Keynote Speakers
Lynda Joy Sperling
Keynote Address: "The Tourist View: Victorian Women Abroad"
Friday evening, April 3rd
Joy Sperling is an associate professor of art at Denison University where she specializes in art history, particularly modern art and the history of photography. She has published in the areas of 19th century American and British art, modern art, and postmodern art. Sperling is the author of Famous Works of Art in Popular Culture (Greenwood Press, 2003) and numerous book chapters including “Prints and Photographs in Nineteenth Century England: Visual Communities, Cultures and Class” in A History of Visual Culture: Western Civilization from the 18th to the 21st Century (forthcoming in Spring 2009). Author of an exhibition catalogue for Out of Belfast (Three Women Artists from Belfast): Herbert, Kelly, and O’Baoill, she was also curator for a Denison University Museum exhibit of the same name. Sperling has co-edited The Anglo-American Artist in Italy, 1750-1820 as well as a special issue of the Journal of American Culture titled American Art and Visual Culture (March 2008). Most recently, her articles have appeared in The Journal of American Culture and Nineteenth Century Worldwide. Her current book project is titled "The Paper Currency of Art: The Art Union in The United Kingdom and the United States."
Alison Booth
Keynote Address: "Recovery 2.0: Exhibiting Women's Collective Biographies"
Saturday luncheon, April 4th
Alison Booth, professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Cornell U P, 1992) and How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (U Chicago P, 2004; winner of the Barbara Penny Kanner prize). She has edited an essay collection, Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure (U P of Virginia, 1993) and the Longman Cultural Edition of Wuthering Heights (available 2008), and is the co-editor with Paul Hunter and Kelly Mays of the Norton Introduction to Literature (10th edition forthcoming).
Her more recent work in bibliography, publishing history, and digital humanities has guided the online project Collective Biographies of Women: An Annotated Bibliography, part of the NINES consortium and the Scholar’s Lab at the University of Virginia. With longstanding interests in the constructions of authorship, literary history, gender, and narrative—in particular, collective biography—her research and teaching have spanned nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American literature. Her articles have appeared in Victorian Studies, Journal of Victorian Culture, Kenyon Review, American Literary History, and elsewhere. Portions of her current book-length study, “Homes and Haunts: Transatlantic Author Country,” are published in The Henry James Review, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. She has served as president of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature (2005), co-organizer of the 3rd Annual North American Victorian Studies Association Conference (2005), and judge of both Perkins (Narrative) and Lowell (MLA) book prizes.
Thursday Evening Roundtable
“Refreshing Conceptions of the Other”
At the 2008 British Women Writers Conference at Indiana University, Susan Fraiman challenged our customary approach to feminist scholarship. She highlighted the necessity of moving beyond our familiar mode of critique to focus on producing “new knowledge” that will help us justify the relevance of the humanities to university administrators and to the public. Because so much research on women’s writing has critiqued the dominant structures and ideologies that make women marginal (both in terms of gender and in terms of other categories like class, race, age and religion), scholarship on “the other” is perhaps one of many areas that contribute to this mode of critique. We have invited three panelists to present how their research and teaching might help revitalize scholarship on “the other” and to discuss how we can articulate this scholarship as fresh knowledge to a wider public. Panelists will also help us to discover what threads of connection can be drawn between different kinds of female others.
Misty Anderson
Misty Anderson's current project, Enthusiastic Methods, is a study of the ways that the concept of religious enthusiasm, most prominent in the rise of Methodism, shaped the eighteenth-century's notions of gender, sexuality, and national identity. Early versions of that project are included as essays in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (2005) and the collection Launching Fanny Hill. Her first book, Female Playwrights: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage (Palgrave, 2002) looked at the comedies of the first generation of female playwrights as popular negotiations of changing ideas in British marriage law over the course of the eighteenth century. She has also published articles on Margaret Cavendish, Jane Barker, and Jane Austen, and is a contributor to The Cambridge Guide to British Theatre, 1730-1830 and The MLA Guide to Teaching British Women Playwrights of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century. She currently an associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee, where she also co-edits the journal Restoration.
Florence Boos
Florence S. Boos is a professor of English at the University of Iowa, with special interests in Victorian poetry and non-fiction prose, Pre-Raphaelitism, and feminist and working-class literature. The author of monographs on Dante G. Rossetti and William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise, she has edited Morris’s Socialist Diary, his Earthly Paradise, a special issue of Victorian Poetry (34.3) devoted to working-class poetics, and most recently, Working-Class Women Poets of Victorian Britain: An Anthology (Broadview 2008). She is also preparing an Online Morris Edition, in progress at The University of Iowa, and a book on Victorian working-class women’s writing.
Shuchi Kapila
Shuchi Kapila’s research and teaching interests include postcolonial studies, colonial literature and culture, South Asian literature, the English novel, and feminist theory. Her publications include “The Domestic Novel Goes Native: Bithia Mary Croker’s Anglo-India” (forthcoming in Nineteenth-Century Contexts), a book review on recent Partition literature (Interventions, 1.2), “Educating Seeta: The Erotics and Politics of Pedagogy in the Colonial Romance” (Victorian Studies, 41.2), “The Other” (Dictionary entry in Feminist Literary Theory: A Dictionary. Garland Publishing, 1997), and “The Poverty of Theory” and “An Interview with Aijaz Ahmad” in The Bookpress (April 1993). Her current project is a book-length manuscript on family romances of British India. Kapila is an associate professor of English at Grinnell College in Grinnell, IA.
Devoney Looser
Devoney Looser is the author of Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850 (forthcoming, Johns Hopkins UP, 2008) and British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2000; paperback 2005). The latter was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and received honorable mention for the Outstanding Book of 2000 from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Looser has edited Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism (Palgrave Macmillan, 1995) and co-edited Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue (U of Minnesota P, 1997). Since 2004, she has served as co-editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. She is currently an associate professor of English at the University of Missouri.
Saturday Evening of Recitations
Judith Pascoe
Introduction to the evening of recitations
Judith Pascoe is the author of Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Cornell, 1997) and The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors (Cornell, 2006). She is completing a book about Sarah Siddons's voice and the acoustic transformation of the romantic theatre. She teaches classes on romantic literature, on collecting history and theory, and on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century drama at the University of Iowa.