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V21 Summer Reading Group PNW 2018 (9/6-7)

For the second year running, the 18/19C Grad Research Cluster is organizing the V21 Collective Summer Reading Group for Seattle. The idea is to have an informal discussion about issues of enduring political significance for literary studies, framed through Victorian texts and recent scholarship on them. This year, we want to emphasize that we welcome scholars from all specializations as well as people who work on nineteenth-century Anglophone literature. The readings 
might be of particular interest to those working on queer theory and 
critical race theory. The more diverse the group we gather, the more 
fruitful our conversation will be. Check out #V21summer on Twitter to see the conversations other groups around the world have had. 

Logistical details, links to the readings, and framing questions are below. 
Informal is the emphasis here: read as much as you have time for, or come 
for the readings you’re most excited about. We will provide coffee, tea, 
and snacks, and those who want to will probably wander to the Ave for a 
relaxed group lunch. 

If you’re interested, please RSVP to Matt Poland so we can plan for snacks, etc. Additionally, if you’re particularly interested in a reading and would like to come up with a few guiding questions, let me know when you RSVP, too. Again, no stress: this will just get the discussion going. (N.b. that Wright’s Bad Logic is already spoken for.) 

Please let me know if you have questions, and forward this to anyone you 
think might be interested. 

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Quarterly Reading Group: 18/19C critical race theory (5/16)

Join us for our quarterly reading group today at 3:30 in the English Dept. grad lounge. We will have tea, coffee, and snacks. 

We will be reading the intros from Roxann Wheeler’s The Complexion of 
Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture
(Penn, 2000) and Daniel Hack’s Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (Princeton, 2016) (pdfs attached). Read as much or as little as you can — we look forward to seeing you! 

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Podcasting, Cataloguing, Dancing: public humanities roundtable (Courtney Floyd, Whitney Buccicone, Sarah Faulkner) (5/25)

Please join us on Friday, May 25 at 12pm in COMM 202 (Simpson Center 
seminar room) for a Public Humanities Roundtable. Since this is the 18/19C Graduate Research Cluster’s final event of the academic year, and it’s a 
lunchtime meeting at the end of the quarter, we’ll be providing Pagliacci 
pizza!These short talks and the following discussion will focus on 
innovative ways scholars are connecting with new publics in the university 
and in wider communities. Although the focus will be on nineteenth-century studies, the range of topics addressed will be applicable across 
disciplines and specializations.

Sarah Faulkner (English) is a PhD candidate whose work focuses on women’s writing, nationalism, and the historical novel in the Romantic period. She is also active in Jane Austen fandom, having been the primary organizer of last fall’s JaneFest. She will discuss the intersection of fan culture and academic research, and the possibilities of greater engagement where the two meet.

Whitney Buccicone (UW Libraries) is the Special Collections Cataloging Librarian at the University of Washington Libraries. She is responsible for creating records that allow users to find the materials they need to complete their research. She will be discussing cataloging as a form of outreach for special collections and libraries.

Courtney Floyd (English, University of Oregon), our featured speaker and a PhD candidate focusing on Victorian fiction and disability studies, will be discussing podcasting as a method for outreach and teaching. Using her personal podcast, Victorian Scribblers, and one she’s producing with her students as examples, Courtney will talk about podcasting as a means for advocating for the humanities and for making literature, and our work with it, more accessible to a wider public.

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Devin Griffiths on the biology of form (4/19)

We wanted to draw your attention to an upcoming talk cosponsored by 18/19, Textual Studies, and the Anthropocene crossdisciplinary research cluster. Hope to see you there! 

Thursday, April 19, 2018, 3:30 pm
Communications 202

Devin Griffiths
Associate Professor of English, University of Southern California 

The Biology of Form​:​ Scientific Fixation and the Molecularization of 
Race


What can ecological thought tell us about the nature of forms — biological and social? 
​ ​ 
This talk draws together discussions of literary form, ecocriticism, and 
science studies, but departs from recent accounts of formalism in arguing that form constitutes a relation between things, rather than a shape or a property. Conceived as an event constituted through interaction, form can be understood as the basic unit of ecology, of an ontological sociality that (as Darwin realized) extends throughout the wider lived relations of both natural systems and human societies, and defines the mutual implication of what Bruno Latour has termed nature/culture. 

To explain what this ecological account of form suggests for our readings 
of textual artifacts and their cultural import, I turn to Watson and 
Crick’s 1953 paper, “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acid,” and its 
controversial relation to the X-ray crystallography of Rosalind Franklin. 
This conjunction, I will argue, relied on various strategies of scientific 
fixation, a stabilization of inherently unstable relations—through specific protocols of experiment, publication, and reproduction—that produced both our background confidence in the stability of DNA and the “central dogma” of modern biology. Understood as a process, this account of scientific fixation crystallizes the relation between empirical practice and the literary procedures that Chip Tucker once termed the “fix of form.” Finally, I will suggest what this scientific fixation has meant for more recent iterations of scientific racism and what I describe (following Jordana Rosenberg) as the molecularization of race. 

Devin Griffiths is Associate Professor of English at the University of 
Southern California and the author of The Age of Analogy: Science and 
Literature Between the Darwins (Johns Hopkins, 2016). His research examines the intersection of intellectual history, scientific literature, and the digital humanities, with emphasis on nineteenth-century British literature and science. He is at work on two new book projects: “The Ecology of Form,” which examines how mid nineteenth-century naturalism offers alternative models for ecology and the study of literary form, and “The Radical Catalogue,” which studies the science of order that organized 
nineteenth-century print and natural history collection, and tests the 
relation between empire and modern information technologies. 

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Yuri Cowan on William Morris’s book collecting (10/16)

The Mirror of Everyday Life: William Morris’s Book Collecting and the 
Kelmscott Press

October 16, 3:30 pm 
CMU 202 (Simpson Center Seminar Room) 

Yuri writes:

In accordance with his historical, aesthetic, and political theories, 
William Morris’s collection of medieval manuscripts, early printed books, 
and books about medieval art and material culture were meant to be 
experienced as art-objects, as reading copies, and as texts that provided a 
broad and stimulating picture of the everyday life of the past. In addition 
to their status as exemplars to support Morris’s historical and social 
theories, his library of (mostly German, but also French, Dutch and 
English) incunabula and manuscripts served to influence the design of books at his Kelmscott Press and thus by extension the entire small press 
movement. This lecture will draw on original research into Morris’s 
collecting practices to chart the influence of his library on his and his 
collaborators’ theories in the field of book design, and to outline some of 
the literary and historical principles on which the wide-ranging canon of 
Kelmscott texts was based. 

Yuri Cowan is Professor in the Department of Language and Literature at 
the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, specializing in book history, nineteenth-century literature, and 
medievalism. He has published articles on topics including William Morris; 
the Aesthetic Movement; ballad anthologies and the history of editing; 
Victorian sporting periodicals; and the reprinting of Victorian fantasy in 
the 1970s. His current book project is entitled William Morris and 
Medieval Material Culture, and he is beginning to write about the 
portrayal of book technology in science fiction. He is also a founding 
editor of the online peer-reviewed open-access journal Authorship.
Reception to follow. All are welcome. 

Cosponsored by the Textual Studies Program, the Art History Department, the 18th and 19th Century Graduate Research Cluster, and CMEMS. 

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Linda Hughes on Victorian reception of French fixed-verse forms (10/30)

Linda Hughes (Texas Christian University): “Transnational Print Journeys into French Fixed Verse Forms”
Mon. Oct 30, 3:30pm (CMU 202) 

Linda writes:

Tracing the movement of print and literary forms in the later nineteenth 
century uncovers a complex transnatonality and intersectionality embedded in what might otherwise seem the most esoteric and confined of literary movements: the fixed-form verse revival of the late 1870s and 1880s. Reaching across national and temporal borders, the male coterie of Edmund Gosse, Austin Dobson, and Andrew Lang extolled villanelles, ballades, sestinas, rondeaux, and triolets as means to discipline contemporary English verse and delight connoisseurs. However, the movement did stay confined within elite class or gendered formations but infiltrated popular print in humorous penny weekly papers or political poems and also beckoned women poets from A. Mary F. Robinson to Amy Levy to participate. Ultimately the fixed-form verse revival was a byproduct of a transatlantic literary market, so that the revival rested upon dynamic movements across bodies of water as well as across ostensible divides of nation, gender, and high versus popular culture. 

Reception to follow. All are welcome. 

*** 
Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature at TCU, specializes 
in historical media studies (poetry, periodicals, serial fiction); gender 
and women’s studies; and transnationality. Past monographs include The 
Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry (2010), Graham R.: Rosamund 
Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (2005), and The Victorian Serial (with 
Michael Lund, 1991). She has also co-edited with Sharon M. Harris the 
4-volume transhistorical Feminist Reader: From Sappho to Satrapi (Cambridge UP, 2013) and, with Sarah R. Robbins, Teaching Transatlanticism (Edinburgh UP, 2015). Her current book projects include the transdisciplinary essay 
collection Replication in the Long Nineteenth Century, which she co-edits 
with art historian Julie Codell (now in production at Edinburgh UP) and The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2018), which includes a chapter by U of Washington faculty member Charles LaPorte. As part of a five-member editorial team, she is additionally editing An Anthology of Anglophone Transatlantic Literature, 1776-1920 scheduled for publication in 2020 by Edinburgh UP. 

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Quarterly Reading Group: “Time for Victorian Studies?” (12/6)

Before everyone scatters for the holidays, we’d like to invite you to join 
us for our quarterly reading group on Wed. 12/6 at 3:30 in the English 
Dept Grad Lounge (Padelford B-11).
 

This time around, we’ll use John Bowen’s 2009 essay “Time for Victorian 
Studies?”
as an anchor for thinking about historicist scholarly practices. 
Despite the title and literary focus, I think his argument will resonate 
for people thinking about other periods and other types of cultural objects 
— that is to say, come one, come all. 

We will supplement Bowen with two intertexts for his essay: Walter 
Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
and the opening paragraph of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. We’ve also chosen some visual art to read alongside the texts: Luke Fildes’s “Applications for Admission to a Casual Ward” (1874) and his engraving “Houseless and Hungry” (1869), as well as (naturally) Klee’s “Angelus Novus” (1920). The texts and links to the images can be accessed in this Google Drive folder.

As always, read as much or as little as you can, and come join us 
for camaraderie and coffee.

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Quarterly Reading Group: transatlantic abolitionist poetry (2/28)

Please join us for our quarterly reading group meeting on Wed. 2/28 at 
3:30 pm in the Simpson Center (CMU 202/204). We will have tea, coffee, and snacks aplenty. 

We are focusing on transatlantic abolitionist poetry this time around, 
with Meredith McGill’s essay “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry” (2012) and Rebecca D. Soares’s essay “Material Spirits and Immaterial Forms: The Immaterial Materiality of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Abolitionist Poetry” (2015). The essays examine Harper’s and Browning’s work through the context of performance, ephemerality, and material culture. 

The essays and a selection of FEWH’s and EBB’s poetry (some of which were pulled from The Often Unreliable Internet, so apologies for any misplaced lines that occur) can be accessed through this Google drive folder. Let us know if you have any troubles accessing the readings. Feel free to read as much or as little as you can, and we look forward to seeing you on Feb. 28! 

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Classics Retold: Celebrating Classical Reception from Aldus Manutius to William Morris (Rare books workshop) (4/4)

Please join us and our early modern colleagues for: 

Wednesday, April 4th, 3:30-5:00
Classics Retold: Celebrating Classical Reception from Aldus Manutius to William Morris
Join the 18th and 19th century Graduate Research Cluster, the Classics, 
Medieval, and Early Modern Studies Group, and UW Special Collections 
on Wednesday, April 4th for a hands-on rare books session, featuring translations, adaptations, and artistic responses to Greek and Latin literature from the sixteenth century to today. As part of “Whan that Aprille Day” (the annual celebration of old, dead, and undead languages and literatures), come explore the continued material legacy of classical texts and their retellings across different cultures, languages, and times, and familiarize (or re-familiarize) yourself with UW’s Special Collections holdings. 
Location: Allen Library, Special Collections Classroom

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Ecology and Religion in 19C Studies conference (9/18-21)

Registration (free!) is now open for the upcoming distributed conference co-hosted by UW, Ecology and Religion in Nineteenth Century Studies. Featuring keynote panels including Gauri Viswanathan, Mike Berners-Lee, and our own Gary Handwerk, this promises to be a stimulating conference we can enjoy from the comfort of home. (You could take that literally and watch the livestreams at home, but we hope you’ll join us in person at UW!) 

The primary events to be hosted locally will be on campus on Thursday, 9/19. These include a keynote panel with Gary and a roundtable seminar on ecology, religion, and literature from 3-4:30. Both of these will be live-streamed over the conference website. 
If you’re interested in attending, please do the following two things:

  1. Conference: register for the overall conference at https://sites.baylor.edu/ecologyreligion/
  2. Seminar: RSVP to conference organizer Charles LaPorte to receive readings for the 9/19 seminar (and so that we can plan for refreshments)