UW 18/19Please join us at Shultzy’s Bar & Grill on The Ave (4114 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105) this Friday, March 4th at 6pm for an in-person reception in honor of NAVSA’s annual conference. No conference participation is necessary to join! Come chat about the conference, the quarter, or whatever else you like! 18/19 will buy one drink per person (21+), plus some bar food to share.
Be sure to bring proof of vaccination!
Want to get feedback on a draft of a seminar paper, conference paper, article, or dissertation chapter relating to the 18th or 19th centuries? Join us for a works-in-progress workshop on Friday, February 25th at 3:00 pm in CMU 202. Participants should submit their drafts to Laura Gehrke at lgehrke@uw.edu by 9am on Tuesday, February 22nd. 18/19 coordinators will group participants according to the length of their drafts, matching each participant with one or two others. Participants should read these drafts before the works-in-progress workshop meeting.
This peer-to-peer workshop is designed for graduate students at any stage in the program, from first-years to those finishing their dissertations. Any draft (including partial drafts) with a loose connection to the 18th or 19th centuries is welcome.
This event will be in person. Please wear a mask.
Questions? Contact Laura Gehrke at lgehrke@uw.edu.
Join us on Friday, February 18th at 9:30 a.m. via Zoom for a conversation with Emma Mason about Christina Rossetti’s ‘To What Purpose is this Waste?’.
Emma Mason is a professor in the department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick whose work focuses eighteenth and nineteenth-century poetry and religion.
Register for the Zoom session by clicking here.
Participants will receive a link to the poem and the Zoom meeting in their registration emails.
Join us on Friday, October 30 at 4pm PDT on Zoom for a Halloween reading group! We will be discussing two Victorian ghost stories:
– “The Old Nurse’s Story” by Elizabeth Gaskell
– “Thurnley Abbey” by Perceval Landon
Registration required: https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0sc-qhrTMiGdWsWL5bgwObq9V6M4kxtxss
Questions? Contact Laura Griffith at lgriff2@uw.edu
Join us on Thursday, Sept. 24 at 4pm on Zoom for a discussion about anti-racism anchored by essays from the forthcoming Victorian Studies special issue, Critical Race Theory and the Present of Victorian Studies (ed. Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, Amy R. Wong). Read a version of the editors’ introduction that has already generated lots of discussion in the LA Review of Books.
Contacts:
Readings:
Several authors included in the special issue have generously shared advance copies of their essays with us. Thank you to them!!
As always, read as much or as little as you can!
Please do not distribute or cite the readings without permission from the author.
This quarter, our reading group will meet on Thursday, Feb. 20 at 3:30pm in the Simpson Center seminar room (CMU 202). We will focus on questions of respectability arising from Charles Darwin’s work, especially The Descent of Man, which details his theory of sexual selection, and how they manifested in literature and culture. As always, our discussion will be informal and convivial: please read as much or as little as you can of these (pretty short) readings and join us for a chat and a snack.
Our readings will be:
Please email Matt Poland to RSVP and he’ll trade you PDFs of the readings.
Our first talk of the new year will be presented by Dr. Devin Garofalo, who joins us from University of North Texas. A scholar of nineteenth-century poetics and environmental humanities, Devin will be sharing a talk entitled, “‘What’s a world, more or less?’: Nebular Planetarity and Formal Abstraction in Victorian Skies.” The talk will take place on Wednesday, January 8 at 3pm in Denny 359 (the Germanics Dept. seminar room). Please also join us afterwards for happy hour with the speaker at the College Inn Pub from 4:30.
Devin writes:
In “System of the Heavens” (1846), Thomas De Quincey wonders: “What’s a nebula, what’s a world, more or less?” De Quincey’s contemporaries were some of the first to identify nebulae for what they are: clouds of interstellar dust and gas, many of which consolidate over slow time into planetary systems. Of particular interest to thinkers from John Herschel to Elizabeth Barrett Browning are nebular forms, which “sho[w] how difficult it is to assign correctly the figure of an object which has no outline, but shades away insensibly on all sides.”
In their attempts to map nebulae and thereby resolve formal abstraction, Victorian astronomers resorted to figurative modes of representation. But figures, like eyes and telescopes, are prone to failure. This talk takes seriously the inadvertent work of analogical failure. It does so to explore how such failure might make visible an Earth which disfigures the liberal subject and thereby unsettles the colonial “we” of the Anthropocene; which, in Elizabeth Povinelli’s terms, “turn[s] away from certain forms of existence” and “withdraw[s]” from normative ways of knowing; which does not passively await figuration but is a co-conspirator in the project of representing our Victorian—and increasingly no-analog—present.
In the spirit of end-of-quarter conviviality, we thought we’d combine a reading group discussion with happy hour. To wit, please join us next at 4:30 next Thursday, 12/5, at the College Inn Pub, where we will discuss Carolyn Betensky’s new essay, “Casual Racism in Victorian Literature” (Victorian Literature & Culture 47.2, Winter 2019). Victorian-focused certainly, but with much to interest colleagues working in other national or linguistic contexts. By way of tantalization, here is an excerpt:
The first time a casually racist reference crops up in the Victorian texts I teach, I tell my students that the presence of slurs and stereotypes in Victorian literature reflects the prevalence of racism in Victorian society. I give them some historical context for the racism whenever possible and smile stoically. Yes, I say, that expression in the novel I’ve made you purchase and that I’m encouraging you to find fascinating is indeed racist. Let’s talk about how racist it is and why! The second time an explicitly racist reference crops up, we refer to the previous conversation. The third time it does, we look meaningfully at each other and shake our heads. The fourth time it does, we don’t even mention it. We learn, like the Victorians, to take it for granted.
Please email Matt Poland to RSVP and I’ll trade you a PDF of the essay. If you download the essay yourself, RSVP to me anyway so we know how big a table to get.
We hope you’ll join us for a chat, a drink, or some pub nachos — preferably all three.
The UW Eighteenth/Nineteenth Century Graduate Research Cluster will be hosting a happy hour to welcome VISAWUS to Seattle on Wednesday, 11/6 at 5pm at Altstadt in Pioneer Square. Here’s the address:
Altstadt Bierhalle & Brathaus
209 1st Ave S, Seattle, WA 98104
This is a 5 minute walk from the conference hotel (Marriott Courtyard Seattle Downtown/Pioneer Square). We hope this will be a chance for Seattle area Victorianists and folks who have arrived from out of town to get together and mingle before the conference kicks off. We will provide some appetizers and a few pitchers of bier!
Looking forward to seeing you there.
Please join the Eighteenth/Nineteenth Century Graduate Research Cluster at 4:30pm on Thursday, October 24 in Allen Library Research Commons Seminar Room Red C for a presentation by Dr. Katherine Anderson (English, Western Washington University) entitled “Angry White Men: Torture and Settler Sovereignty in Colonial Fictions of South Africa and the Pacific.”
Reception to follow in the Petersen Room (Allen Library 485).
Katherine writes:
When “The Methodical Mr. Burr of Majuru” (1895) discovers his wife on the verge of committing adultery, he acts swiftly. Mr. Burr, a fictional British trader in the Marshall Islands, follows his indigenous wife to her assignation and cuts off the head of her lover with one hand while holding her in place with the other. He then forces his wife to carry the head into town and stand on display with it, while singing the song her lover used to woo her. Ned Burr’s deliberate use of spectacular cruelty seemingly situates him far outside the bounds of a liberal British government, an anachronistic loner whose grasp at sovereignty stands in stark contrast to the humanitarian bureaucracy of a modern civilization. Yet he is not alone. Late-Victorian colonial fictions by authors such as Louis Becke (Mr. Burr’s creator), Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bertram Mitford often depict white settlers asserting their absolute sovereignty through the torture of indigenous subjects. This paper argues that in implementing torture to quell rebellion, citizens of empire actually appropriate the state-of-emergency rhetorics originally used to justify the British state’s torture of citizen-subjects in reaction to perceived social crises. In both cases, whether perpetrated by the state or by the individual outside the law, torture serves as a means of justifiable terrorism meant to reassert British sovereign authority. By transferring the state’s rhetorics of sovereignty, emergency, and sanctioned violence onto individual citizens within the Empire, these fictions undermined state terrorism and made significant contributions to evolving definitions of citizenship and human rights at the close of the nineteenth century.