of anatomical specimens

Organizing Committee:

• Laurence Talairach, UT2J /  Alexandre-Koyré Centre (UMR 8560-CNRS-EHESS-MNHN)
• Clémentine Guiol, Alexandre-Koyré Centre (UMR 8560-CNRSEHESS-MNHN
• Noémie Robert, Alexandre-Koyré Centre (UMR 8560-CNRSEHESS-MNHN)
• Jérôme van Wijland, Library of the National Academy of Medicine, Paris

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Vernon Lee and the European cultural heritage, 18-19 September 2025 – Programme

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Pictorial Punch – Treasures from the Archive 

November 7, 2025

For over 150 years, Punch magazine was renowned for its original and provocative satire. From early cartoons such as John Leech’s anti-establishment “Substance and Shadow” (1843) to its later conservative social commentary, Punch’s pithy observations on both national and international affairs ensured the longevity of its success and confirmed the brand as a cornerstone of the British popular press. As a mass media trailblazer for both the visual and verbal, moreover, the magazine’s innovative branding model enabled its publishers to branch out into new markets and alternative formats such as the almanack and the pocket book.

The Punch Archive attests to the historical and cultural import of the brand and its evolving publication portfolio through its eclectic range of print culture materials and artefacts. Acquired by the British Library in 2004, it comprises three sub-fonds – the records of Punch; the financial archive of Bradbury and Evans, and Bradbury, Agnew and Co., successive owners and publishers of the magazine; and the papers of Richard Geoffrey G. Price, a Punch contributor – all of which, to this day, remain largely unknown to both the academic community and the wider public. Among these resources is the Henry Silver bequest which, besides personal correspondence, notebooks and diaries, comprises hundreds of unexplored original preparatory drawings and proofs by Punch artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Archive also includes a full collection of Punch’s Pocket Book (1843-1881), a lavishly illustrated annual which, over a period of forty years, efficiently promoted the brand.

In line with Punch’s Pocket Book Archive, an international digitisation project which proposes to deliver an open-access database based on a full run of these annuals, a symposium entitled “Pictorial Punch – Treasures from the Archive” will take place at the British Library on 7 November 2025. Organised by the Punch’s Pocket Book Archive team with the support of the Archives and Manuscripts Department, the event seeks to explore the breadth and diversity of this unplumbed material, and provide an opportunity for experts and enthusiasts alike to discover and discuss the Archive’s extensive catalogue, as well as other related items within the British Library’s collections. It will feature keynote presentations by two renowned specialists of nineteenth-century periodical studies, Dr. Patrick Leary, historian of the Victorian press and author of The Punch Brotherhood. Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London (The British Library, 2010), and Pr Julia Thomas (Cardiff University), Principal Investigator of the AHRC/NEH-funded Finding A Place: A research project to advance digital methods and unlock the use of digitized bookillustrations in cultural institutions, and a high-profile expert on Victorian visual and material culture.

This project is supported by the French government through funding managed by the National Research Agency under the France 2030 initiative (reference ANR-23-EXES-0001), and by the Normandy Region.

With support from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

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Brontë Society Conference, Sat 6 Sept

‘Under an African summer’s sun’ Re-mapping the Brontës: Place, Race and Empire

The 2025 Brontë Society Conference, ‘Under an African summer’s sun’, Re-mapping the Brontës: Place, Race and Empire’, takes place in Bradford on 6 September, and the keynote speaker is Professor Corinne Fowler, Professor of Colonialism and Heritage at the University of Leicester.

For more information see the website here https://www.bronte.org.uk/events/bronte-society-conference

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Chromatic Encounters: Experiencing Colour from Early Modern Literature to Modernism

DAY 1, Thursday 26 June (Amphithéâtre Bilsky-Pasquier, Campus des Cordeliers)

09:00 – 09:30 – Registration 

09:30 – 10:00 – Opening Words 

10:00 – 11:15 – Keynote: Steven Mentz (St John’s University, NYC): “Kinds of Blue: Colors, Water, and Ecological Dynamism” – Chair: Anne-Valérie Dulac (Sorbonne Université)

11:15 – 11:45 – Tea and Coffee Break

11:45 – 13:15 – Panel 1: Impressions and Emotions – Chair: Emily Eells (Université Paris-Nanterre) 

Catherine Maxwell (Queen Mary University of London): “ ‘Ideal Instants’ and the Impressionist Lyric of Colour” 

Nicholas Gaskill (University of Oxford): “Colour and Intensity in Modernist Poetry”

Gwenda Koo (University of Cambridge): “Katherine Mansfield: A Subjective Experience Coloured by Emotions” 

13:15 – 14:30 – Lunch 

14:30 – 15:30 – Panel 2: Global Encounters (1) – Chair: Madeline Hewitson (University of Birmingham)

Lucy Powell (University of Oxford): “Making Whiteness Visible: Behn, Pope, Mignard and the Colours of Colonialism” 

Anita Raychawdhuri (University of Houston Downtown): “Shakespeare’s Blues: The Significance of Blue in the Early Modern World”

15:45 – 16:45 – Panel 3: Global Encounters (2) – Chair: Stefano Evangelista (University of Oxford)

Rosie Blacher (Kingston University, London): “Vision in T. N. Mukharji’s A Visit to Europe (1886)” 

Béatrice Laurent (Université Bordeaux Montaigne): “Syncretic Chromatics in Lafcadio Hearn’s Experience of Japan”

16:45 – 17:15 Tea and coffee break

DAY 2, Friday 27 June (Amphithéâtre Bilsky-Pasquier – Campus des Cordeliers)

09:30 – 11:30 – Panel 4: Anxious Modernities – Chair: Isabelle Gadoin (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) 

Angie Dunstan (Queen Mary University of London): “Slow Fade: Anxious Chromatic Encounters in Victorian Literature and Visual Culture”

Michele Brugnetti (Sapienza University of Rome): “The Aesthetic Experiencing of Colour: Tracing the Connection between aesthetic Bildung and chromatic Encounters in Walter Pater’s Gaston de Latour”

Mimi Lu (University of Sydney/University of Oxford): “Colouring the Idea of a University: The “Secondary and Tertiary Hues” of a modernising Institution”

Leonor-Jo Barnard (University of Oxford): “Dark and Earthy Shades: Ecological Consciousness in Thomas Hardy” 

11:30 – 12:00 – Tea and coffee break

12:00 – 13:00 – Panel 5: The Material Book – Chair: Matthew Winterbottom (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

Melissa Tedone and Rosie Grayburn (University of Delaware): “The Poison Book Project: Examining the colourful Materiality of mass-produced nineteenth-century Euro-American Book Covers”

Giulia Simonini (Technische Universität Berlin): “Colour Materiality in early nineteenth-century Watercolour Painting Handbooks”

13:00 – 14:30 – Lunch 

14:30 – 16:00 – Panel 6: Texts and Textiles – Chair: Julie Loison-Charles (Université de Lille) 

Alessandra Ronetti (Sorbonne Université): “ ‘Eiffel Red’: Materiality, Fashion and Urban Experience in fin-de-siècle Culture” 

Suchitra Choudhury (University of Glasgow): “White (lies): Pale Shawls in Victorian Literature” 

Gabriel Saada (Sorbonne Université): “ ‘A Mosaic of Pieces of Colour’: Romance as Textile in William Morris’s late Prose Fictions” 

16:00 – 16:30 – Tea and coffee break

16:30 – 18:00 – Keynote: Alexandra Loske “Teaching the basics and subtleties of colour: Women writing and illustrating for children and young art students from 1805 to the 1940s” (The Royal Pavilion, Brighton & Hove Museums, Brighton) – Chair: Charlotte Ribeyrol (Sorbonne Université)

18:00 – 19:30 – Drinks Reception (garden of the Campus des Cordeliers)

DAY 3, Saturday 28 June (Amphithéâtre Abbé Grégoire – Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers)

09:30 – 11:00 – Panel 7: Colour on Stage – Chair: Robert Stagg (Texas A&M) 

David Taylor (University of Oxford): “Kaleidoscopic Dryden: Theatre, Empiricism, Colour” 

Armelle Sabatier (Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas): “Performing Colours in Early Modern Drama: Theatrical Chromaticity in Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613), a case study”

Nora Galland (Université de Bretagne Occidentale): “Chiaroscuro Aesthetics in Early Modern Drama: Race, Gender and Class

11:00 – 11:30 – Tea and coffee break

11:30 – 13:00 – Panel 8: Chromatic Epistemologies – Chair: Nicholas Gaskill (University of Oxford) 

Elodie Ripoll (University of Trier): “A Literary History through Colours”

Arnaud Dubois (CNRS): “ ‘A Biological Classification of the Colours of Living Organisms’: Alfred Russel Wallace and the Categorisation of the Colours of Nature”

Joyce Dixon (University of Edinburgh): “Charles Darwin’s Colourscapes: Chromatic Notation on the Voyage of H.M.S Beagle”

13:00 – 14:00: Lunch 

14:00 – 15:30: Closing round-table 

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“Leslie Stephen : Thinking With and Against His Time”

24-25 octobre, Maison de la Recherche (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)

4 rue des Irlandais, Paris 5ème 

Thursday 24^th October (Salle Athéna)

9.00   Conference opening & Welcoming address

Stephen and the Enlightenment

10.00 – 11.30       

Melissa ALEXANDER (Trinity College Dublin):

“Sympathising with Leslie Stephen: Building Bonds Via a Shareable World”

Sara SULLAM (University of Milan):

“Leslie Stephen’s Pope (1880)”

Rémy DUTHILLE (Université Bordeaux Montaigne):

“Leslie Stephen on Eighteenth-Century Sociability” 

11.30 – 12.30  Keynote lecture

Jane POTTER (Oxford Brookes University):

“Leslie Stephen and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography”

12.30 – 2.00  Lunch break

Stephen’s Biographies, Stephen as Biographer

2.00 – 3.30                   

Alex SISKIN (Independent scholar):

“Leslie Stephen: The Biographer’s Autobiography”

Eleanor McNEES (University of Denver):

“Softening the Steel Engraving: The Biographer as Biographee”

Tadakazu SUZUKI (Rikkyo University):

“Biography as an Alternative Discourse of the Mind: Leslie Stephen’s ‘Applied Psychology’ and Virginia Woolf’s Psychology of Educated Men’s Daughters”

3.30 – 4.00  Coffee & refreshments

4.00 – 5.00 

Christine REYNIER (Université Paul Valéry – Montpellier 3):

“Reappraising Stephen the Moralist in the Light of his Mountaineering Essays”

Emma Claire SWEENEY (Open University):

“‘The Most Tragic Thing in His Life’: Fiction as a Tool for Exploring Leslie Stephen’s Relationship with His Eldest Daughter”

Friday 25^th October (salle du Conseil)

Agnosticism and Ethics

9.30-11.00                                                                                  

Samuel WEBB (Trinity Hall, Cambridge):

“How to Not Know: The Voice(s) of Leslie Stephen’s Agnosticism”

Rishona ZIMRING (Lewis & Clark College): 

“Leslie Stephen and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: Conversations and Correspondences”

Judith ALLEN (University of Pennsylvania):

“Resisting Patriotism: Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf ‘Thinking Against the Current’” 

11.00 – 11.30  Coffee & refreshments

11.30 – 12.30                                                                          

Christine FROULA (Northwestern University):

“Leslie Stephen’s Dialectic of Enlightenment”

Jane DE GAY (Leeds Trinity University):

“Salvation Beyond the ‘Sacred Common’? Leslie Stephen, Son of Clapham”

12.30 – 2.00  Lunch break

Exploring the Mountains

2.00 – 3.00  Keynote lecture 

Terry GIFFORD (Bath Spa University, UK and Universidad de Alicante, Spain):

“Deep Play: The Mountaineering Aesthetic of Leslie Stephen”

3.00 – 4.00 

Catherine W. HOLLIS (University of California, Berkeley):

“Granite and Rainbow (Literally): Mountaineering, Agnosticism, and Empiricism”

Jane GOLDMAN (University of Glasgow):

“‘Where the Great Vision of the Guarded Mount’: Intertextual Mountaineering with Leslie Stephen in To the Lighthouse”

4.00 – 4.30  Coffee & refreshments

4.30 – 5.30                                                                              

Caroline SCHAUMANN (Emory University):

“The Making of Modern Mountaineering”

William MITCHELL (Specialist in Alpine paintings):

“Leslie Stephen’s ‘Sunset on Mont Blanc’”

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Breaking New Grounds: Democratising Gardens and Gardening in Great Britain, 19th-20th centuries

27-28 September, 2024

Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3

Site Saint-Charles – Rue du Professeur Henri Serre, Salle des colloques 2 and cour des marronniers

https://doi.org/10.58079/127qu

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27

9.30am Welcome & opening of the conference

Jean-Michel Ganteau, co-director of EMMA (Études Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone)

9.50am Panel 1 – Garden and Class Boundaries

Chair: Aurélien Wasilewski (Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas)

– Jeremy BURCHARDT (University of Reading, U.K.)

“Roast Beef and Plum Pudding: The ceremony and symbolism of nineteenth-century allotment rent suppers”

– Deborah ROGIERS (RWTH University, Aachen, Germany)

“‘But the Garden, Stephen!’ – Genteel Poverty and Gardening in Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle”

10.30am Discussion

10.50am Coffee Break

11.10am Panel 2 – Gardens of Confinement, Gardens of Freedom

Chair: Jean-Michel Ganteau (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3)

– Laurence DUBOIS (Université Paris Nanterre, France)

“‘The first thing she could remember on the return to her reason, was crossing the Thames in a boat on going on one of these excursions to Kew’: the aesthetic and therapeutic power of gardens and gardening in Victorian lunatic asylums”

– Susan REID (independent scholar, U.K.)

“From Edinburgh to Montpellier: the people’s gardens of Patrick Geddes and Norah Geddes”

11.50am Discussion

12.10pm Lunch

2pm Panel 3 –Testing out the Boundaries of Gardens

Chair: Christine Reynier (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3)

– Niketa NARAYAN (University of Cambridge, U.K.)

“The Artificial Limits of Liberty: Pattern and Representation in the Nineteenth-Century English Garden and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”

– Léa BEAUCHEMIN-LAPORTE (University of Quebec, Montreal)

“Day Gardens, Night Gardens: On the Ambivalence of Culture and Nature in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906)”

– Cristina-Ruxandra BURGHELEA (University of Heidelberg, Germany)

“(Mis)Uses of Authority and Human-Nonhuman Encounters in Lewis Carroll’s Fictional Garden”

3pm Discussion

3.20pm Coffee Break

3.40pm Panel 4 – Challenging Authority and Building Community through Garden Representations

Chair: Jeremy Burchardt (University of Reading)

– Kristin BLUEMEL (Monmouth University, U.S.)

“Spades and Gravers: Clare Leighton, Victor Gollancz and the Radical Countryside”

– Valérie MORISSON (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3, France)

“Artists, Community Gardens and the New Commons”

4.20-4.40pm Discussion

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 28

9.30am Panel 5 – Women Negotiating Personal and Professional Garden Spaces

Chair: Clémence Laburthe-Tolra (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3)

– Caroline IKIN (National Trust, U.K.)

“Democratising the garden: defining the ‘working amateur’ at Gertrude Jekyll’s Munstead Wood”

– Daria TOLOKONNIKOVA (Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, France)

“Amateurship, beauty, and gardening in Vita Sackville-West’s Some Flowers”

– Florence PINARD-NELSON (Royal Holloway University of London, U.K.)

“Transforming School Gardening: the work of Chrystabel Procter, 1916-1950)”

10.30am Discussion

10.50am Break

11.10am Panel 6 – Women Circulating Horticultural Matters. Transnational Perspectives

Chair: Caroline Ikin (National Trust)

– Rebecca WELSHMAN (independent scholar, U.K.)

“Violets, Socialism, and the French Garden: a Pioneering Women’s Nursery in Henfield, West Sussex (1903-1948)”

– Julien BASTOEN (École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Paris-Belleville, France)

“The Feminisation of Horticulture in England as seen from France at the Turn of the 20th Century”

11.50am Discussion

12.10pm Closing of the conference

Lunch

2-4pm Outing in the afternoon: guided tour of the Scotts College with Sabine Kraus (Independent scholar / EHESS)

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Colour Matters

Exploring Colour and Chromatic Materialities in the Long Nineteenth Century (1798-1914)

6-8 December 2023

Trinity College, Oxford

Wednesday 6 December

13:30 – 14:00 – Welcome and Opening Remarks

14:10 – 15:40 – Parallel Session 1

Heavy Metals

Databases From Pigments to Pixels

Questioning Optics

15:40 – 16:10 – Tea & Coffee

16:10 – 17:50 – Parallel Session 2

Non-Colour

Chromoscapes

The Power of Printing

18:00 – 19:00 – Drinks Reception (Levine Building Cafe)

Thursday 7 December

08:00 – 10:00 – Private View of Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design (Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont Street)

10:30 – 12:30 – Parallel Session 3

Geologies of Colour

Wearing Colour

Chro-ative/Creative Processes

12:30 – 14:00 – Lunch (Levine Building Cafe)

14:00 – 16:00 – Parallel Session 4

The Sensing Body

Receptions of the Past

16:00 – 16:30 – Tea & Coffee

16:30 – 16:50 – Presentation by Dr. John Gilchrist (Clyde HSI) – The Value of the Photon: Hyperspectral Imaging for Art Heritage Science

18:00 – 21:00 – Dinner for Conference Speakers (St. John’s College, St. Giles)

Friday 8 December

09:00 – 11:00 – Parallel Session 5

Disseminating Colour

Threatening Colour in Body and Mind

Artificiality and Affect

11:00 – 11:30 – Tea & Coffee

11:30 – 12:30 – Concluding Roundtable (Auditorium)

12:30 – Conference Close

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Soutenance d’HDR de Catherine Heyrendt, Maître de Conférences en Civilisation britannique

Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne

CIRLEP (Centre interdisciplinaire de recherches sur les langues et la pensée)

La soutenance aura lieu le vendredi 15 décembre 2023 à 14h à CY Cergy Paris Université (33 bvd du Port, Cergy Pontoise), salle des thèses, Chênes 2, premier étage (RER A Cergy Préfecture).

[CRESEM] 100 ANS PLUS TARD : CHARLES RENNIE MACKINTOSH, DE L’ÉCOSSE AU ROUSSILLON

JOURNÉE D’ÉTUDE, Université de Perpignan

Le jeudi 14 septembre 2023 de 9h à 18h, Salle du conseil de la BU Lettres

Programme

9h Ouverture, présentations

9h30 Joseph SHARPLES (Historien de l’architecture et conservateur en charge du fonds Mackintosh à la Hunterian Gallery): Mackintosh the Architect: Modernism and Tradition

10h Peter TROWLES, (spécialiste de médiation patrimoniale, conservateur du fonds Mackintosh de la Glasgow School of Art) : Charles Rennie Mackintosh: The Art of Furniture Design – from Arts and Crafts to Art Deco

10h30 pause café

11H00 Judith URBANO (Université Internationale de Catalogne) :  De l’influence de Mackintosh sur les architectes catalans

11h30 Lesley GRAHAM (Université de Bordeaux, Société française des études écossaises) : Voyageurs écossais dans le sud de la France : de Stevenson à Mackintosh

12h Questions

14h Richard EMERSON  (Historien de l’art, inspecteur des monuments historiques) : Aller-retour entre Menton et le Roussillon – Charles et Margaret Mackintosh en France

14h30 Jacques RAUPP  (Professeur de dessin, aquarelliste) : Une autre visage de Mackintosh : Les aquarelles roussillonnaises

15h20 James TROLLOPE (journaliste et auteur de l’ouvrage : Rudolph Ihlee: The Road to Collioure ( 2022 ) : Rudolph Ihlee en Roussillon, peintre et ami de Mackintosh

15h50 Clara SILBER (Comédienne et metteuse en scène) :  Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh : une artiste éclipsée

16h 30-17h30 Questions et Table ronde Isabelle Cases, Sylvie Plas, Esteban Castaner

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SÉMINAIRE ALIÉNATION/ÉMANCIPATION : NEIL DAVIE

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“Charlotte Brontë’s Inhospitable Airs: Atmospheric Inspiration in Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853)”

Dr. Justine Pizzo, Université de Southampton

Séance de séminaire du CAS (EA 801, Toulouse Jean-Jaurès), 17 janvier de 13h à 14h.

Studies of Victorian literature have long associated the rise of the realist novel with middle- class readers’ increasing interest in domestic subjects. From the 1840s, when Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre (1847), through the end of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1901, the home remained a popular setting for novelists such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Henry James. Along with British realism’s focus on everyday life, domestic fiction transformed characters’ indoor concerns—household management, marriage and familial relationships, and social desires—into engaging and suspenseful plots. As Nancy Armstrong explains in her pivotal study Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), the domestic novel feminized cultural representation and ‘Brontë . . . bonds domestic space to the woman who inhabits it in a way that had never been so represented before.’

As I argue, however, Brontë’s most remarkable narrative innovation rests not in aligning women’s desire with domestic space, but rather in articulating their radical yearning for inspiring weather. This innovative theory of feminine authorship, which Brontë first articulates in her private journal and later explores in her novels, holds that artistic genius arises from an atmospheric force. In this talk, we will examine a few of the atmospheric events that inspire the narrators of her first and last novels—Jane Eyre and Villette, informing Jane’s desire for ‘the wind to howl more wildly, the gloom to deepen to darkness’ and Lucy Snowe’s ‘delight of staying with the wild hour, black and full of thunder, pealing out such an ode as language never delivered to man’. Unlike the indoor hospitality that inspires communal and sociable activities such as card playing and afternoon tea in so many nineteenth-century domestic novels, Charlotte Brontë’s fiction demands that we look beyond the home to understand the inhospitable airs the author and her female protagonists found so inspiring.

Lien zoom: https://univ-tlse2.zoom.us/j/97281513635?pwd=YXVOV0VwYllNTnJvZ3lUUTJSaXl4QT09

ID de réunion : 972 8151 3635

Code secret : 428798

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The Future of Intelligence: A Multidisciplinary
Vernon Lee Conference
8-10 September 2023, Florence, Italy and Online

CFP French

CFP English

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Annual Conference of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Margin/Limit/Periphery/Edge

Sept. 15-17, 2022

‘How are we to think of the edge of a given landscape or seascape? Assuming it exists – something we cannot take for granted – is it a limit, a perimeter, a periphery? What is it and how are we to think of it?’

-Edward Casey, The Places of a Landscape (2011, p. 91)

This year, RSVP’s annual conference builds on the ongoing work in nineteenth-century studies that challenges and extends the spatial, temporal and conceptual limits of what we understand by the Victorian period, Victorian studies, the British Empire, and centre/periphery models and practices. Through a focus on the matter of the long nineteenth-century’s pervasive mass medium, the periodical press, we ask participants to consider how the press in its multiple genres, iterations, networks, materialities, and practices reinforced, resisted or extended margins, limits, and edges.

The event will take place virtually from September 15-17, 2022. Registration is free and open to all. You can register now at https://whova.com/portal/registration/victo_202201. 

RSVP is hosting the conference on the Whova platform (a desktop and mobile app). Presenters have posted their papers, videos, and posters to the site for attendees to view in advance of the live Q&A sessions that comprise the conference.

Note that you will need to register for the conference and register for Whova before you can log into the conference site, but both are free. To learn more about registering for the conference and using Whova, please visit RSVP’s conference webpage at https://rs4vp.org/rsvp-conference and click on our Attendee Guide, which will walk you through each step in the process of registering and accessing the conference platform. A full PDF of the program is also available on this page.

We look forward to seeing you virtually!

150 ans du livre Descent of Man de Darwin, colloque dédié à Jean Gayon

Colloque A.V. Dicey (1835-1922)
Célébrer le centenaire de la mort d’un juriste, constitutionnaliste et penseur politique britannique

Celebrating the centenary of the death of a British jurist,
constitutionalist and political thinker

2 et 3 juin 2022

Univeristé Panthéron-Assas, Paris

Programme

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This international conference explores the diversity of connections, inspirations and influences in the work of modernist writer, May Sinclair (1863-1946). It will be held online on 24-25 June 2021.

Many reviewers and critics have shown that May Sinclair’s modernism was not so much a derivation of other contemporary aesthetics but was rather a product of her idiosyncratic articulation of her many research interests and experiences. In addition, “the interdisciplinarity of Sinclair’s output […] eludes straightforward categorisation and this has arguably contributed to the traditional critical neglect of her writing” (Bowler & Drewery 2016, 1). As May Sinclair is now gaining critical legitimacy, this conference seeks to explore Sinclair’s texts and contexts and aims to shed light on her place in literary history and on her contribution to “the radical modernist challenge to traditional assumptions about what it means to be human” (Bowler & Drewery 2016, 14).

• Download the call for papers (pdf)

Program :

• Download the program (pdf)

Thursday 24 June

10:15 : Welcome Address (“Paris time – UTC/GMT +2 hours”)

10:30-12:00: May Sinclair between the Victorians and the Modernists
Chair: Florence Marie
Georges Letissier (Université de Nantes) – “The Innocence of the Eye”: May Sinclair’s Reversed Case Study of the Brontës
Maria Juko (University of Hamburg) – Jessie Boucherett’s Smilesian Gentlewomen in May Sinclair’s Three Sisters
Isabelle Brasme (Université de Nîmes) – May Sinclair, Modernist Critic

14:00-15:00 Memory and Aftermath
Chair: Isabelle Brasme
Andrew Frayn (Edinburgh Napier University) – “Odd how the War changes us”: May Sinclair, domesticity and war
Jana Funke (University of Exeter ) – “Nothing is lost”: May Sinclair, Inherited Memory and Impersonality.

15:15-16:15 Mysticism
Chair: Claire Drewery
Christine Battersby (University of Warwick) – With Schopenhauer at the Belgian Front: May Sinclair’s War Journal and Related Texts
James H. Thrall (Knox College) – Agency and the Modern Mysticism of May Sinclair

Friday 25 June
 

10:00- 11:00 Woman in/of letters
Chair: Rebecca Bowler
Suzana Zink (Université de Neuchâtel) – “Miss Sinclair’s Sparkles”: May Sinclair in Contemporary Newspapers
Sanna Schyllert (University College London) – “‘Don’t have anything to do with them,’ she said”: May Sinclair as a fictional character

11:15-12:45 Aesthetic Networks
Chair: Sanna Schyllert
Emma Liggins (Manchester Metropolitan University) – Women writing the uncanny in the 1920s: May Sinclair, Clemence Dane and Elizabeth Bowen
Shalini Sengupta (University of Sussex) – Broken Gifts: May Sinclair, Modernism, and the Motif of Exchange
Khalid Chaouch (Sultan Moulay Slimane University) – May Sinclair and her Illustrators/Co-Authors

14:00-15:00 Treading New Ground
Chair: Georges Letissier
Milena Schwab-Graham (University of Leeds) – “Sharp, queer, uncertain happiness”: Walking as feminist “affective militancy” in May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier
Faye Pickrem (York University) – The Anatomy of Agency in May Sinclair

15:15-16:45 KEYNOTE LECTURE
Rebecca Bowler and Claire Drewery – Transtextual Mysticisms: Editing May Sinclair
Chair: Leslie de Bont

 

Middlemarch 150^th Anniversary Symposium* this Friday.

The event is on zoom, but we have a terrific line-up of speakers and activities to wave away the fatigue and liven up a difficult year.

Short presentations by:

Sierra Eckert (Princeton University)

     “Middlemarch 1960-2020: Scholarly Quotation as Literary Critical History”

Laura Griffith (University of Washington)

     “‘No Coherent Social Faith and Order’: Sainthood and Secularisation in Middlemarch and The Daisy Chain”

Alex McCauley (University of Washington)

     “Dorothea Dreams of Drains”

Matt Poland (University of Washington)

     “Multimedia Middlemarch”

A keynote by Ronjaunee Chatterjee (Concordia University) on “Middlemarch: A Grown-up Novel”

and

Eliot on Demand: Readings and reflections by…

Fionnuala Dillane (University College Dublin)

Nancy Henry (University of Tennessee Knoxville)

Summer Star (San Francisco State University)

Please click here to register, learn more, and annotate your favorite passage(s) of Middlemarch for what we hope will be a likely discussion.  

*hosted by the U of Washington Eighteenth & Nineteenth Century Research Cluster

The latest in a series of online events examining the Victorians at home and abroad, co-organised by the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and the Durham Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies.

Professor Josephine McDonagh (Chicago) will give a paper based on her forthcoming book Literature in a Time of Migration (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Professor Charlotte S. Sussman (Duke) will act as respondent.

The event will take place online, via Zoom, and attendees will receive a discount code for Professor McDonagh’s new book.

Book tickets here: 

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/thinking-about-literature-in-a-time-of-migration-tickets-152686372049

The Armstrong Browning Library & Museum proudly presents the virtual 2021 Browning Day Lecture

The presentation is aimed at a wider public in addition to a scholarly audience, and so could also be appropriate for students interested in Victorian poetry and religious culture.  Titled “Lords of the Earth? Elizabeth Barrett Browning on Christ’s Body in the Age of Human Domination,” it will ask how in her poetry Elizabeth Barrett Browning struggled to come to terms with the world-altering impact of the Industrial Revolution, and how she envisioned a place for what she understood to be the body of Christ – those participating in the work of God on earth and in the world emerging. 

The Zoom credentials will be posted to baylor.edu/library/browningday one day before the event. If you would like to receive a reminder email the day before the lecture that contains the Zoom credentials, select the “Request Zoom Credentials” option on the event site at baylor.edu/library/browningday. 

‘nineteenth-century Women’s Ghost stories’

North West Long Nineteenth-Century Seminar

Wednesday march 24^th 2021, 4 – 6.30 pm GMT

The third of our online research seminars hosted by Manchester Metropolitan University. To find out more about the seminar series or to offer a paper, please contact Dr Emma Liggins e.liggins@mmu.ac.uk and Dr Sonja Lawrenson s.lawrenson@mmu.ac.uk.

Please click on the following Zoom link to join the seminar. Feel free to write questions or responses in the chat box.

https://mmu-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/99346229473?pwd=djZBellKd2p1R0dzRFRBSm00TjNmQT09

Meeting ID: 993 4622 9473
Passcode: 360887

4.00 – 5.15

Dr Ruth Heholt (Falmouth University), ‘Detecting the Ghost: Real Apparitions and Real Crimes in the Work of Catherine Crowe’

Dr Jen Baker (University of Warwick), ‘Minor Embodiments: Spectral and Ghostly Children of the long nineteenth century’

5.15 – 5.30 Break

5.30 – 6.30

Dr Zsuzsa Török, (Institute for Literary Studies, Budapest), ‘Mrs Vachott’s Haunting Memories: Walter Scott and the Female Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Hungary’

Katerina García-Walsh (University of St Andrews), ‘Margaret Oliphant’s Ghostly Afflictions’

A Single Drop of Ink for a Mirror: A Symposium on Nineteenth-Century Literature and the Visual Arts, hosted by Princeton University on October 4-5, 2019.

The conference will afford an opportunity for scholars in different fields to come together to address new directions in interdisciplinary studies of literature and the visual arts. The conference is open to the public and will center around the papers and presentations of twenty-one principal interlocutors. Our list of speakers includes scholars at various stages of their careers, from leaders in the field to advanced graduate students. The conference will also be accompanied by a small exhibition at the Princeton Art Museum, curated by Rosalind Parry and Ariel Kline. Caroline Arscott, of the Courtauld Institute of Art (London), will deliver the keynote address, and senior scholars Tim Barringer, Ruth Yeazell, Elizabeth Helsinger, Kate Flint, Rachel Teukolsky, Joseph Viscomi, and David Pike will also present.  Papers topics include: the Idyllic School, African exploration and missionary literature, the reception of Vermeer in England, slum imaginaries, Ruskin, John Everett Millais’s portraits of fathers, Blake, and the Pre-Raphaelites.

 For more information, please visit princetonartlit2019.princeton.edu

The Victorians Institute will hold its 2019 conference on

TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIONS:
AFRICA, THE CARIBBEAN, THE AMERICAS, & VICTORIAN STUDIES

on October 31 – November 2, 2019 in Charleston, SC. The conference site affords an opportunity to think about transatlantic connections in the 19th century when Charleston was a prominent intersection on a web that connected Britain, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas.