Institutions in the Nineteenth Century and Beyond – Call for Papers

The Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies (CNCS) at Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, and Teesside Universities is pleased to announce its annual Postgraduate Conference, to be held in-person at Durham University on Wednesday, 7 May 2025. Postgraduates from all disciplines are invited to submit proposals for a 15-minute paper.

The nineteenth century saw the emergence and consolidation of institutions in many different areas, including art, education, law, medicine, politics, and more. These institutions not only informed the period’s socio-political landscape, but also left a legacy that still reverberates in the twenty-first century. In the current era filled with self-reflection and reassessment, a richer account of the historical past provides a better understanding of our contemporary situation. It is therefore timely to reconsider how long-standing institutions developed and their lasting implications for the present day.

CNCS invites papers that consider ‘institutions’ in the long nineteenth century, especially from an interdisciplinary perspective. Papers may address, but are not limited to, the following questions:

• What new institutions emerged in the nineteenth century?
• Which individuals and/or groups were involved in developing these institutions?
• How did different institutions—perhaps in separate or overlapping domains—intersect and shape one another?
• How did these institutions affect the nineteenth century’s intellectual, cultural, and socio-political milieu?
• What is the nineteenth century’s influence on contemporary institutions?
• How does research on the nineteenth century intersect with the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums)?

Please e-mail a title, an abstract of no more than 300 words in length, and a biographical note of no more than 100 words to Ardi Echevarria at rafael.d.echevarria@durham.ac.uk with the subject ‘CNCS 2025 PG conference’. The final deadline for abstracts is Monday 3 March 2025 and successful applicants will be notified by Friday 31 March 2025.

Download a copy of the CfP here CNCS PG Conference 2025 CfP

_____________________________________________________

 Writing about 19th c. mid-size cities 

An International Conference at the University of Tours, France, 19-20 November 2026.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the growth of cities led to irreversible changes in the balance of populations and power, particularly in relation to the emergence of the modern industrial state. These cities were dynamic places, structured by the social uses and practices of space, which in turn shaped the configurations of the groups that occupied them. The cities of Europe, with their own municipal governments, could operate as autonomous entities separate from central government (Weber, 1921).

The wide variety of ways in which writings on the city have been produced and used reflects variousadministrative, social, scientific and cultural practices. These have long been used and/or reinvented to assert the identities of mid-size towns in changing urban networks at various scales.

The production of administrative, antiquarian, archaeological, sociological, cultural and ordinary knowledges about the 19th-century city bears witness to the material forms, social organisation, cultural life and governance of these cities. It also indicates their role in the construction of the state and of memory. On a global scale, the richness and variety of national cultures in the 19th century were partly due to the tremendous growth of these mid-size towns, which had multiple facets: they were both laboratories for a municipalism that responded to economic, social and health problems, but also places conducive to the development of knowledge, political activism and the emergence of new cultural forms, (literary and artistic). The latter trend revealsnew cultural practices that produced social identity: in a landscape that was radically altered by the political and civic consecration of the individual, the democratisation of new writing enabled new discursive procedures to justify speaking out –no longer in terms of predefined social groups, but in terms of an identity to be constructed and in relation to a changing community. The modern novel, for example, was above all a privileged place for the representation of individuality, which resulted fromthe emergence of the middle classes, economic individualism, and philosophical and technical innovations.

The aim of this conference is to focus on writings that take intermediate cities, which have been relatively less studied than the major capitals and the most dynamic metropolises, as their subject. The project covers a long period of the nineteenth century (from the 1780s to the eve of the First World War), with no exclusions as to geographical scope, so as to enable global and comparative approaches. 

During this period, i.e., the long 19thcentury, these mid-size towns were multi-faceted: at once breeding grounds for new intellectual and for political currents and new cultural, literary and artistic forms, andproducers of social identity. This urbanisation, which sometimes proceeded at a different pace, also raises questions about the relationship between these areas and their natural environments and the protection of their ancient architectural heritages (Geddes, 1915); the social effects of their spatial and economic transformations (Harvey, 2003); and the cultural, political and economic roles played by these intermediate towns in the national and global changes of the long nineteenth century (Osterhammel, 2017). Mid-size towns were thus able to nurture alternative projects and models to the ‘big city’ model. This conferencewill examine their ecological, aesthetic, social, collectivist and reformist developments.CFP – Writing about 19th c. mid-size cities 

Taking note of a rich historiography on: the writing of the city in the modern age (Histoire urbaine, 2023/1; Urban History, 2020/47, ‘Thinking spatially: new horizons for urban history”); the crossroads of the action of writing (GRIHL, 2016); the history of science and knowledge and urban history (Van Damme, 2012 ; Garnier, 2024); and cultural history (Revue d’Histoire Culturelle, XVIIIe-XXIe siècles), this interdisciplinary conference on writings about the city will endeavour to reveal the diversity of actors and modes of elaborating knowledge about mid-size towns and their mobilisation (or performativity) in the processes of (re)forming local, national, imperial and transnational identities on a global scale. The conference is open to all continents, while paying attention to colonial and comparative dynamics, in order to grasp this long 19th century in all its spatial and chronological extension.  

Among the types of writing that take the intermediary city as their object, and without presupposing watertight boundaries between these different fields, proposals for papers may cover:

-administrative writings, in the broadest sense of the term (administrators’ reports, grey literature, cartographic documents, statistical tables, surveys, communal monographs, travel accounts, etc.), whether produced by administrators, scholars, craftsmen, notables, teachers or ecclesiastics, etc.;

-scholarly writings (antiquarian, archaeological, topographical, historical, etc.), at various stages of formalisation and institutionalisation;

-the writing of myths and mysteries, aimed at exalting (or toning down) local particularities, in a variety of media that were flourishing at the time (the press, travel guides, travel logs, postcards and correspondence, literary and artistic productions,etc.); and

-written documents produced by city dwellers (requests, petitions, addresses, grievances, etc.), more or less structured into groups (professional, religious, family, political, associative, artistic, literary, etc.) focused on their dealings with urban authorities, on the everyday life of the city, or as taken from the height of socio-political crises that challenged the harmony and social conventions of the established order.

Conference scientific committee: 

Pr. Philippe Chassaigne (CEMMC, Université de Bordeaux) 

Pr. Aude Deruelle (POLEN, Université d’Orléans) 

Pr. Stéphanie Sauget (CeTHiS, Université de Tours) 

Pr. Tri Tran (ICD, Université de Tours) 

Proposals of no more than 500 words, together with a one-page CV, should be sent to the following two addresses by 15 January 2025:

Tri Tran : tri.tran@univ-tours.fr 

Stéphanie Sauget : stephanie.sauget@univ-tours.fr 

All proposals will receive a response from the organising committee by 15 March 2025.

___________________________________________

Chromatic Encounters: Experiencing Colour from Early Modern Literature to Modernism

Place: Sorbonne Université and Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris

Dates: 26-28/06/2025

Since the pioneering work of Michel Pastoureau and John Gage in 1990s, colour studies have grown into a wide interdisciplinary field, embracing new research trends, from gender-focused to environmental and post-colonial approaches. Following the recent ‘material turn’ in the humanities, chromatic materiality is also being discussed by an ever-increasing number of disciplines (Feeser 2012; Young 2018). Literary studies, however, have so far lagged behind. Indeed, with the exception of the illustrated text, the difficulty of reading colour is that it is not there (Conquer 2019), the black-and-white page necessarily invoking it by absence or abstraction. 

The conference ‘Chromatic Encounters’ aims to create a dialogue between literary and colour studies by exploring the experience of colour in literature written in English. It builds on the expertise developed by the CHROMOTOPE team (Sorbonne Université, CNAM and the University of Oxford) during the past five years. The main objective of the ERC project CHROMOTOPE was to study what happened to colour in the 19^th century – a period when the art of ‘chromographia’ (Gaskill 2018) seems to have taken on a new dimension following the invention of a wealth of new synthetic dyes for which new names had to be devised. The conference broadens the historical scope of the project, going back to the age of print which marked the dawn of modernity and radically changed the experience of reading, and up to the age of modernism in the early 20^th century. Within this broad time framework, ‘Chromatic Encounters’ seeks to interrogate how literature provided a stage for the shifting relationship between colour and changing concepts of the modern. 

‘Chromatic Encounters’ wishes to take the significance of colour in literature beyond the universalizing symbolism which has dominated many approaches to colour so far. Instead, we invite speakers to look at the specifics (cultural, historical, material, geographic, political, sensorial, racial and environmental…) of the experience of colour within and surrounding the literary space/text. How do literary texts envisage and represent colour and its material forms? How does colour, in the guise of illustrations or additions to a text, influence processes of reception and remediation? Such questions should help us to see how colour can challenge our understanding of literature by taking it beyond the book/page.

We welcome abstracts for 20-min papers on any aspect related to the following topics from early and more established researchers, whatever their disciplinary background.

–       Reading/writing colour

–       Colour and ekphrasis 

–       Colour and intermediality 

–       Translating colour

–       The evolution of colour symbolism through the ages

–       Literary chromophobia 

–       The politics of colour in literature (colour and the racialised and/or gendered body etc.)

–       The ecologies of colour 

–       The poetics of colour

–       Performing colour (cosmetics, pigments, costumes, stage designs etc.)

–       Sensory responses to literary colour

–       Specificities of colour in literary movements (neoclassicism, realism, romanticism etc.)

–       Colour naming and classification

–       Colour as a way of reading, making or reassessing literary history

–       Colour and the materiality of the printed word (fonts, inks, illustrations, illuminations, book covers, hand colouring, colour printing, etc.)

–       The hermeneutics of colour (close or distant readings)

–       Colour in the history of literary criticism 

Proposals specifying COLOUR PAPER in the subject should be sent to chromotope@gmail.com by 15 Novembre 2024. 

The submission should include, as an attachment, a short biography and a 300-word abstract in PDF format. Proposals will be reviewed by our scientific committee and accepted applicants will be notified around 25 January 2025. Accommodation and transportation costs will be covered and meals provided for all speakers.

Organizing committee: Anne-Valérie Dulac, Stefano Evangelista, Charlotte Ribeyrol

Scientific committee: Aurélia Gaillard, Robert Stagg, Claudia Tobin 

For more information about this project and the conference, please consult the CHROMOTOPE website: www.chromotope.eu

24 et 25 avril 2025

L’amitié selon John Henry Newman

Colloque universitaire interdisciplinaire
L’Institut Catholique Rennes
Campus de Ker Lann
Appel à communications

Présentation: appel en français / CFP in English

John Henry Newman (1801-1890) fut un homme d’amitiés tout autant qu’un homme de l’amitié en ce qu’il la tenait en haute estime et qu’il l’envisageait avec très grand sérieux.

Au cours de sa très longue vie, Newman eut l’occasion d’entretenir des amitiés fidèles et éprouvées ; son amitié profonde et sincère avec Ambrose St. John en fut d’ailleurs le modèle le plus exemplaire. Mais elles furent parfois aussi malmenées voire interrompues lorsque Newman fit le choix de sa liberté de conscience au prix des affections qu’il avait entretenues (Mouvement d’Oxford). En raison de son choix radical en 1845-sa conversion au catholicisme qui fut un arrachement et sonna le glas de plusieurs amitiés, le thème ne peut être traité sans évoquer la rupture. Parler des amitiés de Newman, de ses affinités intellectuelles avec d’autres grandes figures du XIXe siècle anglais, c’est aussi suivre l’histoire du Mouvement d’Oxford, des différents visages du catholicisme anglais, jusqu’au Renouveau catholique car l’influence de Newman a évidemment perduré après sa mort.

Pour autant Newman prit soin de cultiver son art de l’amitié en la revêtant d’une profonde spiritualité qui soit à l’image, comme il le croyait, de l’amour que le Christ témoigne à ses créatures. Très tôt, à 15 ans, il fit l’expérience de cet amour divin, s’éprouvant lui-même face à son Créateur. Cette rencontre, qui le liera à jamais à Dieu, non seulement modela sa pensée, mais elle participa du mode de relations qu’il développa avec autrui. L’amitié selon Newman implique un face à face avec son prochain, à l’image de Jésus et Jean, c’est-à-dire une relation authentiquement vraie « hors des ombres, et des images, dans la vérité ».

L’amitié selon Newman était aussi la pratique quotidienne des vertus du modèle chrétien : la charité, la fidélité, l’obéissance. L’amitié ne doit pas être un vain mot, noyée sous de bonnes intentions, elle doit prendre forme, exister dans le réel. Ainsi Newman se méfiait-il des grandes déclarations d’affection et privilégiait sa manifestation au cours des visites qu’il faisait à ses paroissiens mais aussi dans sa correspondance rassemblée dans les 32 volumes de Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman (plus de 20 000 lettres). L’attachement qu’il éprouvait pour ses proches, s’exprimait dans son soin à leur égard. Panser les blessures de l’âme, dispenser des conseils aux esprits égarés, telles étaient les missions auxquelles s’attachait Newman.

L’engagement personnel dont il faisait preuve auprès de ceux qu’il côtoya dans les communautés religieuse et universitaire peut aussi nous permettre de questionner sa relation à la personne. Le principe de relation entre soi et l’autre semble reposer sur une forme d’altérité, une complémentarité qui respecte l’individualité de chacun et qui se manifeste aussi par la communion des coeurs et des esprits. Homme de communion et de communauté, Newman se défendait pourtant d’être un homme de mondanités ( « worldliness »), ainsi concevait-il la relation amicale comme l’expression du don de soi à l’autre. Encore est-il nécessaire de s’interroger sur le chemin qui conduit à ce don de soi chez Newman. Ce cheminement intérieur semble se caractériser par des moments de solitude et de silence, des intermèdes nécessaires au maintien d’amitiés durables et authentiques. Grand maître de l’introspection, Newman jugeait donc ces temps suspendus propices à la réflexion sur ce que doit être, selon lui, l’amitié et la façon dont elle doit s’exercer.

Aussi pouvons-nous nous enquérir de la perpétuation au fil des siècles de l’esprit d’amitié développée par Newman. Comment l’a-t-on accueilli et transmis au XXe et XXIe siècles ? Cet esprit d’amitié participe-t-il finalement de quelque chose de plus grand et de plus immuable qui dépasse nos propres individualités ? Telles sont les questions que nous devrons nous poser afin d’éclairer un peu plus la personnalité et la pensée de John Henry Newman.

Objectif du colloque :
En prenant appui sur les amitiés entretenues par John Henry Newman, ce colloque souhaite apporter un éclairage sur la personnalité intime de ce dernier et sa relation aux autres. Y aurait-il un modus operandi « newmanien » de l’amitié, c’est-à-dire une tournure idiosyncratique de l’esprit et de l’être développée par cet homme de foi ? Et si tel est le cas, ce modèle « newmanien » serait-il universel ?

Méthodologie :
Notre démarche se voudra essentiellement empirique. S’appuyer sur le réel, c’est-à-dire les rencontres amicales de Newman et les différentes formes qu’elles ont pu prendre pour tenter une définition « newmanienne » de l’amitié.

Les axes de réflexion proposés seront les suivants :

AXE 1 : ETAT des LIEUX : Newman est-il un ami « victorien » ?

Thématiques proposées :

1. La conception victorienne de l’amitié
2. Les « dames » de Newman : les amitiés féminines
3. Amitiés et mondanités chez Newman
4. Les amitiés de Newman et l’esprit de communion/communauté (Oxford, Dublin, Birmingham…)
5. Les amis du Mouvement d’Oxford : continuité et rupture

AXE 2 : VERS UNE DEFINITION de l’amitié chez Newman ?

Thématiques proposées :

1. « Cor ad cor loquitur » : relation dialogique de l’amitié
2. Le Verbe comme mode de médiation
3. Rencontre avec l’Autre et solitude du moi : complémentarité et nécessité
4. Amitiés/inimitiés et liberté de conscience : exister pour se réaliser
5.Amitié et vérité : dévoilement de la personne

AXE 3 : LEGS NEWMANIEN : récipiendaires et passeurs de l’esprit newmanien

Thématiques proposées :

1. Entrer en amitié : une pratique pédagogique et spirituelle (témoignages)
2. Filiation intellectuelle entre Newman et des auteurs et penseurs des siècles suivants
3. Le modèle « newmanien » de l’amitié : un modèle universel ?

____________________________________________________

Breaking New Grounds

Democratising Gardens and Gardening in Great Britain, 19^th-20^th centuries.

Date: 27 September 2024

Venue: Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3.

A one-day conference organised by Clémence Laburthe-Tolra (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3-EMMA) and Aurélien Wasilewski (Law & Humanities, CERSA, UMR 7106, Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas).

This conference stems from a reflection on the social and political dimensions of gardens and gardening in Great Britain ranging from the Victorian and Edwardian eras to the post-war period. Pondering on “People’s Gardens,” Vita Sackville-West claimed that “we have been called a nation of shopkeepers; we might with equal justice be called a nation of gardeners” (Sackville-West 1939). Her assertion insists on a sense of community, portraying gardening as an inclusive affair spreading across the country to amateurs along professionals who undertook training in botany and horticulture. Yet, such inclusivity needs to be qualified and addressed, taking into consideration class and gender: how was gardening dependent on class in Britain in the 19^th and 20^th centuries? How did class condition gardening practices? How did men and women’s experiences of gardening or access to gardens differ?

Stephen Constantine points out that “historians of the gardens have been dazzled by the rare and the beautiful” (Constantine 1981), focusing on magnificent estates owned by the wealthy and powerful. The aim of the conference is to follow in Constantine’s footsteps and depart from the exploration of opulent gardens owned by the well-to-do. Of interest for the conference is how some gardens, gardeners and gardening practices have been overlooked to this day by most garden historians, with notable exceptions like Hilda Smith who tended her cottage garden in Lincolnshire (Paul Smith and Peter Weston 2017).

Investigating the gardening practices of English gardeners also begs the following question: how did gardens become accessible in situ? Access varied whether workers were granted allotments by industrialists and land-owners at the end of the 19^th century who meant to control workers (Gaskell 1980; Page 2017); some gardened in public parks during World War 2 as part of the Dig for Victory campaign (Way 2005; Willes 2015); others got to visit private, ornamental gardens opened by their owners to welcome in amateurs. In these instances, the garden becomes an ambivalent site: it is sometimes a “means of control over the moral and physical lives of the labouring population” (Gaskell 1980), a site of resistance in the context of World War 2, or a site of aesthetic pleasure made accessible by aristocrats, as was the case when Sackville-West opened Sissinghurst in 1938, re-enacting 18^th-century practices adopted by the landed gentry.

While gardens became accessible in several ways to serve various purposes (be they aesthetic, socio-economic, or political), how was gardening encouraged and perceived across the social spectrum? The role played by the press and by the radio is of particular interest, whether they welcomed professionals and amateurs to publish chronicles or broadcast programmes on how to garden, or whether they became part of the propaganda apparatus in wartime (Willes, 2015). The multiple garden memoirs (Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898), Marion Cran’s The Garden of Ignorance (1922) to name but a few) and the rise of the advice gardening text (Bilston, 2008) and of garden autobiographies (Seaton, 1979 and 1984) is also to be taken into account in this perspective. Last but not least, the rise of horticultural colleges (more often than not opened by women aristocrats such as Frances Garnet Wolseley with Glynde College) is also to be investigated alongside the professionalisation of women gardeners at the turn of the 20^th century, symbolised by the admission of Gertrude Cope, Alice Hutchings and Eleanor Morland to Kew Gardens in 1895. Yet, the mixed reaction of Londoners and the press deeming them “Kewriosities” (partly due to the “bloomers” they had to wear as a uniform) complicated their access to gardening: they were eventually asked to work in a section of the garden “marked off as ‘private’.” (Chapman 2017).

This one-day conference prompts questions that have to do with the history and philosophy of gardens and gardening in Great Britain but also their representation in literature and the arts.

 Possible topics include, but are definitely not restricted to, the following topics:

• The allocation of allotments or cottage gardens to urban and rural workers in the 19^th
• The boom of the gardening press and industry in the 19^th
• The success of garden competitions and flower shows and the development of garden societies.
• Enthusiasm for gardening, or the lack thereof.
• Differences between gardens of the working-class, the middle-class, and the upper-class.
• The opening of horticultural colleges at the turn of the 20^th century, especially for women.
• Gardening memoirs and first-hand accounts in general.
• Gardens as inclusive or exclusive sites; access to and accessibility of garden writing.
• Gardens as places of social reforms and cross-class mixing.
• Gardening in wartime; gardens as places of resistance.

Researchers in anthropology, arts, history, literature, philosophy and political sciences are more than welcome to submit a proposal.

Proposals of  300 words maximum together with a brief biographical note (100 words or so) should be sent by 3 June 2024 to Clémence Laburthe-Tolra (clemence.laburthe-tolra@univ-montp3.fr) and to Aurélien Wasilewski (Aurelien.Wasilewski@u-paris2.fr).

Full CFP including bibliography here: Breaking New Grounds

____________________________________________________________

CFP: Leslie Stephen: Thinking With and Against His Time 

(Extended Deadline: 31 March 2024)

International Conference

24-25 October 2024

Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris

PRISMES – EA 4398

Langues, Textes, Arts et Cultures du Monde Anglophone

CORPUS – UR-UPJV 4295

Conflits, Représentations et Dialogues dans l’Univers Anglo-Saxon

SEW – Société d’Études Woolfiennes

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Prof. Terry Gifford (Bath Spa University)

Dr. Jane Potter (Oxford Brookes University)

Dr. Trudi Tate (Clare Hall, University of Cambridge)

Call for papers:

Early advocate of evolutionism, one of the first openly declared agnostics, editor of the Cornhill Magazine, pioneering mountaineer, moral philosopher, founder and general editor of the DNB: there are so many more facets to Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) than those recorded by his daughter Virginia Woolf, who memorably paid tribute to his “strong,” “healthy out of door, moor striding mind”. By unfolding all the contradictions and paradoxes of the character, this first international conference on Leslie Stephen means to reclaim the full complexity of his thought and legacy. 

Thinking with and against his time, Stephen held a key position at the heart of the Victorian literary scene and was an impressively prolific writer, profoundly engaged with the religious, philosophical and social debates of his age. A highly respected journalist and critic, he edited the Cornhill Magazine from 1871 to 1882, publishing works by George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, John Addington Symonds, Henry James and R.L. Stevenson, and was the author of hundreds of essays, published over the course of forty years in periodicals, such as the Fortnightly Review, Fraser’s Magazine, Macmillan’s Magazine, Mind, the National Review, the Nineteenth Century, the Saturday Review or the Pall Mall Gazette, a vast oeuvre now finally accessible thanks to online databases.  

His devotion to knowledge and integrity were such that he preferred to break with the academic world of Cambridge rather than compromise with the Church. Heir to the Clapham Sect, Stephen engaged with the theological debates of his time to the point of gradually and publicly embracing agnosticism, a form of radicalism that coexisted from then on with forms of traditionalism. 

His own prolific output bears witness to his encyclopaedic mind and his boundless curiosity for all the key issues of the day, however polemical: the anti-slavery movement, agnosticism, educational and social reform… Both a man of his time and a pioneer, Stephen explored new epistemological modes in keeping with the expanding frontiers of his age, while remaining profoundly anchored in some of the values and hierarchies of the day. 

The DNB, his life’s work, and one of his most ambitious projects, is the finest example of his desire to define new modes of classification and new forms of expression for the expanding knowledge of his time. Breaking with the established narratives of the past, he devised a new approach to writing the biography of the nation, doing away with the grandiose tradition of commemoration. In its place, he developed a more archaeological approach, delving into the past and collating the life stories of all those who helped shape the evolution of the country.

The same pioneering spirit stoked his passion for the Alps and mountaineering, in which he proved as much a trailblazer as he did in intellectual life. It is this conquering spirit that his close friend Thomas Hardy immortalized in his poem “The Schreckhorn, With Thoughts of Leslie Stephen” (1897), which extolled his will to “venture life and limb” as well as the “quaint glooms” of his personality, when paying tribute to Stephen as the first man ever to ascend this mountain.

However daring and rigorous in his endeavours, Stephen was no less a direct heir to the Romantic tradition. An ardent poetry lover, he could quote vast swathes of the poetic canon, from Milton to Wordsworth, Tennyson and Arnold, and would rhythm both domestic life and mountaineering exploits with his recitations. Likewise, despite his allegiance to Victorian models of “Muscular Christianity”, and the manly world of clubs and fellowships, he would at times indulge in various forms of sentimentalism and melodramatic displays of emotion. 

These are some of the contradictions that the participants to this conference are invited to explore. Similarly, his vast output deserves to be reconsidered through diverse critical paradigms, such as new materialist History, print culture studies, new sensory studies, phenomenology, affect studies and ethics, gender studies, health and disability studies.

We welcome contributions focusing on Leslie Stephen, but also on the following topics, connected with his life and times and shedding light on the larger context of his work: 

• Victorian encyclopaedism
• Victorian periodicals, print culture, the publishing industry 
• Biography, the DNB, “hero-worship”
• Stephen’s relations to Victorian sages and prophets
• Letters, epistolarity, literary networks
• Cambridge, academia, education and university reform
• Gentlemen’s clubs, sociability
• 18th century philosophy and literature, the Enlightenment 
• Utilitarianism, Science, Evolutionism
• The Clapham Sect, Agnosticism, Scepticism
• War, the anti-slavery movement
• Morality, the “science of ethics”
• Mountaineering, athletics, walking, nature and travel writing
• Memory, elegy, mourning, the Mausoleum Book, Virginia Woolf & Leslie Stephen

Abstracts of about 300 words, for 25-minute papers in English, together with a short (100-word) author biography, should be sent to the organizers by 31 March 2024 at the following address: leslie.stephen.conference@gmail.com. In case of difficulties tracing Stephen’s works, please contact the organizers, who will be happy to share links and resources.

A selection of peer-reviewed articles based on papers given at the conference will be collected for publication.

____________________________________________________________________________

CFP Colloque international de la Société Française d’Études Victoriennes et Edouardiennes.

A Scottish Air : Inspirations et modèles écossais

30 et 31 janvier 2025

Université Grenoble Alpes

Au dix-huitième siècle, Voltaire rendait hommage au rayonnement culturel et scientifique de l’Écosse en écrivant : « Nous nous tournons vers l’Écosse pour trouver toutes nos idées sur la civilisation ». En l’espace de quelques décennies, cette nation s’était imposée comme un pôle majeur de l’Europe des Lumières. Son influence en Grande-Bretagne et au-delà des îles britanniques allait perdurer dans le siècle suivant et jusqu’au XXème siècle. À titre d’exemple, au XIXe siècle, les publications de Walter Scott marquèrent profondément la littérature britannique, et plus généralement européenne, s’imposant comme l’origine du roman historique. L’Écosse se rendit aussi célèbre en jouant un rôle majeur dans l’innovation scientifique dès les débuts de la Révolution Industrielle, tant dans le domaine de l’énergie (James Watt), des transports (Macadam, Thomson et Dunlop) ou encore des communications (Bell). Les Écossais firent également des découvertes médicales qui allaient avoir des retombées majeures telles que la seringue hypodermique, inventée par Alexander Wood en 1853, et la première utilisation du chloroforme comme agent anesthésique pour les accouchements par James Young Simpson en 1847. Dans le domaine des arts, ce fut en Écosse qu’ouvrit, en 1889, la première galerie exclusivement consacrée à l’art du portrait. Le groupe d’artistes connus sous le nom de The Four réalisa des œuvres qui exercèrent une influence déterminante dans l’émergence de l’Art nouveau, courant artistique dominant au début du XXe siècle.

Cette visibilité, issue de cette contribution distincte de l’Écosse au sein du Royaume-Uni, est sans nul doute à relier aux conditions qui avaient présidé à son union à l’Angleterre en 1707. Contrairement au pays de Galles avant elle, et à l’Irlande après elle, le pays avait pu garder son propre système éducatif, son propre système légal et sa propre Église (presbytérienne). Sa participation active à l’entreprise impériale (notamment James Matheson et William Jardine), ses échanges avec le monde et son importante production industrielle valurent par ailleurs à l’une de ses villes, Glasgow, de se voir attribuer le titre de « deuxième ville de l’Empire », alors même que la capitale écossaise revendiquait le titre d’Athens of the North en contrepoint à une Londres perçue comme nouvelle Rome. Pour toutes ces raisons, ce qui se passait « au nord de la frontière » put, à l’occasion, être pris comme modèle – ou contre-modèle – au sein du monde britannique voire anglo-saxon. La gestion glasvégienne de la prostitution put ainsi être opposée par les abolitionistes anglais (dont Joséphine Butler) aux lois sur les maladies vénériennes adoptées par le gouvernement britannique sur un modèle régulationniste plutôt continental. Le modèle scolaire, et notamment le rôle joué par les écoles paroissiales en Écosse, fut également fréquemment cité en exemple, dans la première moitié du XIXème siècle par les défenseurs d’un système éducatif soutenu par l’État en Angleterre et au pays de Galles, tandis que le modèle universitaire s’exportait dans certaines colonies, comme par exemple la Nouvelle-Galles du Sud.

La diffusion à l’échelle nationale et internationale d’un modèle écossais « souple » se fit souvent à bas bruit, en raison de la nature « plastique » de l’héritage culturel et politique écossais, souvent adaptable à la culture de réception (on pense ici aux « emprunts » à Walter Scott par notamment James Fenimore Cooper), qui ne fut jamais vraiment source d’un quelconque soft power. En témoigne l’influence « par ricochet » du style dit Scotch Baronial, à travers la félicité du château et du domaine de Balmoral, directement inspirés de l’Abbotsford de Scott, dont Miles Glendinning et Aonghus MacKechnie sous-entendent qu’il a pu infuser dans le Second Castle Age. C’est, plus subrepticement, le cas dans la discussion du domaine de Scott (hôte généreux qui y reçut écrivains, hommes politiques, et lecteurs de sa fiction) que l’on trouve sous la plume (souvent désapprobatrice) de ses nombreux visiteurs, contemporains (notamment Washington Irving) ou non (Virginia Woolf).

Enfin, outre l’inspiration qu’elle a pu susciter, et les modèles qu’elle a pu offrir pour certains, au-delà de ses frontières, dans les différents domaines mentionnés, l’Écosse put également représenter un contre-modèle pour d’autres. Par boutade, on peut penser à l’amusante désignation « ‘No true Scotsman fallacy » en philosophie, et il n’est peut-être pas tout à fait incident que cette formulation convie la figure du « true Scotsman » et les pièges de l’essentialisme, tant la définition d’un supposé « caractère écossais » a agité les esprits. On notera à ce titre que malgré toute sa typicité, la figure du Highlander put être source du parasitage de la question de l’essentialisme de l’identité écossaise ; l’opposition pseudo-scientifique que traçait Robert Knox, dans son influente étude The Races of Men (1850) entre races anglo-saxonne et celte, reposait en partie sur l’opposition perçue par beaucoup entre Highlanders et Lowlanders, qu’il aurait en substance transposée à un contexte plus large. Cette distinction, fondée sur un modèle écossais supposé, lui permit d’extrapoler le devenir racial du contexte impérial, discours qui entrait en écho avec la vaste entreprise racialiste.

Ce colloque international, qui se déroulera à l’Université Grenoble Alpes les 30 et 31 janvier 2025, portera donc sur l’Écosse comme source d’inspiration et exemple à l’époque victorienne et édouardienne, mais également comme contre-modèle, à l’intérieur et à l’extérieur des frontières du Royaume-Uni. Il aura pour objectif d’apporter un éclairage nouveau sur cet aspect de l’histoire de l’Écosse qui reste encore à étudier.

Les axes de réflexion (non-exhaustifs) proposés dans le cadre de ce colloque sont les suivants :

• L’Écosse comme source d’inspiration dans le domaine des arts et de la littérature ;
• Les modèles (ou contre-modèles) écossais en Grande-Bretagne, en Europe, dans les colonies britanniques et dans le reste du monde dans les domaines scientifique, politique, économique et social ;
• Un ou des modèles écossais ?  Parce que l’Écosse est plurielle, les spécificités régionales (Lowlands, Highlands & Islands, mais sans doute plus encore) ainsi que religieuses pourront être examinées.

Les propositions de communication (format 20 minutes de présentation), rédigées en français ou en anglais (environ 500 mots) accompagnées d’une courte notice biographique, sont à adresser au plus tard le 10 juin 2024 à l’ensemble des organisateurs du colloque.

marion.amblard@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

cyril.besson@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

veronique.molinari@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

Une sélection des communications sera publiée dans la revue en ligne Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens.

Comité scientifique

Marion Amblard, Université Grenoble Alpes (SFEVE/SFEE)

Cyril Besson, Université Grenoble Alpes

Nathalie Duclos, Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès (Présidente SFEE)

Marjory Harper, University of Aberdeen

Philippe Laplace, Université de Franche-Comté (SFEE)

Fabienne Moine, Université Paris Est Créteil (Vice-Présidente SFEVE)

Véronique Molinari, Université Grenoble Alpes (SFEVE/SFEE)

Laurence Roussillon-Constanty, Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour (Présidente SFEVE)

Bibliographie :

Anderson, Robert David, Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland. Schools & Universities, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983.

_, Education and the Scottish People, 1750-1918, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2015.

Anderson, R. D. “Education and the State in Nineteenth-Century Scotland.” The Economic History Review 36, no. 4 (1983): 518–34. https://doi.org/10.2307/2597238.

Auer, Christian, Dubois-Nayt, Armel & Duclos, Nathalie, Femmes, pouvoir et nation en Écosse du XVIe siècle à aujourd’hui, Villeneuve-d’Ascq, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2012.

Auer, Christian, Luttes et résistances des femmes écossaises. 1838-1915, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2013.

Auer, Christian, Scotland and the Scots, 1707-2007. A Reader, Strasbourg, Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2013.

Civardi, Christian, L’Écosse depuis 1528, Paris, Ophrys, 1998.

Devine, T. M, The Scottish Nation 1700-2000, Londres, Penguin Press, 1999.

_, Scotland’s Empire 1600-1815, Londres, Allen Lane, 2003.

Fraser, Hamish & Morris, R. J. (éds.), People and Society in Scotland. Volume 2, 1839-1914, Édimbourg, John Donald, 1990.

Gascoigne John (1996) The cultural origins of Australian universities, Journal of Australian Studies, 20:50-51, 18-27, DOI: 10.1080/14443059609387275

Gifford, Douglas (éd.), The History of Scottish Literature, vol. 3, Nineteenth Century, Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Press, 1988.

Herman, Arthur, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, New York, Crown, 2001.

Hill, C. W., Edwardian Scotland, Édimbourg, Scottish Academic Press, 1976.

Leruez, Jacques. « L’identité de l’Écosse au sein du Royaume-Uni », Diplomatie, n° 2 (2003): 62–67. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26980170.

Leydier, Gilles, “Victorian and Edwardian Scotland”, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, n° 54, 2001.

Macmillan, Duncan, Scottish Art 1460-2000, Édimbourg, Mainstream, 2000.

Pittock, Murray (éd.), The Reception of Robert Burns in Europe, Londres, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

_, The Reception of Walter Scott in Europe, Londres, Continuum, 2006.

_, Scotland: The Global History: 1603 to the Present, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2022.

Smout, T. C., A Century of the Scottish People, 1830-1950, Londres, Fontana, 1987.

Wills, Elspeth, Scottish Firsts: a Celebration of Innovation and Achievement, Édimbourg, Mainstream, 2002.

Webb, R. K. “Literacy among the Working Classes in Nineteenth Century Scotland.” The Scottish Historical Review 33, no. 116 (1954): 100–114.

CFP International conference of the Société Française d’Études Victoriennes et Edouardiennes.

A Scottish Air: Inspirations and models from Scotland

30 and 31 January 2025

Université Grenoble Alpes

In the 18^th century, Voltaire paid tribute to Scotland’s cultural and scientific influence by writing: “We look to Scotland for all our ideas about civilisation”. Within a few decades, this nation had established itself as a major centre of European Enlightenment. Its influence in Britain and beyond the British Isles would last well into the following century and, indeed, into the 20^th century. In the 19^th century, for example, the publications of Walter Scott had a profound impact on British and, more generally, European literature, as they were at the origin of the historical novel. Scotland also made a name for itself by playing a major role in scientific innovation in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, in the fields of energy (James Watt), transport (Macadam, Thomson and Dunlop) and communications (Bell). The Scots also made medical discoveries that were to have a major impact, such as the hypodermic syringe, invented by Alexander Wood in 1853, and the first use of chloroform as an anaesthetic in childbirth by James Young Simpson in 1847. In the arts, the first gallery devoted exclusively to portraiture opened in Scotland in 1889. The group of artists known as The Four produced works that wielded a decisive influence on the emergence of Art Nouveau, an artistic movement that was to become one of the most important art movements of the 20th century.

This visibility, coming from Scotland’s distinct contribution to the United Kingdom, is undoubtedly linked to the conditions that led to its union with England in 1707. Unlike Wales and Ireland, the country had been able to retain its own education system, its own legal system and its own (Presbyterian) Church. Its active participation in the imperial enterprise (notably James Matheson and William Jardine), its exchanges with the world and its significant industrial production also earned one of its cities, Glasgow, the title of “second city of the Empire”, while the Scottish capital claimed the title of Athens of the North as a counterpoint to London, which was considered as the new Rome. For all these reasons, what was happening ‘north of the border’ could, on occasion, be taken as a model – or counter-model – within the British or even Anglo-Saxon world. The English abolitionists (including Josephine Butler) were thus able to contrast the Glaswegian management of prostitution with the laws on venereal diseases adopted by the British government on a more continental regulatory model. The school model, and in particular the role played by parochial schools in Scotland, was also frequently cited as an example in the first half of the 19^th century by advocates of a state-supported education system in England and Wales, while the university model was being exported to some colonies, such as New South Wales.

The spread of a ‘flexible’ Scottish model on a national and international scale was often low-key, due to the ‘plastic’ nature of Scotland’s cultural and political heritage, which was often adaptable to the culture of the recipient (cf. the ‘borrowings’ from Walter Scott by James Fenimore Cooper for instance), and was never really a source of soft power. This is borne out by the “ricochet” influence of the so-called Scotch Baronial style, through the felicity of Balmoral Castle and estate, directly inspired by Scott’s Abbotsford, which Miles Glendinning and Aonghus MacKechnie imply may have infused into the Second Castle Age. This is, more surreptitiously, the case in the discussion of Scott’s estate (a generous host who welcomed writers, politicians and readers of his fiction) that we find in the (often disapproving) writings of his many visitors, both contemporaries (notably Washington Irving) and non-contemporaries (Virginia Woolf).

Finally, in addition to the inspiration it may have generated, and the models it may have offered for some, beyond its borders, in the various fields mentioned, Scotland may also have represented a counter-model for others. In jest, we might think of the amusing expression ‘No true Scotsman fallacy’ in philosophy, and it is perhaps not entirely incidental that this formulation conjures up the figure of the ‘true Scotsman’ and the pitfalls of essentialism, given how much the definition of a supposed ‘Scottish character’ has puzzled people. Robert Knox’s pseudo-scientific opposition between the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic races in his influential study The Races of Men (1850) was partly based on the perceived opposition between Highlanders and Lowlanders, which he transposed to a wider context. This distinction, based on an assumed Scottish model, enabled him to extrapolate the racial future of the imperial context, a discourse that echoed the vast racialist enterprise.

This international conference, to be held at Grenoble Alpes University on 30 and 31 January 2025, will thus focus on Scotland as a source of inspiration and example in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, but also as a counter-model, both within and beyond the borders of the United Kingdom. The aim is to shed new light on this aspect of Scottish history that has yet to be studied.

Possible topics for proposals may include, but are not limited to:

• Scotland as a source of inspiration in the arts and literature;
• Scottish scientific, political, economic and social models (or counter-models) in Great Britain, Europe, in British colonies and the rest of the world;
• One or more Scottish models? Because Scotland is plural, the regional (Lowlands, Highlands & Islands) and religious specificities will be examined.

Paper proposals (20-minute presentation format), written in French or English (approximately 500 words) and accompanied by a short biographical note, should be sent no later than 10 June 2024 to the conference organisers.

marion.amblard@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

cyril.besson@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

veronique.molinari@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

A selection of contributions will be published in the online journal Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens.

Scientific committee

Marion Amblard, Université Grenoble Alpes (SFEVE/SFEE)

Cyril Besson, Université Grenoble Alpes

Nathalie Duclos, Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès (Présidente SFEE)

Philippe Laplace, Université de Franche-Comté (SFEE)

Fabienne Moine, Université Paris Est Créteil (Vice-Présidente SFEVE)

Véronique Molinari, Université Grenoble Alpes (SFEVE/SFEE)

Laurence Roussillon-Constanty, Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour (Présidente SFEVE)

Selected readings:

Anderson, Robert David, Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland. Schools & Universities, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983.

_, Education and the Scottish People, 1750-1918, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2015.

Anderson, R. D. “Education and the State in Nineteenth-Century Scotland.” The Economic History Review 36, no. 4 (1983): 518–34. https://doi.org/10.2307/2597238.

Auer, Christian, Dubois-Nayt, Armel & Duclos, Nathalie, Femmes, pouvoir et nation en Écosse du XVIe siècle à aujourd’hui, Villeneuve-d’Ascq, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2012.

Auer, Christian, Luttes et résistances des femmes écossaises. 1838-1915, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2013.

Auer, Christian, Scotland and the Scots, 1707-2007. A Reader, Strasbourg, Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2013.

Civardi, Christian, L’Écosse depuis 1528, Paris, Ophrys, 1998.

Devine, T. M, The Scottish Nation 1700-2000, London, Penguin Press, 1999.

_, Scotland’s Empire 1600-1815, London, Allen Lane, 2003.

Fraser, Hamish & Morris, R. J. (éds.), People and Society in Scotland. Volume 2, 1839-1914, Edinburgh, John Donald, 1990.

Gascoigne John (1996) The cultural origins of Australian universities, Journal of Australian Studies, 20:50-51, 18-27, DOI: 10.1080/14443059609387275

Gifford, Douglas (éd.), The History of Scottish Literature, vol. 3, Nineteenth Century, Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Press, 1988.

Herman, Arthur, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, New York, Crown, 2001.

Hill, C. W., Edwardian Scotland, Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press, 1976.

Leruez, Jacques, « L’identité de l’Écosse au sein du Royaume-Uni », Diplomatie, n° 2 (2003): 62–67. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26980170.

Leydier, Gilles, “Victorian and Edwardian Scotland”, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, n° 54, 2001.

Macmillan, Duncan, Scottish Art 1460-2000, Edinburgh, Mainstream, 2000.

Pittock, Murray (éd.), The Reception of Robert Burns in Europe, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

_, The Reception of Walter Scott in Europe, London, Continuum, 2006.

_, Scotland: The Global History: 1603 to the Present, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2022.

Smout, T. C., A Century of the Scottish People, 1830-1950, London, Fontana, 1987.

Wills, Elspeth, Scottish Firsts: a Celebration of Innovation and Achievement, Edinburgh, Mainstream, 2002.

Webb, R. K. “Literacy among the Working Classes in Nineteenth Century Scotland.” The Scottish Historical Review 33, no. 116 (1954): 100–114.

________________________________________________________________________________

CFP: The 29^th Annual Dickens Society Symposium

“Dickens, Context and Co-occurrence”

July 15 – 18, 2024

University of Birmingham, UK

We are delighted to welcome you to the University of Birmingham!

The theme of the 2024 symposium will be “Dickens, Context and Co-occurrence”. We invite you think of the various contexts that Dickens’s works are set in, connect to, and imagine. Contexts are where things co-occur – with various effects.

Topics of papers can cover Dickens and the context of theatre, the world of fashion, or the natural environment; Dickens and changing contexts through travel, translation, and time; contexts of family and friends; you may also want to think about the relationship between real world contexts and the textual contexts of the words on the page. As is the case every year, proposals on other aspects of Dickens’s life and works are welcome, too.

Please submit your abstract of 300 words (maximum) and bio of 150 words (maximum) to

dickens2024@contacts.bham.ac.uk

DEADLINE: 15 JANUARY 2024.

Please note that you need to be a member of the Dickens Society to present at the annual conference. Membership is conferred by subscription to Dickens Quarterly. Find out more here.

Birmingham is known for its status as the UK’s “Second City” (after London) and for its industrial heritage. Centrally located in the West Midlands, it boasts excellent transportation access, located less than two hours from London, and has its own international airport. Home to the largest creative sectors outside the capital, it is one of the most multicultural cities of the UK, and also one of the greenest cities in the country. If you are thinking of spending a few days before or after the symposium in Birmingham, you might find this information useful

The University of Birmingham is England’s first civic university. Cultural assets on campus include the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, the Lapworth Museum of Geology and Winterbourne House and Garden. Charles Dickens visited Birmingham on several occasions, the most notable time probably occurring in 1853 when he gave his first public reading of A Christmas Carol in Birmingham Town Hall.

Details about travel, accommodation, and the conference programme will be posted and updated on the Dickens Society website and on the University of Birmingham’s conference page. 

For any questions, please contact the conference organisers, Michaela Mahlberg at m.a.mahlberg@bham.ac.uk & Caroline Radcliffe at C.Radcliffe@bham.ac.uk.

Call for Bursary Applications:

The Dickens Society annually provides bursaries to support the scholarly development of graduate students, independent scholars, and untenured faculty.

For our Symposium in Birmingham, we will be offering bursaries for various social media responsibilities and assistance during the event.

We will be asking bursary recipients to take over the Dickens Society social media accounts during the Symposium, help with running the conference, possibly write a report of the papers to be disseminated afterwards through the Society’s channels, and contribute a blog post on a topic of their choosing for the Society blog within four months of the end of the event.

To apply, graduate students, independent scholars, and untenured faculty whose papers have been accepted should send a one-page CV with a one-page cover letter to Claire Wood, the Society Secretary, at dickenssocietysecretary@gmail.com by 31 May 2024.

The one-page cover letter should specify your academic status and funding (or lack thereof) and discuss the relevance of the Symposium for your research and professional development. It should also outline the following:

• Your own ideas for improving the social media presence of the event/any skills with Twitter and other relevant experience.
• If relevant, a very brief idea for a blog post you might write for the society blog after the event.
• Any relevant previous experience organizing and/or attending online and in-person academic conferences.

The bursary winners will be announced in early June. If you have any queries, please email dickenssocietysecretary@gmail.com.

Robert B. Partlow, Jr. Prize

The Partlow Prize recognizes the best essay submitted for presentation at the Symposium by a graduate student, independent scholar, or contingent faculty member. Applicants for the Partlow Prize must submit a complete essay, suitable for 20-minute presentation time, to the Program Committee Chair, Michaela Mahlberg, at m.a.mahlberg@bham.ac.uk by 1 May 2024.

The Partlow Prize carries a cash award of $500 (or, in the case of co-winners, two prizes of $300 each) and a waiver of the registration fee for the Symposium.

Should the essay be of publishable quality, Dickens Quarterly shall have the right of first refusal. We expect to decide on a winner by end of May.

David Paroissien Prize

The David Paroissien Prize is awarded each year to the best peer-reviewed essay on Dickens published in a journal or edited collection. The Prize is named for David Paroissien, a founding member of the Dickens Society and also the founder of Dickens Quarterly, which he edited from its first issue in 1983 until his final issue in December 2020. As an editor he was rigorous, tactful, and generous, particularly with younger scholars. Under his direction, Dickens Quarterly attracted contributions from Dickens scholars around the world and became a leading venue for new work in the field.

To nominate (or self-nominate) an essay for the Paroissien Prize, please provide a copy of the essay and a cover email giving the name, email address, and institutional affiliation (if any) of its author. For the 2023 competition (essays published 1 January 2023 – 31 December 2023), send these materials to Claire Wood, the Society Secretary, at dickenssocietysecretary@gmail.com by 31 January 2024.

A three-person committee comprised of Officers and/or Trustees will judge submissions.

Please note that, in determining an essay’s eligibility for a given year, the actual date of appearance is what matters, not the nominal date of the journal issue, since it is common for journals to lag behind their publication date. Any author may be nominated for this Prize, whether or not they are a Society member. The Prize carries a cash award of $500 and waives the registration fee for the Symposium at which the recipient will be recognized.

Decisions will be announced by early June 2024 to allow the recipient the option of making travel plans to attend the symposium and accept the prize in-person.

_____________________________________________

Leslie Stephen: Thinking With and Against His Time

International Conference

24-25 October 2024

Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris

Extended deadline: March 31st, 2024

PRISMES – EA 4398, Langues, Textes, Arts et Cultures du Monde Anglophone

CORPUS – UR-UPJV 4295, Conflits, Représentations et Dialogues dans l’Univers Anglo-Saxon

SEW – Société d’Études Woolfiennes

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Dr. Jane Potter (Oxford Brookes University)

Dr. Trudy Tate (Clare Hall, University of Cambridge)

Call for papers:

Early advocate of evolutionism, one of the first openly declared agnostics, editor of the Cornhill Magazine, pioneering mountaineer, moral philosopher, founder and general editor of the DNB: there are so many more facets to Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) than those recorded by his daughter Virginia Woolf, who memorably paid tribute to his “strong,” “healthy out of door, moor striding mind”. By unfolding all the contradictions and paradoxes of the character, this first international conference on Leslie Stephen means to reclaim the full complexity of his thought and legacy. 

Thinking with and against his time, Stephen held a key position at the heart of the Victorian literary scene and was an impressively prolific writer, profoundly engaged with the religious, philosophical and social debates of his age. A highly respected journalist and critic, he edited the Cornhill Magazine from 1871 to 1882, publishing works by George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, John Addington Symonds, Henry James and R.L. Stevenson, and was the author of hundreds of essays, published over the course of forty years in periodicals, such as the Fortnightly Review, Fraser’s Magazine, Macmillan’s Magazine, Mind, the National Review, the Nineteenth Century, the Saturday Review or the Pall Mall Gazette, a vast oeuvre now finally accessible thanks to online databases.  

His devotion to knowledge and integrity were such that he preferred to break with the academic world of Cambridge rather than compromise with the Church. Heir to the Clapham Sect, Stephen engaged with the theological debates of his time to the point of gradually and publicly embracing agnosticism, a form of radicalism that coexisted from then on with forms of traditionalism. 

His own prolific output bears witness to his encyclopaedic mind and his boundless curiosity for all the key issues of the day, however polemical: the anti-slavery movement, agnosticism, educational and social reform… Both a man of his time and a pioneer, Stephenexplored new epistemological modes in keeping with the expanding frontiers of his age, while remaining profoundly anchored in some of the values and hierarchies of the day. 

The DNB, his life’s work, and one of his most ambitious projects, is the finest example of his desire to define new modes of classification and new forms of expression for the expanding knowledge of his time. Breaking with the established narratives of the past, he devised a new approach to writing the biography of the nation, doing away with the grandiose tradition of commemoration. In its place, he developed a more archaeological approach, delving into the past and collating the life stories of all those who helped shape the evolution of the country.

The same pioneering spirit stoked his passion for the Alps and mountaineering, in which he proved as much a trailblazer as he did in intellectual life. It is this conquering spirit that his close friend Thomas Hardy immortalized in his poem “The Schreckhorn, With Thoughts of Leslie Stephen” (1897), which extolled his will to “venture life and limb” as well as the “quaint glooms” of his personality, when paying tribute to Stephen as the first man ever to ascend this mountain.

However daring and rigorous in his endeavours, Stephen was no less a direct heir to the Romantic tradition. An ardent poetry lover, he could quote vast swathes of the poetic canon, from Milton to Wordsworth, Tennyson and Arnold, and would rhythm both domestic life and mountaineering exploits with his recitations. Likewise, despite his allegiance to Victorian models of “Muscular Christianity”, and the manly world of clubs and fellowships, he would at times indulge in various forms of sentimentalism and melodramatic displays of emotion. 

These are some of the contradictions that the participants to this conference are invited to explore. Similarly, his vast output deserves to be reconsidered through diverse critical paradigms, such as new materialist History, print culture studies, new sensory studies, phenomenology, affect studies and ethics, gender studies, health and disability studies.

We welcome contributions focusing on Leslie Stephen, but also on the following topics, connected with his life and times and shedding light on the larger context of his work: 

• Victorian encyclopaedism
• Victorian periodicals, print culture, the publishing industry 
• Biography, the DNB, “hero-worship”
• Stephen’s relations to Victorian sages and prophets
• Letters, epistolarity, literary networks
• Cambridge, academia, education and university reform
• Gentlemen’s clubs, sociability
• 18th century philosophy and literature, the Enlightenment 
• Utilitarianism, Science, Evolutionism
• The Clapham Sect, Agnosticism, Scepticism
• War, the anti-slavery movement
• Morality, the “science of ethics”
• Mountaineering, athletics, walking, nature and travel writing
• Memory, elegy, mourning, the Mausoleum Book, Virginia Woolf & Leslie Stephen

Abstracts of about 300 words, for 25-minute papers in English, together with a short (100-word) author biography, should be sent to the organizers by 31 March 2024 at the following address: leslie.stephen.conference@gmail.com. In case of difficulties tracing Stephen’s works, please contact the organizers, who will be happy to share links and resources.

A selection of peer-reviewed articles based on papers given at the conference will be collected for publication. 

______________________________________________________________

Call for Papers Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens n°102

Full version: Call for Papers Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 102 (1)

Guest editor : Lawrence GASQUET, Université Jean Moulin Lyon III – Institut d’Etudes Transtextuelles  & Transculturelles  (IETT – EA 4186)

Jamais l’âme ne pense sans image.

                               Aristote

I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.

Garry Winogrand

Far from holding up the mirror to nature, which is an assertion usually as triumphant as it is erroneous, it holds up that which, however beautiful, ingenious, and valuable in powers of reflection, [photography] is yet subject to certain distortions and deficiencies for which there is no remedy.

Lady Eastlake

THROUGH A LENS, MECHANICALLY:

THE BIRTH OF PHOTOGRAPHY & THE GENESIS OF A RADICALLY NEW VISION

What if the story crafted by photography was one of distortion, of a technological recasting of the world? What if the ease with which photographs have been accepted as reflections of reality was a conditioned response? What if we have taught ourselves to forget that photography is a source of discontinuity, mediating between the viewer and the world? What if we have become blind to the fact that, by encoding what it captures and presents, photography is a source of rupture rather than of continuity?

We aim to provide an in-depth assessment of the first century of photography (1823-1910), when it was still an experimental technology in France and Great-Britain. This initial period of radical innovation stands in stark contrast with what came after, the period that Vilém Flusser has described as the age of the “redundant image” – a mass visual culture endlessly churning out what are essentially the same images for the same purposes. Our aim will be to highlight the epistemological revolution that photography created, and to sort out the theoretical issues that ensued.

Returning to The Emergence of Photography to See It Afresh (Niepce, Fox, Talbot)

In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes bemoaned the essential transparency of photography: whatever it presents to our eye, and however it does so, a photograph is always invisible: we never see it, in and of itself. (Barthes, 6). We never see it, because we are conditioned to ignore it in favour of what it signifies – we have trained ourselves to recognise only the latter. It is time to refocus our gaze upon the signifier – the photo itself, as a densely symbolic surface.

By concentrating on its early years, it is easier to perceive photography “per se” and avoid being distracted by what it purports to show us. At the moment of its emergence the dissonant potential of the new-born technology was starkly evident: the essential novelty of its output had not yet been obscured by its assumed resemblance to objects pre-existing in the world.  We have failed to take into account the parallels between the invention of photography and that of writing. Before it was conceptualised as a simple filter or prism, before its inventors theorised what they had brought into being, before the public learned to blindly accept and adopt its output, photography was first and foremost an unparalleled innovation in man’s ability to create images. As such, it called out for a whole new hermeneutics. Setting aside the photogram (tracing the contours of light itself on a 1:1 scale, without intermediary); a road less travelled, but whose pioneers (Fox Talbot, Atkins) and stubborn contemporary partisans (Fabian Miller, Derges, Bucklow, Fuss) certainly merit further exploration – the triumphant ascent of the camera during this period cries out for analysis. For the camera – mechanical brush, palette and easel to the photographer – has drawn scant attention from theorists, its ominous omnipresence having gone unnoticed because it was seen as a mere copying machine, an astonishingly efficient means of reproduction.

To Meditate the Mechanics of Photography Is to Realise Our Thoughts About It Have Been Mechanised

The philosopher Vilém Flusser identifies the camera as an apparatus: a complex system that recasts our experience, leading us to behold the world through a specific code (Foucault, Agamben, Crary, Alberti). Flusser insists that power lies with the camera rather than the photographer, with the former subtly bending the latter to its will: “in the act of photography, the camera does the will of the photographer but the photographer has to will what the camera can do” (Reaktion Books, 35). A product of human design, the camera becomes an extension of the body, influencing not only what is seen but what is thought, as demonstrated by Jonathan Crary in Techniques of the Observer, on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century and Kate Flint in The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. Flusser sees the camera as an early instance of programmed playthings capable of simulating thought and encouraging new modes of behaviour and ways of apprehending the world (67). The invention of photography therefore marks the beginning of the post-historical era, where mechanical means both model and determine how mankind interacts with the world.

We shall seek to understand why the spectator (or consumer) has lost consciousness of the fact that photographs are symbolic images rather than simple windows onto the outside world. Observers “consequently do not criticize [photographs] as images, but as ways of looking at the world (to the extent that they criticize them at all). Their criticism is not an analysis of their production but an analysis of the world.” (Flusser, 15). Lost to sight is the fact that photography produces not images of the world, but images born of a theoretical recasting of the world; photographs are always meta-images, no matter how well we have been conditioned to see them as isomorphic reflexions (Van Lier). The apparent objectivity of the photograph is an illusion. At the birth of photography, its abstract, symbolic properties were more apparent, at least until it was classified as a scientific (passively reflecting) rather than artistic (manipulating and creating) discipline. It is easier to see how pioneering photographers produced, manipulated and arranged symbols in the same fashion as a writer or painter (Flusser, 25). When first used, the clairvoyant nature of the camera was evident – its capacity to make visible possibilities that would not exist without it. Fox Talbot wrote as much when he declared, in The Pencil of Nature, « the eye of the camera would see plainly where the human eye would find nothing but darkness » (Plate VIII).

“On the Art of Fixing a Shadow” (Fox Talbot)

For Flusser, mankind needs images to understand the world even though they – paradoxically – obscure and disguise rather than reveal. Photographs are therefore essentially anti-determinist, allowing the invention of new modes of existence compatible with the vision which is crafted by the camera’s intermediation. Photography, and other so-called “technical” means of representation, are (like language) metacodes that reconstruct reality via symbols and imagination, creating an “image” that is only apparently reflective, given it is moulded by thought. Photography creates a shared illusion about the world, one fed by our desire to perceive the things that the camera alone allows us to see (« it is precisely the obscurity of the box which motivates photographers to take photographs. They lose themselves […] inside the camera in search of possibilities » Flusser, 27).

We know – from disparate, but fragmentary, sources – that photography came into being in various places at various times (we can pose the question, along with François Brunet, whether it was a “discovery” or an “invention”), but remained in obscurity for many years (Niepce’s first heliographies are now thought to date from 1823). Its first spectators, unaccustomed to see the world through its lens, had to learn to decode its products. This proved no easy matter. In 1857 Lady Eastlake insisted that Wedgwood and Davy – the first to spot the surface marks left by light (1802) – were entranced by the action of chemicals and photons rather than the objects they seemed to trace (“the importance lay in the first stain designedly traced upon the prepared substance, not in the thing it portrayed”). In similar fashion, and even earlier, Lady Elizabeth Fulhame was entranced in the 18^th century by photochemical traces of colour on textiles as she sought to create fabric woven from gold, silver and other metals. Only once Niepce, Daguerre and Fox Talbot had perfectioned their respective techniques did a consensus come into being, conceptualising the objects they produced into a single category named “photography”.

It is our intention to question this monolithic approach by comparing what happened in the UK and in France in the 19^th century: can a heliograph truly be compared to a daguerreotype or a calotype? Does a cyanotype, through colour, tell us different things than a sepia calotype, and, if so, why and how? What do such comparisons reveal, and what do they conceal? How should we understand the spectacular reduction of scale that photography introduced and the fact that it was taken on board with such apparent ease? Why was such an innovative technique assimilated so rapidly? Was the historical adoption of a common term – photography, chosen by John Herschel – for a variety of images produced by heterogeneous techniques an act of brutal simplification or the recognition of a common essence? Did politics have anything to do with it, given the struggle for technological supremacy between France and England at the moment when Arago announced that France would present the world with the gift of the daguerreotype? How should we view the homogenisation of the photographic process that took place after 1839? Although they all capture traces of light on a photosensitive surface, the cameras invented by Niepce, Daguerre, Fox Talbot, Bayard and their followers differ greatly in all other aspects (mechanics, chemistry, means of framing, type of contact, etc.). By focusing on these differences, can we gain a more critical perspective on the status accorded to photography in the 19^th and 20^th centuries?

Photography as a Conceptual Object

As it was invented and perfected, photography recast the notion of the pictural, introducing a series of ruptures in the fabrication, form and reception of images. The birth of photography can be seen as a disjunctive moment that created an epistemological revolution, suddenly bringing forth multiple possibilities and throwing into question the theoretical status of images.

The heuristic breach opened by this newfound medium was, however, short-lived. The novelty and heterogeneity of its technical procedures – which seemed to leave no room for virtuosity – were seen as placing photography firmly within the scientific, rather than artistic, field. Its radical originality was thus brushed under the carpet. That widespread recognition of photography’s status as a legitimate artistic practice has come only in the past 25 years may well be the result of the haste with which it was lodged in a reproductive niche: a means of producing passive copies of pre-existing objects. What if, rather than focusing exclusively on the resemblances between a photo and its object, we had remained alert to the dissemblance that it operates? That, after all, is what Lady Eastlake asked of us in 1858 when she insisted on the way that photography deforms what it captures.

Excluded from the cult of originality and the realm of virtuosity, photography came to play a key role in the emergence of conceptual art. Jan Dibbet’s “alternative” photography celebrates the impurity and imperfections of the medium, simultaneously capturing objects and making them impossible to see. Duchamp insisted that photography created a shortcut between conception and embodiment, allowing for the projection of pure thought. What if these 20^th century theoreticians were simply rediscovering the insights of photography’s pioneers?

Possible subjects for articles (with a focus on Great-Britain):

• The print and its applications (photograms, lumigrams, cameraless photography, chronophotography by Marey and Muybridge etc.)
• The invention of perspective, the influence of drawing machines and the conceptualisation of reproduction (Brunelleschi’s Tavoletta, de Dürer’s perspectograph, pantograph, physionotrace, camera lucida, camera obscura, etc.)
• Text-image relations, encoding, intertextuality & interpicturality (Fox Talbot, Pencil of Nature, Daguerre, Bouton and the diorama, etc.), discursive and conceptual framework
• Standardisation, normativity, format
• Simplification, automatisation, reproduction, prototypes et stereotypes, matrix vs singularity
• Magic, enchantment, poetry vs science & technology
• Scenography, composition, tableaux vivants, montage, collage, decorative arts et ornementation
• Scale and psychology, macrophotography et astronomical photography, reproducibility, anthropometry, conservation/preservation, private or public sphere, infinite/finite
• Photography vs entropy, vs natural decay (memory)
• Optics & modelisation
• Theory and artworks by William Henry Fox Talbot, Nicéphore Niepce, John Herschel, Anna Atkins, Hippolyte Bayard, Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, Julia Margaret Cameron, Oscar Gustav Rejlander, Henry Peach Robinson, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Christopher Bucklow, Garry Fabian Miller, Susan Derges, Adam Fuss, etc.

Proposals of about 300 words, in French or in English, are to be sent together with a short biographical note to Lawrence Gasquet (lawrence.gasquet@univ-lyon3.fr) by February 16, 2024.

 _____________________________________________

Victorian Heterotopias: Alternative Spaces and Places in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Nineteenth-Century Global Cities and Urban Worlds: An International Symposium
Aix-Marseille University, Schuman campus
6 to 8 June 2024

Keynote speakers

————————————————————————-

RFCB – Call for papers

‘One Nation Conservatism from Disraeli to Johnson’

Deadline for abstracts: January 10, 2022

Catherine Marshall and Stéphane Porion, guest editors of a special issue on ‘One Nation Conservatism from Disraeli to Johnson’, are soliciting contributions for this issue of the Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique (French journal of British Studies, https://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/), an international online peer-reviewed journal published by the Centre de Recherches et d’Etudes en Civilisation Britannique (centre for research in British Studies, https://crecib.org/).

Rationale

The expression ‘One Nation Conservatism’ has taken on a mythical signification ever since Conservative PM Stanley Baldwin used it in a speech on 4 December 1924 at the Albert Hall. Baldwin was taking on the mantle of one of the great former Conservative Prime Ministers, Benjamin Disraeli, who had expressed the need to “bridge the gap between the rich and the poor” and “elevate the condition of the people” in order to achieve social unity in one of his novels, Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845). The cradle of Conservatism can be found in Disraeli’s desire to bring together the ‘two nations’ at the heart of the United Kingdom but also the two types of Victorian Conservative thinking from the industrial North and the rural South. It was in this context that the phrase “One Nation” became a “familiar formula, which was used especially to signpost a Conservative concern with ‘social reform’” (Walton, 1990, 4).

Baldwin declared the Conservative Party stood “for the union of those two nations of which Disraeli spoke two generations ago: union among our own people to make one nation of our own people at home which, if secured, nothing else matters in the world.” (Some extracts from the speech may be found at: http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/161/2012/10/1-of-2.jpg). Baldwin’s use of the term took on a symbolic nature because he was channeling in the expression what had made the greatness of the Conservative party but he was also trying to make sense of what the Conservative Party stood for in the context of the 1920s.

The Disraelian legacy was given life afresh in the aftermath of the Second World War and Labour’s landslide victory in 1945. Some in the Conservative Party were very concerned about the need to adapt Conservative ideas and policies to post-war Britain, and more particularly to cope with the Welfare State set up by Attlee’s Labour Party. This was the time of the “reiteration of Disraelian commitments to social reform” and the emergence of the One Nation Group (Walsha, 2000 & 2003). These ideas “sought to reconcile an industrial democracy with economic and social inequalities”, moving away from a laissez-faire approach and vindicating a Tory approach of government rooted in earlier Tory thinking expressed in the time of Disraeli, which blended Conservatism and democracy altogether (Walton, 1990, 65). The words ‘One Nation’ had thus kept their “incantatory power”, even though, as John K. Walton puts it, “it was not quite what Disraeli had meant by ‘One Nation’” (Ibid). According to Norton and Aughey,

“the formula of One Nation did strike a chord in the minds of Conservatives. If it was a myth that Disraeli had something of practical significance to say to post-war Britain it was an effective myth. It established Conservative credentials to manage the new mixed economy and it represented the fashioning of an electorally successful image of Conservative compassion as well as competence” (Norton & Aughey, 1981, 78).

The Conservative Party and what it stands for are easier to define by referring to Edmund Burke or, today, to a philosopher such as Michael Oakeshott for whom Conservatives prefer “the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried, fact to mystery” (“On Being Conservative”, 1956). Therefore, ‘One Nation Conservatism’ is used, often, by Conservative politicians to keep alive a sort of ‘sacred flame’, a convenient impressionist idea, linked to the past of the UK (Jenkins, 1996, 141-145), mostly against the dangerous consequences of the 1789 French Revolution and its misplaced demands for rational rights. It carries with it a resistance to radical change as well as a willingness to adapt to organic change in an empirical way.

The remarkable ability of British Conservatism to move away from the legacy of Disraelian Conservative paternalism, believing in the Monarchy, the Church and the Empire, to a ‘One Nation Conservatism’ defending the institutions whilst seeking to promote the welfare of the citizens post-WWII, is part of the story.

Later, it was also used by Thatcher in the 1980s to defend her own brand of Conservatism (Green, 2006, Evans, 2009) resting on monetarism, patriotism, and moral expressions of individual responsibility. For example, she declared at the annual Conference of the Conservative Party in 1986:

“We Conservatives believe in popular capitalism – believe in a property-owning democracy. And it works! […] The great political reform of the last century was to enable more people to have a vote. Now the great Tory reform of this century is to enable people more and more people to own property. Popular capitalism is nothing less than a crusade to enfranchise the many in the economic life of the nation. We Conservatives are returning power to the people. That is the way to one nation, one people” (Thatcher, 1986 quoted in Ball, 1998, 179).

However, the ‘Wets’ managed to survive throughout the Thatcher years and did their utmost in the 1980s and even in the 1990s to continue to spread the genuine gospel of ‘One Nation Conservatism’ couched in Disraelian terms.

Years later, in the aftermath of Cameron’s victory at the leadership election, he attempted to regain the political centre in 2006-2007 by advocating the One Nation tradition of Conservatism, before gradually moving back to a neo-Thatcherite stance of Conservatism embodied by his Big Society ideological project (Hayton, 2012, Alexandre-Collier, 2010). Nevertheless, in May 2015, in another context, he also resorted to the use of the moniker to describe the Queen’s speech written by his government as a “One Nation Queen’s Speech for a progressive, One Nation, Conservative Government” (https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/queens-speech-2015).

When Theresa May became Prime Minister in July 2016, she too succumbed to the need to ground her ideas in the mythical expression and gave a speech on the steps of 10 Downing street which was once again an echo to the Disraelian brand (Hickson, Page & Williams, 2020). She pledged to “make Britain a country that works not for a privileged few, but for every one of us” (https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/statement-from-the-new-prime-minister-theresa-may). It is not surprising then that the debates regarding the Johnsonian “levelling-up” agenda today are also part of the same rhetoric and Johnson himself has made his own use of the idea (https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-statement-in-downing-street-13-december-2019),

In the end, it comes as no surprise that the expression has been abused by all types of politicians from all sides of the political spectrum (Ed Milliband’s “One Nation Labour” in 2013 for example) precisely because it can be opportunistically used for the essence it incarnates and for the genuine suspicion that the lower classes may suffer from the changes pushed upon them by an elite cut away from them, both geographically, socially and financially.

The problem remains that the term seems to adapt to the politicians using it, within different contexts and means something in rhetoric but often not in deed. Its elasticity is what makes it the essence of British Conservatism but what does it really stand for, for whom and how? Is its flexibility not also its demise?

Looking at the secondary literature, there are practically not full-length studies of ‘One Nation Conservatism’ but that of David Seawright, entitled The British Conservative Party and One Nation Politics, published before Cameron’s victory in 2010, which was prefigured in a chapter published in 2005 in Kevin Hickson (ed.), The Political Thought of the Conservative Party since 1945 (Seawright, 2005 & 2010). Although there is a range of academic papers on the subject, they usually address this specific brand of Conservatism by studying a specific Conservative Premiership or a group of One Nation Conservatives, such as the One Nation Group (Walsha, 2000 & 2003). Therefore, this Special Issue of the Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique will aim to bridge a gap in historiographical debates and focus on the wider meaning of the expression ‘One Nation Conservatism’, since the 19th century, as the soul of the Conservative Party’s ideas but also as an expression of British politics in a wider sense.

Call for papers

The papers may focus on:

▪ The expression ‘One Nation Conservatism’ and its use in the history of political ideas;

▪ The use of the expression by successive PMs and politicians since the 19th century;

▪ The political culture it is supposed to express;

▪ Social and economic initiatives designed to promote ‘One Nation Conservatism’;

▪ The representation of the expression in cartoons, pictures and art;

▪ Literary representations of ‘One Nation Conservatism’ (for example, Disraeli’s Sybil);

▪ Initiatives to improve its meaning (for example Nick Timothy’s Remaking One Nation, Polity, 2020)

▪ The interaction between ‘One Nation Conservatism’ and other types of Conservatism

▪ Challenges to ‘One Nation Conservatism’;

▪ The use of the expression by other political parties, women and actors in the UK and abroad;

▪ The international impact or lack of it if might have had over the years

▪ Other, any related topics to the subject.

Call for reviews

The Special issue will publish reviews on books related to the subject and published in the last 2/3 years (for example: Edmund Neill, Conservatism, Polity Press, 2021; Edmund Fawcett, Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition, Princeton University Press, 2020).

The editors welcome proposals by advanced PhD students.

Submission guidelines

Please send a 300 to 500 word abstract, a short bibliography and a 5 line biography to both Catherine Marshall (catherine.marshall@cyu.fr) and Stéphane Porion (stephane.porion@univ-tours.fr) by 10 January 2022.

Full proposals will need to be submitted by May 1, 2022.

Instructions for authors (for authors proposing articles in English) can be found at: https://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/344

The issue is scheduled for publication in December 2022.

______________________________________