The London Nineteenth-Century Studies Graduate Strand is pleased to announce that our upcoming in-person conference will take place on Saturday, 11th February. This year’s conference will explore the themes of ‘Home and Away’ in the long nineteenth century.
The nineteenth century was a period in which industrial and technological advancements enabled national as well as international travel. This in turn to a clear differentiation between what was meant by ‘home’ and ‘away’. With nineteenth century citizens denied the mobility that we enjoy today, this conference intends to discover the ways nineteenth century citizens facilitated and engendered ideas of the home and that of being away, through written words, technological inventions or the exchange of material things.
This conference features papers from PGRs and ECRs, as well as a Keynote talk from Dr Mary Shannon at the University of Roehampton, which looks at Billy Waters and African American culture in early New York.
The conference will be held in person at Senate House, London.
Please see below for the programme. The detailed programme, with abstracts and speaker information, is also available.
Registration and welcome
9:00-9:45
Keynote: Dr Mary L. Shannon (University of Roehampton)
Complicating ‘Home’ and ‘Away’: The Busker Billy Waters and 19th Century Black Performers in New York and London
9:45-11:00
Break
11:00-11:15
Panel 1: Service and care
11:15-12:15
Hendrikje Kaube (Freie Universität Berlin)
Acquiescence and Acrimony: Working Gentlewomen in Victorian and Edwardian Homes
Lourdes Salgado Vinal (University of Liverpool)
Geocriticism and Gendered Spaces in G. W. M. Reynolds’s Servant Novels
Charlotte Wilson (University of Oxford)
Caregiving in the Home, Character, and Self-Suppression in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit
Lunch
12:15-1:00
Panel 2: Childhood
1:00-2:15
Harriet Salisbury (University of Roehampton)
Hogwarts or Heaven: Harry Potter and the Blessed Child
Sophie Thompson (University of Kent)
The Socialist Utopia as Child’s Play: The Games of H. G. Wells and E. Nesbit
Pamela Mansell (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Home and away as Viewed through the Pages of the Maidstone and Southend Secondary School Magazines at the End of the Long Nineteenth Century
Panel 3: Empire
2:15-3:30
Samuel Cheney (University of Edinburgh)
Listening to Empire, Hearing Race: Music and Sound in British Travel Writing from China, c. 1860 – c. 1920
Nicola Froggatt (National Trust)
Whose Home Now? How Western Australian Settlers Used Aboriginal Objects to Control Narratives at the Glasgow International Exhibition (1901)
Chetna Jena (University of Greenwich)
“Lost in a Tangle”: Visions of Vegetal Vitality in the Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells
Break
3:30-3:45
Panel 4: Travel and Migration
3:45-5:00
Arthur Charlesworth (City, University of London)
Up the Junction: The Potential Energy of the Victorian Railway Station
Anna Dadaian (UCL) and Anastasia Sitnina (Independent Scholar)
Life in American Frontier Boomtowns: A New “Home”
Beth Mills (University of Exeter)
Writing from ‘Exile’: Scientific Identity in Grant Allen’s Early Letters to Herbert Spencer
Closing remarks
LNCSS Graduate Strand 