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SUMMARY:Nineteenth-Century Gothic Afterlives
DESCRIPTION:Nineteenth-Century Gothic Afterlives\nFree and Online One-Day Halloween Workshop\nFriday 31st October\, 10.45 am  ̶  5.00 pm (Central European Time)\nRegistration is required. Sign up here.  \n  \nThe Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International (CN-CSI) is pleased to announce a one-day interdisciplinary workshop on Halloween (Friday 31st October) exploring how the global afterlives of nineteenth-century Gothic art\, media\, and culture continue to haunt our multimedia present. \nFrom dark digital adaptations of Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ (1843)\, to whimsical animated revivals of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Canterville Ghost’ (1887)\, and innumerable reimaginings of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) through renderings of Nosferatu\, Van Helsing\, and even the count’s ship\, the Demeter\, nineteenth-century Gothic imagery has left an indelible global footprint on our cultural imagination. As Fred Botting emphasises\, these ‘ghostly returns of the past’ turn audiences inwards as they reveal both ‘fearful and exciting incursions of barbarity’\, but also expose ‘primitive and archaic forces deeply rooted in the human mind’. Modern audiences across the globe continue to return to – and crucially\, update – the doppelgängers\, ghosts\, and vampires of our nineteenth-century past in order to reframe a beleaguered present plagued with hauntingly similar uncanny anxieties. \nWith a focus on a wide range of multimedia adaptations\, receptions\, revivals\, and reimaginings\, this workshop will examine the Gothic afterlife of the nineteenth century as seen through modern texts\, radio\, video game culture\, film\, television\, and artistic practice. \n  \n\nFull Programme: Nineteenth-Century Afterlives\nFriday 31st October\, 10.45am –5.00pm (CET)\n**All times are in Central European Time (CET)** \n  \n10.45am – 11.00am (CET) Welcome Address \n11.00am – 11.45am (CET):\nSpeaker 1: ‘Melmoth in the Tropics: The Wanderer from Argentina to Caliwood’\, Dr Sonja Lawrenson (Manchester Metropolitan University). \n11.45am – 12.00pm (CET) Break \n12.00pm – 12.45pm (CET):\nSpeaker 2: ‘Adapting Heathcliff; or\, the Gothic Has an anti-Roma Racism Problem’\, Dr Sam Hirst (University of Liverpool). \n12.45pm – 2.00pm (CET) Break \n2.00pm – 2.45pm (CET):\nSpeaker 3: ‘From Gothic Pages to Haunted Airwaves: Nineteenth-Century Horror in Radio and Podcast’\, Professor Richard Hand (University of East Anglia) \n2.45pm – 3.00pm (CET) Lunch Break \n3.00pm – 3.45pm (CET):\nSpeaker 4: ‘Re-Enchanting the Laboratory: The Occult Transformation of Science in Horror Video Games’\, Marijke Valk (University of Birmingham). \n3.45pm – 4.00pm (CET) Break \n4.00pm – 4.45pm (CET):\nSpeaker 5: ‘Taboo\, Regency Romance\, Gothic and the Reframing of History’\, Dr Derek Johnston (Queen’s University Belfast). \n4.45pm – 5.00pm (CET):\nClosing Remarks: Dr Emma Merkling (University of Manchester\, Durham University). \n  \n\nFull Programme and Abstracts\n10.45am – 11.00am (CET): Welcome Address \n11.00am – 11.45am (CET): Speaker 1: Dr Sonja Lawrenson (Manchester Metropolitan University)\, ‘Melmoth in the Tropics: The Wanderer from Argentina to Caliwood’ \nPublished in 1820\, contemporary reviewers characterized Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer as a belated and outmoded gothic horror; one more at home in the 1790s than in the final decade of the Romantic era. It is perhaps somewhat surprising\, then\, that its eponymous anti-hero repeatedly resurfaces in the twentieth century across Latin America’s shifting cultural landscapes. This revenant Melmoth testifies to the malleability and dynamism of Gothic’s transnational transmission from the late eighteenth century to the present day. As a member of the Protestant Ascendancy in nineteenth-century Ireland\, Maturin was a beneficiary of Anglo-Irish hegemony. His protagonist\, Melmoth\, is also anchored in this sectarian history as a soldier of Cromwell’s Irish campaign. Maturin’s text situates Ireland’s fraught colonial politics within a larger frame of British and Spanish imperialism. Pursuing the colonial connections between Melmoth the Wanderer and the transnational fictions and literary worlds that it continues to haunt\, this paper traces the elaborate nexus of cultural and political channels through which Melmoth circulated in Latin America. In so doing\, it situates the text and its afterlives within an intricate yet uneven economy of colonial and postcolonial exchange where generic and national hierarchies are often mutually reinforcing but equally unstable. \nSonja Lawrenson is Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University\, where she co-directs the Long Nineteenth-Century Network. Her research centres on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish fiction. She has published on a range of Irish Romantic writing\, including the works of Frances Sheridan\, Maria Edgeworth\, and Sydney Owenson. \n  \n12.00pm – 12.45pm (CET): Speaker 2: Dr Sam Hirst (University of Liverpool)\, ‘Adapting Heathcliff; or\, the Gothic Has an anti-Roma Racism Problem’ \n“You really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book.” Kharmel Cochrane\, casting director for the 2025 Wuthering Heights \nWuthering Heights is\, indeed\, ‘just’ a book. But\, there is very little ‘just’ about books as they both reflect and affect the world which creates them. The same can be said\, of course\, for the seemingly endless stream of Wuthering Heights adaptations which have hit stages and television and cinema screens since the first in 1920. The dismissal of Heathcliff’s racialisation encompassed by Cochrane’s response to complaints about Heathcliff’s casting not only ignores important currents in the original text\, which reflect contemporary attitudes towards and conditions for Romani people\, but reflects a present-day disinterest in Romani history\, rights and marginalisation. Heathcliff’s racial identity is ambiguous; but this talk builds on Madeline Potter’s reading of this very ambiguity as reinforcing the Romani identity associated with Heathcliff multiple times in the text (he is referred to as a ‘gipsy’ six times). In discussing Heathcliff’s Romani racialisation\, it also builds on a cinematic tradition\, particularly strong in early adaptations\, of describing and depicting Heathcliff as explicitly Romani and seeks to explore how this early acknowledgement of race became displaced in subsequent adaptations. \nThis talk will explore a history of Wuthering Heights adaptation from 1920 to the current day\, looking at a variety of case studies and charting the ways in which Heathcliff’s racialisation has been acknowledged\, erased or depicted. It will chart the move towards a ‘white’ Heathcliff from early adaptations’ insistence on his Romani identity and will chart the history of later adaptations attempts or failure to grapple with Heathcliff’s racialisation. While contemporary discussion of Andrea Arnold’s 2010 depiction and its casting of James Howson celebrated the series as a unique attempt to address this racialisation through representation\, this talk will argue that Arnold’s version should not be seen as ground-breaking in its approach. Rather\, this talk will showcase how earlier stage productions addressed the racialisation of Heathcliff through casting and that Arnold’s version fails to explore in any depth Heathcliff’s racialisation. It will also discuss whether the contemporary celebration of Arnold’s adaptation owes more to the desire to appear inclusive than the sincere will to grapple with the difficult and demanding questions of the text\, and its adaptations\, can and should pose for the contemporary viewer. It will also argue that the failure in both current adaptations and scholarship to address the racialisation of Heathcliff as Romani is part of a wider trend of apathy towards the realities of anti-Roma racism’s insidious grip on modern British society. Beyond the broader issue of erasing the racialisation of Heathcliff in the text\, this session will focus on how ignoring Heathcliff’s association with Romani identity relates to a larger problem in popular culture and Gothic studies – the failure\, or lack of desire\, to grapple with the Gothic and contemporary society’s depiction and treatment of the Roma. \nSam Hirst is a Tutor in Continuing Education at the University of Liverpool. They are a frequent collaborator with the Bronte Parsonage and are running a course on ‘Bronte Afterlives’ this year online. Sam created and manages Romancing the Gothic\, an accessible programme of Gothic talks with an annual conference. You can find the schedule and recordings of past talks here: https://romancingthegothic.com/class-schedules/. \n  \n2.00pm – 2.45pm (CET): Speaker 3: Professor Richard Hand (University of East Anglia)\, ‘From Gothic Pages to Haunted Airwaves: Nineteenth-Century Horror in Radio and Podcast’ \nAudio is uniquely suited to Gothic horror\, translating the shadows\, whispers\, and dread of nineteenth-century literature into intimate\, immersive experiences. From the howls of wolves and rattling chains to the subtle creak of a door\, sound evokes the unseen terrors that define the Gothic tradition. Horror sound designer Graham Reznick observes that audio can “unwrite and rewrite reality\,” a power that aligns perfectly with the atmosphere of classic Gothic fiction. \nThis talk will trace the adaptation of nineteenth-century Gothic literature into over a century of horror audio. From early US and UK radio broadcasts – including The Witch’s Tale\, Mercury Theatre on the Air\, Quiet\, Please and Appointment with Fear – to contemporary podcasts\, these productions demonstrate how the Gothic imagination thrives in sound. Hand will explore how scriptwriting\, voice acting\, and sound design transform canonical texts into terrifyingly vivid experiences\, while examining the interplay between literary source material and technological innovation. \nDrawing on both historical research and his own work as a scriptwriter for the National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre on the Air – a podcast series now preserved in the Library of Congress – this talk will demonstrate how audio adaptations sustain and reinvent the Gothic\, proving that the nineteenth-century imagination continues to haunt the airwaves today. \nRichard J. Hand is a Professor of Media Practice and Head of Literature\, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia\, UK. He has a particular interest in cross-media forms of popular culture\, especially horror. He is the author of two monographs on horror radio Terror on the Air: Horror Radio in America\, 1931-52 (2006) and Listen in Terror: British Horror Radio from the Advent of Broadcasting to the Digital Age (2014); the co-author of four volumes on Grand-Guignol horror theatre (2002\, 2007\, 2016\, 2022); and numerous other studies of diverse horror media including\, most recently\, as the co-editor of American Horror Story and Cult Television: Narratives\, Histories and Discourses (2023). Aside from academic work\, he is a theatre and radio scriptwriter and director. He is the lead scriptwriter for the US-based National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre on the Air\, a podcast drama series which\, in 2020\, was acquired by the Library of Congress for preservation in recognition of ‘its cultural and historical importance’. \n  \n3.00pm – 3.45pm (CET): Speaker 4:Marijke Valk (University of Birmingham)\, ‘Re-Enchanting the Laboratory: The Occult Transformation of Science in Horror Video Games’ \nWhile science is often regarded as a tool to demystify the unknown\, its power to shape the natural world imbues it with almost magical qualities\, evoking both awe and fear. In many modern horror narratives\, supernatural threats are reimagined as what Asma (2009) terms ‘medicalised monsters’: phenomena once linked to the magical or occult are now rationalised through science\, making the monstrous biologically comprehensible. However\, this paper argues that contemporary horror video games often resist such rationalisation\, entwining science with occult aesthetics\, ritualistic symbols\, and Gothic imagery. \nVideo games such as Bloodborne (2015) and Resident Evil Village (2021) create worlds in which science and the occult are inseparable\, challenging our conceptions of what is ‘unnatural’. In these games\, virology\, genetic mutation\, and blood transfusion are presented not as rational processes\, but as esoteric\, channelling a distinctly Victorian Gothic tradition that re-enchants science as arcane\, unknowable\, and uncontrollable. Science\, once a promise of mastery over the unknown\, now carries its own mysteries\, making it feel less like progress and more like dark magic. By tracing these Gothic continuities\, this paper demonstrates how video games reconfigure nineteenth-century anxieties into modern fears of genetic manipulation\, bodily autonomy\, and the limits of scientific mastery.\nMarijke Valk is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham. Her project explores the Victorian alchemical revival and the re-enchantment of science in fin-de-siècle fiction. She has a forthcoming chapter with Palgrave Macmillan in Victorian Gothic and the Occult on Rosicrucian alchemists in early and mid-Victorian Gothic fiction. \n  \n4.00pm – 4.45pm (CET): Speaker 5: Dr Derek Johnston (Queen’s University Belfast)\, ‘Taboo\, Regency Romance\, Gothic and the Reframing of History’ \nThe Stephen Knight and Tom Hardy series Taboo (BBC / FX\, 2017) presents a mysterious man returning to England in 1814 to take up an inheritance\, having made his fortune overseas. He revives a past mutual attraction with a woman\, with a ball representing a key turning point in their relationship\, including fighting a duel over her honour. All of these are recognisable tropes from Regency romances\, but for Taboo they are only a part of its presentation of a darker\, more Gothic version of the Regency\, one which is explicitly based in exploitation and imperialism\, represented primarily here by the East India Company. The fortune made overseas was taken from a murdered slave trader\, the ball is a chaotic debauch\, the duel is rigged. And the woman is the man’s half-sister. \nThis paper uses Taboo as a case study in how different generic frames and modes of presentation influence our expectations of and interpretation of dramas. This includes the ways that different time periods have different associations\, which these transformations challenge\, and may encourage us to consider the role of the media and of accepted ideas of historical periods in relation to power and identity. The case study is also used to consider how this is relevant in the transnational television streaming market\, as the need to engage international audiences reshapes the presentation of history\, potentially moving from one standardised version of the past to another. This research therefore fits with concerns around control of the past and narratives of the past in a time of fragmented\, transnational audiences confronting national narratives and the identities involved with those narratives\, as well as conceptions of the gendered and classed audiences for historical drama. \nDr Derek Johnston is a Senior Lecturer in Broadcast Media at Queen’s University Belfast. His research into media and cultural history has been published in various articles and book chapters\, including the monograph Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween (2015)\, the chapter ’The Folk of Folk Horror’ in Folk Horror\, The Return of the British Repressed (2023)\, and as editor of Nigel Kneale and Horror (2025). \n  \n4.45pm – 5.00pm (CET): Closing Remarks\, Dr Emma Merkling (University of Manchester\, Durham University) \n  \n  \n  \nImage: Murnau\, F. W.\, director. Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. 1922. Screenshot.
URL:https://cn-csi.com/event/halloween-workshop-nineteenth-century-gothic-afterlives/
LOCATION:Zoom: Registration Required
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SUMMARY:Contagion and Contamination in the Nineteenth Century
DESCRIPTION:Contagion and Contamination in the Nineteenth Century\nFree and Online One-Day Interdisciplinary Workshop\nThursday 1 May\, 9.00am – 5.00pm (Central European Time)\nRegistration is required. Sign-up here.\nThe Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International (CNCSI) is pleased to announce a free and online one-day interdisciplinary workshop exploring the relationship between contagion and contamination in nineteenth-century culture across the globe. The workshop will feature several emerging and established scholars as they interrogate a range of artistic renderings\, literary representations\, and historical case studies concerning contagious diseases\, infection\, and pollution in order to explore how ecological and epidemiological concerns of the present were first galvanised by the nineteenth-century anxieties of our recent past. \nAs the nineteenth century drew to a close\, Hungarian physician and social critic Max Nordau warned that society had become ravaged by a severe epidemic: an infectious pandemic of cultural and moral decline. In his infamous social critique Degeneration (1892)\, Nordau declared: ‘We stand now in the midst of a severe mental epidemic; of a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria\, and it is natural that we should ask anxiously on all sides: “What is to come next?”’. Fears of this ‘severe mental epidemic’ were entwined with anxieties popularised by criminologists like Cesare Lombroso who speculated on the dormancy of an individual’s criminal disposition. Anxieties around moral contagion were further exacerbated by the popular press\, political fiction\, and satirical art which amplified the ever-expanding threat of social degeneracy. \nNineteenth-century cultural fears accompanied the pervasive\, mediatised\, and very real pathogenic threats to the bodies of late nineteenth-century individuals who faced epidemics of influenza\, cholera\, smallpox\, the bubonic plague\, scarlet fever\, and venereal diseases on a global scale. On the other hand\, the century also saw the transformation of medical responses to disease detection\, prevention\, and management. This included the cholera and sanitation investigations of John Snow in the 1850s\, the pasteurisation and vaccination breakthroughs of Louis Pasteur\, and the advent of antiseptic surgery through the work of Joseph Lister. As such\, the nineteenth century was a time of invisible threat\, seismic change\, and vibrant discourse concerning diseases both real and imagined. \nImage: ‘Monster Soup commonly called Thames Water’\, William Heath\, 1828\, BranchCollective.org. \n  \nPlease note all times are Central European Time (CET). \n\n9:50-10:00 (CET): WELCOME ADDRESS \n\n10:00-10:45 (CET): SESSION 1  \nChair: Dr Madeline Potter\, University of Edinburgh \nSpeaker: Dr Melissa Dickson\, University of Queensland \nTitle: ‘The Nineteenth Century up-to-date with a Vengeance’: Spreading Vampirism and Russian Influenza across Bram Stoker’s Britain \nThe global influenza outbreak often referred to as the ‘Russian Flu’ began in the city of Petropavovsk in 1889 before sweeping with remarkable rapidity across Europe\, the British Isles\, and the United States. It is often cited as the first modern pandemic\, moving as it did via major roads\, rivers\, and\, notably\, railway lines\, many of which had not existed during the last major pandemic in the 1840s. As people were now more mobile\, so too were their diseases. Commentators of the period noted that those who worked in crowded offices\, and those who travelled together on modern public transport systems were most likely to contract the new strain of influenza. Press reports began to fuel public suspicion that the mail system was operating as a vector of transmission\, as claims spread that railway employees and postal workers were often the first infected in their communities. Modern Britain\, it seemed\, was peculiarly vulnerable to infection\, via the very technologies and the infrastructure by which it so often marked itself as modern. \n This paper focuses on the palpable uneasiness that emerges in the British popular and medical press in response to the arrival of the Russian Flu in the United Kingdom. That response\, I suggest\, was driven in part by an anxiety that the weakness of the modern British subject and the vulnerabilities of its communication and transport networks had been exposed. I trace fears of invasion and contagion from overseas across British periodical culture\, as well as within the Gothic mode of fiction\, which played and preyed upon similar anxieties. Taking Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) as my main fictional case study\, I demonstrate the ways in which vampirism is imagined as a form of infection\, which enters England by exploiting the very networks and technologies of empire that were used to assert its dominance: the communication\, transportation and shipping routes that allow Jonathan Harker to visit Transylvania\, also provide the very means by which a foreign body can enter and attack the heart of the British Empire. Re-contextualising the spread of vampirism throughout the population of Britain as a form of pandemic\, I argue that Stoker’s novel served as a vehicle for anxieties about foreign invasion on a microbial scale. \n  \n11:00-11:45 (CET): SESSION 2 \nChair: Professor Claudia Capancioni\, Bishop Grosseteste University \nSpeaker: Timothy Mills\, University of Portsmouth \nTitle: Implausible Deniability: Exploring the intersection of science\, politics and public health in the British imperial response to contagion\, contamination and the germ theory in late nineteenth-century India \nAs imperialism and globalisation exploded in the late nineteenth century\, extractive commercial ventures and aggressive geopolitics meant that India became the perfect microbial petri dish for highly influential disease ecologies and the evolution of catastrophic pathogenic events. Despite the enormous scientific advances that characterised ‘The Wonderful Century’\, British doctors and officials refused to accept the growing body of thought that tropical diseases were spread by germs and not through humoral imbalances or miasma. \nThe study of contagion and contamination in nineteenth-century Imperial India reveals arguments over the origins\, causation and transmission of disease\, yielding stories of nationalism\, denialism\, fatalism\, blame\, hygiene theatrics\, bigotry\, political opportunism\, and commercial profiteering. Similar themes have emerged through the recent AIDS crisis and the way COVID-19 was understood\, interpreted and treated. I will consider how and why the legacy of this resistance is still seen today through the way medicine was used to create racial and social disparity at this critical time in World history. \nThis paper will consider why such a highly developed international powerhouse as the British Empire refused to accept proven laboratory findings and highly persuasive public health policies proffered by modern science and widely discussed at International Sanitary Conferences. \n  \n11:45-13:00 (CET): LUNCH BREAK \n  \n13:00-13:45 (CET): SESSION 3 \nChair: Dr Emily Vincent\, University of Birmingham and Durham University \nSpeaker: Dr Amanda Sciampacone\, The Open University \nTitle: Constructing Cholera’s Landscape: Nineteenth-Century Medical Climatology and the Colonial Picturesque \nMy paper will explore how epidemic cholera came to be racialised as an Indian disease seemingly born of an Indian environment. More than most illnesses of the period\, cholera inspired deep fears in British society because of its apparent origins\, the mysterious nature of its spread\, and the symptoms it produced on the European body. Although cholera was known in Britain prior to the nineteenth century\, British medics claimed that the epidemic form of the disease had emerged in 1817 in the town of Jessore in what they described as the putrid jungles of the Ganges Delta. Due to its apparent origin in India\, British medics used the terms ‘Asiatic cholera’ and ‘Indian cholera’ to describe the new disease. With cholera’s arrival\, British medics were confronted with a disease of which they had little knowledge. In attempting to identify its cause\, they turned to an exploration of the environmental conditions in which it appeared to spread. Images were used to give visual form to these investigations. As I will argue\, illustrations of cholera’s and India’s environment revealed how the disease took shape in the British imagination as an Indian entity; however\, with subsequent outbreaks of cholera in Britain in 1848-49\, 1853-54\, and 1866\, these images also implied an uncomfortable affinity between the climates of the metropole and the subcontinent. \n  \n14:00-14:45 (CET): SESSION 4 \nChair: Dr Emma Merkling\, University of Manchester and Durham University \nSpeaker: Dr Mark Frost\, University of Portsmouth \nTitle:  ‘No clearer or diviner waters’: Contamination\, Abjection\, and Ecocrisis in the Victorian Imagination \nThis paper will explore the mutual insinuations of water and the human body from ecocritical perspectives to suggest that as Victorians confronted environmental and sanitary crises\, the hitherto-concealed extent of human involvement in environmental networks\, and a new understanding of humans as aqueous symbiotic organisms\, began to emerge. Examining literary works\, lectures\, and journalism by Charles Kingsley\, Henry Mayhew\, John Ruskin\, and others\, I trace figures of fluid circulation that disclose shifting attitudes to the always cultural relationship between humanity and environment. After mid-century\, nascent ecological thinking was implicated in related crises of identity that were particularly felt at the vulnerable thresholds of human bodies and of water\, revealing them as interconnected\, blurring\, and complicit ecological agents within dangerously-open environmental networks. Gradually-developing knowledge of microscopic organisms\, and\, as the century progressed\, their role in disease transmission\, threatened the purity\, sovereignty\, and closed status of the human body\, while effecting a similar crisis in water’s associations with purity and healing. This paper will draw attention to the practical and symbolic connections between human bodies and watercourses during the period – by the passage of river water into drinking supplies and thence into the human body\, and by the passage of human waste and pollution into rivers; but also in the way that both human and watery bodies are revealed as open\, vulnerable circulatory systems composed of multiple agents and ingredients. In tracing how and why water and humanity became inextricably-connected agents-in-crisis within newly-understood ecological networks\, I will outline the ways that watery bodies are open to the entry of multiple sources of contamination; and that it becomes impossible to demarcate boundaries between water and its pollution. Demonstrating that the indetermination of boundaries inherent in acts of water pollution was particularly troubling to Victorian commentators makes it possible to then show that these anxieties also haunted discourse about human bodies by revealing that human bodies\, like rivers\, are vulnerable\, open networks\, neither pure nor singular\, but symbiotic and multiple. \n  \n15:00-15:45 (CET): SESSION 5 \nChair: Professor Kirsten E. Shepherd\, University of Oxford \nSpeaker: Professor Priscilla Wald\, Duke University \nTitle: A Germ’s-Eye View: Getting Up Close and Personal with Our Microbes  \nIn a 2000 article in Science\, the Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist Joshua Lederberg predicted an upswing in pandemics in the coming century that “likely [would] unfold as episodes of a suspense thriller that could be titled Our Wits Versus Their Genes.” More surprising was his nomination of “the most sophisticated” and among “the most important” changes we could make: to replace the twentieth-century metaphor of war to describe humans’ relationship to our microbes with “a more ecologically informed metaphor\, which includes the germs’-eye view of infection.” This talk comes out of Lederberg’s provocation. \nIn 1805 Alexander von Humboldt’s Essay on the Geography of Plants introduced the concept of the interdependence of life forms. The idea gathered force in the succeeding decades\, emerging as a central insight of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species before it was christened “ecology” (Oecologia) in 1866 by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. The concept drew out an idea that had long been lying dormant in the theory of contagion. This talk will track the evolving understanding of interdependence through the rise of germ theory\, the concept of the healthy human carrier\, and the beginning of the public health movement. I am interested specifically\, however\, in how\, why\, and when medical science adopted the metaphor of “microbial warfare” to describe humanity’s relationship to our microbes and what we might gain in following Lederberg’s suggestion.   \n\n16:00-16:45 (CET): SESSION 6 \nChair: Joanna Norman\, Victoria and Albert Museum \nSpeaker: Dr Katherine Ott\, National Museum of American History\, Smithsonian Institution \nTitle: The Lingering Nineteenth-Century\, a Museum Exhibition\, and a Curator \nThis talk is a discussion of an exhibition that examines the nineteenth-century origins of four values in current healthcare practices in the U.S. The exhibition\, scheduled to open in early April 2025 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History\, is entitled First Do No Harm/Lo primero es no hacer daño. The content was conceived as a way to use history to make the COVID pandemic more comprehensible. Consequently\, the team selected issues that COVID dramatically and seemingly suddenly exacerbated. The two main take-away ideas of the exhibition are that the processes of health and medicine are a paradox of wonderful\, miraculous things along with harm and inequality and secondly\, to understand health\, it is necessary to use a One Health approach that considers humans\, non-humans\, and ecology. The lead curator for the exhibition will talk about the intricacies of presenting the legacy of scapegoating (during a Chinatown epidemic)\, colonialism (the rationale for high morbidity and mortality among Indigenous people)\, racism (embedded with Plantation doctors)\, and misogyny (the limited way in which women’s health was understood) to museum audiences in our complicated times. \n  \n16:45-17:00 (CET): CLOSING REMARKS \nSpeaker: Dr Emily Vincent\, University of Birmingham and Durham University
URL:https://cn-csi.com/event/contagion-and-contamination-in-the-nineteenth-century/
LOCATION:Zoom: Registration Required
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DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Paris:20241031T094500
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Paris:20241031T170000
DTSTAMP:20260504T192030
CREATED:20240819T192853Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240930T124025Z
UID:3105-1730367900-1730394000@cn-csi.com
SUMMARY:Online Workshop: Nature and Horror in the Nineteenth Century
DESCRIPTION:Nature and Horror in the Nineteenth Century\n31 October\, 9.45 am – 5.00 pm Central European Time (CET)\nAll sessions are scheduled according to Central European Time.\nFree\, online event\nRegister for ‘Nature and Horror in the Nineteenth Century’ here. \n  \nThe Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International (CN-CSI) is pleased to announce a one-day interdisciplinary workshop exploring the relationship between nature and horror in nineteenth-century culture across the globe. \nIf it was at the end of the century that horror as a genre truly came into its own\, its first stirrings began much earlier. Throughout the nineteenth century — from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)\, to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ (1844)\, to Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1890)\, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Giant Wistaria’ (1891) — depictions of haunted land- and seascapes possessed by monstrous and hybrid forms demonstrated an international cultural fixation with the natural world and the uncanny other-than-human agencies which populated it. Alongside the emergence of the first formulations of ‘ecology’\, scientists\, writers\, and artists began to grapple anew with humankind’s profound interrelatedness with its environment. At the same time\, vast environmental changes wrought by industrialisation\, colonial expansion\, and epidemic disease were destabilising nineteenth-century environments on a global scale. By the fin de siècle\, defiant killer plants and destructive alien visitors were just some of the striking motifs deployed to reimagine anxieties surrounding foreign invasion and human control. From weird fiction to popular science\, from painting to illustration\, nineteenth-century makers engaged the horrors — but also potential pleasures — of such cross-species entanglements. New paganisms\, folk horror\, and the ecogothic emerged as just some of the modes which dramatized the vengeance of oppressed human and other-than-human subjects\, as well as the tainted global ecosystems they inhabited. \nBy interrogating the natural horrors of our recent past\, this workshop will explore how ecological anxieties of the Anthropocene were first galvanised by deep-rooted nineteenth-century fears. This workshop features papers engaging with any aspect of nature and horror in the nineteenth century worldwide\, especially those grappling with its global dimensions and ecocritical aspects. \n  \nProgramme Outline\n\n9.45am – 10.00am: Professor Bennett Zon (Durham University)\, Welcome Address \n10am – 10.45am: Dr Jonathan Greenaway\, ‘Zola the Horror writer? Labour\, Nature and Germinal as eco-gothic’ Chair: Dr Marie-Laure Massei-Chamayou (University of Paris 1–Panthéon Sorbonne) \n10.45am – 11.00am Break \n11.00am – 11.45am: Dr Joan Passey (University of Bristol)\, ‘Vampires on the Beach: Queer Gothic Ecologies at the Coastline’ Chair: Alice Dodds (The Courtauld Institute of Art) \n11.45am – 12.00pm Break \n12.00pm – 12.45pm: Dr Eleanor Dobson (University of Birmingham)\, ‘“Familiar[s] of the deep”: shipwrecks\, horror and the animal from The Wreck of the Titan to Titanic’ Chair: Professor Robert Rix (University of Copenhagen) \n12.45pm – 2.00pm Lunch Break \n2.00pm – 2.45pm: Daisy Butcher\, ‘Tree Mothers\, Hollow Women and Flower Maidens: The representation of plant-women in George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858) and Jane G. Austin’s “Prince Rudolf’s Flower” (1859)’ Chair: Dr Emma Merkling (Durham University) \n2.45pm – 3.00pm Break \n3.00pm – 3.45pm: Professor Matthew Wynn Sivils (Iowa State University)\, ‘Conjure and Rot—Ecogothic Decay in Charles Chesnutt’s Plantation Tales’ Chair: Dr Emily Vincent (Durham University / University of Birmingham) \n4.00pm – 4.45pm: Dr Janette Leaf (Birkbeck\, University of London)\, ‘Gothic Insects Creeping Out the Nineteenth Century’ Chair: Katrina Jan (University of Birmingham) \n4.45 – 5.00 pm: Dr Emma Merkling (Durham University)\, Closing Remarks \n  \n  \nFull Programme\n2024 CNCSI Nature and Horror programme \n  \n  \nImage: Joseph Mallord William Turner\, Death on a Pale Horse\, c. 1825\, oil on canvas 59.7 x 75.6 cm\, Tate Britain.
URL:https://cn-csi.com/event/2024-nature-and-horror-in-19c/
LOCATION:Zoom: Registration Required
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cn-csi.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Death-on-a-Pale-Horse.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20240711T151500
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20240711T164500
DTSTAMP:20260504T192030
CREATED:20240902T195821Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240902T200810Z
UID:3141-1720710900-1720716300@cn-csi.com
SUMMARY:Virtual Lab | Interdisciplinary\, International\, Intertemporal: Teaching and Researching the 19th-Century
DESCRIPTION: 
URL:https://cn-csi.com/event/virtual-lab-teaching-and-researching-19th-century-studies/
LOCATION:Durham University
CATEGORIES:Virtual Lab
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Paris:20240517T080000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Paris:20240517T183000
DTSTAMP:20260504T192030
CREATED:20240220T024421Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240220T141113Z
UID:2852-1715932800-1715970600@cn-csi.com
SUMMARY:Online Conference | Charles Dickens: Beyond Realism
DESCRIPTION:Charles Dickens: Beyond Realism \n17 May\, 9.00am-3.30pm British Summer Time (BST) \nAll sessions are scheduled according to British Summer Time. \nOnline Conference  \nRegister here. \nDickens’s fiction is celebrated for its vivid realism\, luring the reader into the mist and fog of Victorian London’s streets and revealing the profound injustice of day to day life. We find realism in his depictions of place\, and his detailed description of characters: it’s certainly a crucial part of his prose. But what are the limitations of his realism\, and what can looking beyond its confines tell us about Dickens’s work?  Dickens often wrote about the supernatural and invited spirits and ghosts into his stories. His fiction is driven by coincidences and repetition. His sceptical flirtation with spiritualism\, his interest in the human mind\, in experience\, and memory\, in the Gothic\, and the uncanny or macabre\, reveal a ‘shadowy world’\, as he puts it in his preface to the 1850 edition of David Copperfield\,  in which the boundaries between the real and the imagined\, the familiar and the feared\, are fluidly challenged and explored. Dickens might paint vivid and realistic images of the external world\, but they’re accompanied by forays into the mysteries of the internal world of memory and subjectivity. Beyond realism then\, Dickens presents a rich world where reality and imagination\, the material and the immaterial\, past and present\, and life and death are intertwined. In many ways\, Dickens’s use of non-realist elements is precisely what enables him to create a fictional representation of human existence that is paradoxically more effective and realistic than what strict realism would limit him to. \nThis symposium\, hosted by CNCSI\, will feature a series of talks exploring the role\, influence and impact of Dickens’s use of non-realist features in his fiction. It will bring together specialists to delineate new trajectories in the study of Dickens’s engagement with non-realism in his work. \n  \nProgramme \n9am BST  \nWelcome by Emily Vincent (University of Birmingham)\, Emma Merkling (Durham University) \n9.15-10.00 BST  \nKirstin Mills (Macquarie University)\, Dickens and Ghosts from the Nineteenth Century to Now \nChair: Emily Vincent (University of Birmingham) \nAbstract \nThroughout his life\, Charles Dickens was fascinated by ghosts and the claims of Spiritualism. Dickens’s fiction is peppered by ghosts and hauntings of all different kinds and magnitudes and his writing cemented the tradition of the Christmastime ghost story. Privately fascinated by Spiritualism and its quest to scientifically document claims of the afterlife\, his public writing is often considered to demonstrate his scepticism towards the possibility of genuine hauntings. Yet Dickens’s treatment of ghosts in his writings is often more ambivalent\, playing with questions of psychology and perception to suspend the reader in a state of ambiguous possibility on the brink between reality and unreality. Blending humour and horror\, Dickens uses ghosts to probe the human psychological condition\, and this is a tradition refreshed and approached anew by contemporary digital adaptations of Dickens’s ghost stories. This paper will explore these contexts to illustrate the centrality of ghosts\, the supernatural and non-realism to Dickens’s creative project and the continued afterlives of his tales. \n10-10.45 BST  \nJohn Bowen (University of York)\, Dickens’s Theatres of Cruelty \nChair: Jonathan Wild (University of Edinburgh) \nAbstract  \n‘it is understood that life is always someone’s death.’  \nAntonin Artaud\, Letters on Cruelty\, First Letter\, The Theatre and Its Double \nAlgernon Swinburne\, like many others\, saw Dickens as an author of cleanliness and sanity\, claiming that the ‘imagination or the genius of Dickens … never condescended or aspired to wallow in metaphysics or in filth’. But Our Mutual Friend positively incites its readers to wallow in metaphysics and filth\, although few critical accounts have fully registered the derangement wrought by its embedded cruelties\, obsessions and dispossessions to our understanding of Dickens’s work and the nineteenth century novel more generally. In dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s discussion of  Artaud’s work in his 1965 essay ‘La parole soufflée’ (1965\, collected in Writing and Difference\, 1967)\, I will explore  the ways in which Our Mutual Friend is permeated by – and intermittently enacts – strange theatres of cruelty\, told through a poetics of articulation and exhaustion whose breath and voices are characteristically derisive\, prompted or dead.    \n10.45-11.00 BST  \nBreak \n11.00-11.45 BST  \nCéleste Callen (University of Edinburgh)\, Metaphysical Dickens: Time\, Memory and Heterogeneity  \nChair: Lara Virrey (University of Edinburgh) \nAbstract \nThis research examines the representation of subjective temporal experience in Dickens’s fiction through the lens of Henri Bergson’s philosophy of subjective time. By introducing the flaws in our way of thinking about time\, Bergson directly challenges the mistaken attempt to measure time mathematically and spatially\, perceiving feelings as external objects\, rather than accessing true durée\, which felt internally and qualitatively\, rather than quantitatively. These notions are already a source of questioning in the nineteenth century and in Dickens’s fiction particularly. Dickens’s fiction anticipates a modern conception of temporal experience\, which is rooted in heterogeneity\, a coexistence that implies both past and present\, memory and re-creation\, continuity and change. Through Bergson’s concepts of memory\, interconnectedness and continuous re-creation\, this paper seeks to reveal Dickens’s ability to shed light on the real\, lived experience of temporality.  \nDickens creates an in-between world\, a metaphysical representation of the lived experience of time that oscillates between memory and reality\, between past and present\, between the mind and the world. Rather than adhering to the strict confines of realism\, Dickens presents a rich world where reality and imagination\, the material and the immaterial\, the past and present\, and life and death are intertwined. Beyond realism then\, Dickens’s use of non-realist elements in the Christmas Books represent a turning point that is precisely what enables him to create a fictional representation of human existence that is paradoxically more effective and realistic than what strict realism would limit him to. In his use of narrative voice and the complex double movement between past and present and continuity and change\, Dickens provides a heterogeneous representation of temporality. Dickens’s fiction reveals the metaphysical aspect of our subjective experience of time that goes beyond the dualism of mind and matter and complicates the debate between internal/external that was at the heart of the philosophical debates of the time. For Dickens as well as Bergson\, it is particularly through the role of memory as a creative force\, rather than a static archive\, that we can understand the mind and the world as continuously interpenetrating and intertwined in a heterogeneous double movement. I will discuss three of Dickens’s Christmas books\, A Christmas Carol\, The Chimes and The Haunted Man\, as well as two of his first-person narratives\, David Copperfield and Great Expectations. \n  \n11.45-13.00 BST  \nLunch break \n13.00-13.45 BST  \nChris Louttit (Radboud University)\, Reading Dickens through the Adaptive Lens of Dystopian Science Fiction \nChair: Amy Coles (University of Buckingham)  \nAbstract \nMy talk for the ‘Charles Dickens: Beyond Realism’ Symposium does not focus directly on non-realist elements of Dickens’s fiction itself\, but turns instead to two recent adaptations of Oliver Twist (1837-39) which ‘genrify’ Dickens’s novel to adapt and repurpose its characters\, narrative and themes to make them resonate for young-adult readers. Adam Dalva\, Darin Strauss and Emma Vieceli’s Olivia Twist: Honor Among Thieves (Dark Horse Comics\, 2019) and Gary Whitta and Darick Robertson’s Oliver (Image Comics\, 2019-20)\, two roughly contemporary graphic novels\, resituate Dickens in the context of dystopian science fiction. This makes sense\, according to Darin Strauss\, since the grinding poverty and societal oppression represented in Oliver Twist can be read profitably as ‘the original dystopian tale’. The authors of these graphic novels\, then\, use genre conventions to emphasise a darker interpretation of Dickens. They do so in part\, I argue\, as a reflection of their own time\, and specifically the preoccupations of late-2010s America\, at a time when George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) found itself at the top of the bestseller charts and a dystopian mood of what the historian Jill Lepore has labelled ‘radical pessimism’ was in the air. Olivia Twist and Oliver’s reinterpretation of Oliver Twist may well be a strongly politicised one\, but\, as I will show in my paper\, it is also a reworking of the source text that interacts in nuanced ways with more optimistic and hopeful elements of Oliver Twist and its many adaptations.      \n13.45-14.30 BST  \nClaire Wood (University of Leicester)\, Imagining Death \nChair: Amy Waterson (University of Edinburgh) \nAbstract \nSuppose yourself telling that affecting incident in a letter to a friend. Wouldn’t you describe how you went through the life and stir of the streets and roads\, to the sick-room? Wouldn’t you say what kind of room it was\, what time of day it was\, whether it was sunlight\, starlight\, or moonlight? Wouldn’t you have a strong impression on your mind of how you were received\, when you first met the look of the dying man\, what strange contrasts were about you and struck you? \nDickens in a letter to Mrs Brookfield (20 February 1866) \nWriting to Jane Octavia Brookfield\, a would-be contributor to All the Year Round\, Dickens urged her to ‘make more’ of a deathbed scene in her manuscript.[1] Much of his advice centred on the inclusion of realist details\, emphasising time\, place\, and tacit interpersonal dynamics. In many cases\, Dickens followed his own counsel. The author penned dozens of deathbeds\, among them several that are realist in George Eliot’s sense of the word\, emphasising interiority\, sympathetic engagement\, and the ‘faithful representing of commonplace things’.[2] Death\, of course\, is both commonplace and extraordinary. In the ‘expressions and looks’ of a dying man\, Walter Benjamin reflects\, ‘the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him’.[3] Dickens makes powerful use of the ordinary/extraordinary fact of death in scenes of commonplace tragedy\, such as the demise of Jo in Bleak House\, which moves readers to sympathise with the individual and remedy neglect of the many ‘dying thus around us\, every day’.[4] But Dickens was not bound to a particular style or mode in his treatment of mortality. Equally powerful\, yet radically different in conception\, is Oliver Twist’s depiction of the death of a poor woman. Here the horror of the situation is conveyed by lurid\, externalised description. ‘It’s as good as a play’ declares the dead woman’s elderly mother\, signalling the episode’s melodramatic inheritance.[5] \nThis paper considers the ‘fusion of realist and anti-realist tendencies’ that shape Dickens’s work\, with reference to the ways in which he imagines death in his fiction.[6] In addition to examining the mixed mode of his deathbed scenes\, I will explore moments when Dickens goes beyond realism in following the dead as they make their transition into the afterlife. \n[1] Charles Dickens\, ‘To Mrs Brookfield\, 20 February 1866’\, The Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume Eleven\, 1865-1867\, ed. by Graham Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press\, 1999)\, 160. \n[2] George Eliot\, Adam Bede\, ed. by Valentine Cunningham (Oxford: Oxford University Press\, 1998)\, 178.  \n[3] Walter Benjamin\, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’\, in Illuminations\, ed. by Hannah Arendt\, trans. by Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico\, 1999)\, 93. \n[4] Charles Dickens\, Bleak House\, ed. by Nicola Bradbury (London: Penguin\, 2003)\, 734. \n[5] Charles Dickens\, Oliver Twist\, ed. by Philip Horne (London: Penguin\, 2003)\, 42. \n[6] Juliet John\, Dickens and Mass Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press\, 2010)\, 196. \n  \n14.35- 15.20 BST  \nAndrew Smith (University of Sheffield)\, Seeing through the fog: Dickens and the Gothic \nChair: Madeline Potter (University of Edinburgh) \nAbstract \nDickens employed the Gothic to address the need for social reform. He achieved this by working beyond realism in order to focus popular attention on the plight of those who are socially and economically isolated. The Christmas ghost stories\, which foreground the spectre’s invitation to look at the world differently\, provide the clearest example of this (in which Scrooge’s redemption depends upon an alternative way of looking). This issue of sight runs throughout the ghost stories and the journalistic ‘A December Vision’ (1850)\, but also appears in moments that reflect on crime and guilt. This paper explores representations of seeing and being looked at in narratives which are about fogs\, ghosts and prison cell psychologies\, which employ images of the haunted self in order to\, paradoxically\, draw attention to the need for real social and political reform. Texts discussed include the Christmas books\, selected journalism\, Oliver Twist (1838) and Bleak House (1853). \n15.20 BST  \nClosing Remarks  \nImage: J. Gurney & Son\, Charles Dickens\, 1867. Open access image curtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
URL:https://cn-csi.com/event/charles-dickens-beyond-realism/
LOCATION:Zoom: Registration Required
CATEGORIES:Online Conferences
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Paris:20240426T125000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Paris:20240426T190000
DTSTAMP:20260504T192030
CREATED:20240212T210314Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240220T025903Z
UID:2822-1714135800-1714158000@cn-csi.com
SUMMARY:Online Workshop | Expanding ‘Science Fiction’ in the Nineteenth Century
DESCRIPTION:Join the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International (CNCSI) on April 26 2024 for a day-long workshop of eclectic and interdisciplinary papers from guest speakers themed around Science Fiction in the Nineteenth Century. \nThis workshop brings together exciting voices from a range of interdisciplinary fields to explore and expand our understandings of ‘science fiction’ in the nineteenth century across the globe. What we today call ‘Sci-Fi’ is a genre very much of the nineteenth century\, canonically understood to have emerged in its earliest forms with texts like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)\, and reaching broad popular appeal by the fin-de-siècle through publications from H. G. Wells onwards. This workshop adopts a provocatively broad definition of the term ‘Sci-Fi’ to explore the existence beyond literary fiction of creative\, speculative\, and fantastical engagement with new technologies and scientific practices. Our Sci-Fi ‘texts’ will be considered broadly\, ranging from imaginative explorations of non-human others in fiction\, to engagement with nineteenth-century scientific thought and technologies in Victorian ‘high-art’ painting. We shall see how\, across the globe\, fantasies and fears about these technologies\, and the limits and possibilities of scientific enquiry and expansion\, can be traced across areas as diverse as theatre and the visual arts\, mainstream science writing\, and imaginative speculative fiction. \nProgramme Summary: view a summary of the programme here. \nRegistration: Register here \nDate: April 26\, 2024 \nTime: 12:50 pm – 7:00 pm (CET). Please note all talks will take place in Central European Timezone. \nFree\, online event. \nProgramme: Download the full programme and abstracts here. \nImage: Winslow Homer\, The Gulf Stream (1899)\, open access image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
URL:https://cn-csi.com/event/expanding-science-fiction-in-the-nineteenth-century/
LOCATION:Zoom: Registration Required
CATEGORIES:Online Workshop
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20240219T080000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20240219T100000
DTSTAMP:20260504T192030
CREATED:20240216T175323Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240216T214222Z
UID:2842-1708329600-1708336800@cn-csi.com
SUMMARY:Virtual Lab | Scans\, Databases\, and Apps: Teaching the 19th Century in the Digital Era
DESCRIPTION:Please join the 4th CNCSI Virtual Lab for a lively discussion with Professor Kit Belgum (University of Texas at Austin) and Professor Vance Byrd (University of Pennsylvania) on “Scans\, Databases\, and Apps: Teaching the Nineteenth Century in the Digital Era.” Belgum’s and Byrd’s talks will begin Monday\, February 19th at 8 AM (EST/Colombia); 2 PM (Paris); 10 PM (Tokyo). \nSpeakers \n\nProfessor Kit Belgum\, Associate Professor\, Department of Germanic Studies\, University of Texas at Austin\nProfessor Vance Byrd\, Presidential Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures\, Department of Francophone\, Italian\, and Germanic Studies  University of Pennsylvania\n\n  \n\nAt the correct time on Monday\, click on this link to take you to the the event’s page: https://facart.es/19-century-lab-4. You will then scroll down the red connect button to join the conversation on Zoom. \n\n  \nThe Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International (CNCSI)\, (which developed from the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies founded in 2013 by Professor Bennett Zon at the University of Durham)\, gathers a consortium of universities\, independent research organisations\, and professional societies from around the world interested in long-nineteenth-century studies. This innovative network aims to promote international collaboration\, advance interdisciplinary studies involving the widest possible geographical and thematic reach\, and host conversations on long nineteenth-century studies. As CNCSI keeps expanding its activities and outreach\, we now plan on creating a virtual laboratory to start such informal conversations. Each session of our lab will therefore foreground the work of a high-profile guest scholar\, who will be invited to present his/ her research interests\, and teaching methods. \nThe main aim of this Virtual Lab is to create a space where invited academics may share theoretical and practical information\, confront methodologies\, as well as teaching and research practices. This dynamic conversation may also provide fellow colleagues and researchers with a more comprehensive overview of existing approaches to our teaching methods and research interests\, and\, possibly\, further innovative projects and exchanges across disciplines. \n\n 
URL:https://cn-csi.com/event/virtual-lab-teaching-19c-in-digital-era/
LOCATION:Zoom
CATEGORIES:Virtual Lab
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cn-csi.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/02-19-IV-virtual-lab-scans-databases-apps.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20231122
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20231124
DTSTAMP:20260504T192030
CREATED:20230904T035928Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230904T235530Z
UID:2520-1700611200-1700783999@cn-csi.com
SUMMARY:Conference: Occultism and Popular Culture in Europe
DESCRIPTION:Occultism and Popular Culture in Europe \nDate:  22 November to 23 November 2023 \nLocation: Department of English\, Germanic and Romance Studies\, University of Copenhagen \nThere has been a long cultural fascination with the macabre\, horrific\, and downright creepy across European society. From the early popular novels of writers such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)\, and the incredible visual spectacles of fairground phantasmagoria\, to the growth of professional mediumship from the mid 1800s onward\, and the telepathic radio experiments of the early twentieth century\, Europeans have been entranced by all things spooky and ghoulish. The nineteenth century in particular was a tumultuous age of transformation\, where conceptions of reality unraveled before people’s eyes. Media and technology unleashed a phantasmagoric panorama of alternate realities\, and the specter of invisible agents. Interpretations and encounters at the margins of common understanding of how naturalistic and technological systems work fostered beliefs\, superstitions\, and myths. The ethereal presence of communications without bodies suggested the possibility of supernatural forces at play. It was within this ever-changing social climate that interests in the occult\, the gothic\, the extraordinary\, and the horrible flourished. \nSo much of the popular conversations surrounding the rise and growth of occultic media during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries connected to debates surrounding human belief\, perception\, trust\, and the standards of scientific evidence. Stories about exposure and fraud were rife within this context. These issues continue to remain important in our modern age when media sensationalism is so endemic. To a certain extent\, a study of popular occulture in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century\, and the ways in which practitioners and challengers manipulated new media technologies to present carefully crafted stories to broad publics\, links to our own contemporary discussions in the twenty-first century about media deception and fake news. A study of the rise of popular occulture in Europe\, therefore\, provides important historical lessons for understanding the continued surgency of media misperception that is rampant today. \nTo launch the research program for the newly formed Dark Arts Research Group: Studies in Gothic\, Horror and the Occult\, 1750-Present in the Department of English\, Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen\, there will be a two-day hybrid conference between 22 November and 23 November 2023 titled: ‘Occultism and Popular Culture in Europe.’ The aim is to explore the many ways that horror\, gothic and occultic topics have been communicated\, presented\, and packaged for broad audiences from the late eighteenth century to today. We are especially interested in the ways different kinds of media technology\, ranging from print and woodcut illustrations to photography and film have shaped conceptions of horror\, gothic and the occult. \nWe are delighted to have two fantastic keynote speakers lined up for the event: Mathias Clasen\, Aarhus University; and Richard Noakes\, University of Exeter. \nCore research questions include:  \n\nHow and why did occultic ideas burst into the popular cultural mainstream from the late eighteenth century onward?\nWhat role did the new mass media technologies such as print\, photography\, radio\, etc.\, play in propagating these extraordinary beliefs and cultural interests?\nHow can digital tools and resources be used to transform the way we research\, interpret\, and ultimately present topics such as the history of European popular occulture?\n\nSuggested topics can include:  \n\nPrint culture\, publishing\, and gothic\, horror and the occult\nScience\, perception\, and extraordinary belief\nMagic\, illusion and deception\nTechnologies/objects used in practice\, investigation\, or in literary/artistic representations of the gothic\, horror and the occult\nDigital studies of gothic\, horror\, and occultic topics\nGothic\, horror and the occult in the media\n\nIf you have any questions\, please get in touch with either of the project’s co-leading investigators: Robert Rix (rjrix@hum.ku.dk) or Efram Sera-Shriar (ess@hum.ku.dk). \nThe event is funded by a small research grant from CEMES at the University of Copenhagen. \nImage Credit: William H. Mumler\, Mary Todd Lincoln with Abraham Lincoln’s “spirit\,” c. 1872. Lincoln Foundation Collection. Photograph from Wikipedia.
URL:https://cn-csi.com/event/occultism-and-popular-culture-in-europe/
CATEGORIES:Conferences
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Paris:20231031T094500
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Paris:20231031T170000
DTSTAMP:20260504T192030
CREATED:20230708T125604Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20231012T160248Z
UID:2600-1698745500-1698771600@cn-csi.com
SUMMARY:Online Workshop: Monsters in the Nineteenth Century
DESCRIPTION:With the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)\, Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897)\, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)\, monsters became a staple of nineteenth-century literature. But their hold on the nineteenth-century imagination runs far deeper. Gargoyles and grotesques adorn the exteriors of neo-Gothic churches; experiments with blood transfusion elicit fears of monstrous hybrids; in 1885\, Punch publishes a cartoon satirising Ireland’s desire for Home Rule through the image of a vampire. From literature to architecture\, and from the visual arts to medical and political discourse\, monsters emerge as useful vehicles for articulating cultural anxieties\, but also for making sense of a rapidly changing world. This online workshop\, co-hosted by CNCSI and the Dark Arts Research Group at the University of Copenhagen\, will feature a series of talks exploring the role played by monsters in the nineteenth century\, investigating how their uncanny corporeality subverts dominant discourses and how therefore we might understand the monster as a valuable tool in uncovering hidden epistemologies in the study of the nineteenth century and its legacies. \n\nRegistration \n31 October\, 2023\n9:45 – 17:00 (CET)\nFree\, online event\nRegister for Monsters in the Nineteenth Century here. \n  \nProgramme\n9:45-10:00 (CET): WELCOME ADDRESS \nSpeaker: Efram Sera-Shriar\, University of Copenhagen \n  \n10:00-10:45 (CET): SESSION 1 \nChair: Efram Sera-Shriar\, University of Copenhagen \nSpeaker: Gina Wisker\, University of Bath \nMonsters Down Under: Australian and New Zealand Women’s Gothic Horror: Rosa Praed’s “The Bunyip” (1891) Dulcie Deamer “Hallowe’en” (1909). \nThere is relatively little critical work on the supernatural or Gothic stories of late nineteenth\, and early twentieth century women writers from Australia and New Zealand. However\, this dearth of criticism belies the quality of that small\, rich strain of writing\, some of which appeared only in newspapers or in UK Penny Dreadfuls. Both Rosa Praed and Dulcie Deamer engaged in spiritualism\, the occult and Praed evoke the inexplicable cultural otherness of a land still felt as strange\, inexplicable dangerous.  \nThe Bunyip (1891): Australian Rosa Praed’s “The Bunyip” (1891) is a fine example of a Gothic\, supernatural tale dramatising the layering in of the unknown into the known. normalised in British and European ghost stories relying on the trustworthiness of another. The bunyip has been seen by someone else which shifting of verification beyond the narrator while insisting on its plausibility\, produces a mixed sense of security and a gap of vagueness. The bunyip is a particularly Australian creature of forest\, swamp and waterhole\, the “one respectable flesh-curdling horror of which Australia can boast”. European Gothic and supernatural tales have their fairies\, ogres\, goblins\, dangerous creatures of lakes and swamps alongside the deceptively alluring\, seductive sidhe\, lorelei and so on but this very Australian creature is nothing to tempt an errant knight\, described in Aboriginal tales as a pig\, or sea-snake from a waterhole rather than the sea. It resembles a crocodile in its method of dragging its prey under the water and rolling it over to drown it. The bunyip’s deceptive cry\, significantly (for Praed’s tale)\, triggers instinctive human responses to bring it to a safe place\, with destructive outcomes.  \nHallowe’en’ (1909): ‘Queen of Behemia’ New Zealander/Australian Dulcie Deamer’s Gothic  ‘Hallowe’en’ ( 1909 ) is  a werewolf  tale in which Hevar the wife and she-wolf is seen as domestic\, neighbourly and a victim  to violence born of male terror. Some werewolf tales grow from  the fin de siècle representations of women’s “physical or libidinal energies as unnatural to the point of being dangerously demonic”. (McCormick) As Bram Djikstra’s Idols of Perversity illustrates \, they were often visually represented as languorously animalistic\, predatory creatures\, snakelike\, vampiric\, seductively then violently predatory and carnal\, figments of the heated terrified imagination of the men who variously lusted after\, idolised \, or kept them in their domestic roles and enforced delicate state both physical and mental. On this special night\, there are more disturbances and activities for some than others and for Hevar there is an unavoidable call. Her instinctive reactions to the midnight\, when “it is time” the call of the wild\, the “long\, long howl”   of something far away. Her preparations: rubbing herself with poisonous rue\, foxgloves\, hemlock and monks head and donning the girdle of a black wolf\, feed her muffled sense of “sinking\, sinking to a place that is at the bottom of all bottomless things –between heaven and hell\, sending the story towards a moment of seeing demonic figures moving round and in the fire\, bearing an inverted cross. As she rises her eyelids\, she has changed and “Hevar the she-wolf stepped from the circle from a dropped night-shift” . Now the outside world is Gothic\, sensual\, witchy with “fat\, velvet backed spiders” \, death-watch beetles and “a black impet with its forked tail over its shoulder’.  On this Hallowe’en Hevar responds to the wild call\, and death and disorder result. \nThis paper introduces these two fine women writers from Australia/New Zealand and their Gothic/monster tales.  \n  \n11:00-11:45 (CET): SESSION 2 \nChair: Maria Damkjær\, University of Copenhagen \nSpeaker: Madeline Potter\, University of Edinburgh \nGothic Epistemologies: Unearthing Vampire Fictions in the Nineteenth Century  \nStemming from nineteenth-century literature\, vampires such as Dracula\, Carmilla\, and to a certain extent\, Lord Ruthven and Varney\, continue to shape our popular imagination. But numerous vampire fictions\, now largely forgotten\, proliferated at the time\, and such texts are valuable historiographical tools in the study of nineteenth-century material theological thought. It is a time when the figure of the vampire establishes itself at the core of a system of signification which breaks apart binaries between life and death\, as well as materiality and spirituality. Against this background\, the aim of this paper is to uncover some of the lesser-known vampire fictions of the nineteenth century\, and challenge critical narratives of Gothic anxiety attributed to the genre. Instead\, I look to the epistemologies made manifest in vampiric corporeality\, and propose that vampiric bodies double as imaginative spaces where theological possibilities can be explored independently of denominational constraints. I endeavour to situate the literary vampire centrally in what can be described as a material turn in Victorian religious thought\, defined by variously seeking to locate spiritual realities physically. I therefore use these hitherto overlooked texts to showcase how literary vampires draw together elements of occultism\, magic\, and sacramentality to probe theological ideas beyond the scope of broad Protestantism by making metaphysical realities materially manifest.  \n  \n12:00-12:45 (CET): SESSION 3 \nChair: Emma Merkling\, Durham University \nSpeaker: Richard Fallon\, University of Birmingham \nCreation\, Clairvoyance\, and the Art of Envisioning Prehistoric Monsters \nAcross the nineteenth century\, palaeontologists\, science writers\, novelists\, and artists built up a vivid visual and literary language for envisioning strange prehistoric monsters. Sometimes\, however\, the urge to ‘envision’ these lost beings could become quite literal. From the middle of the century\, prominent evangelicals promulgated the notion that the creation story in the Book of Genesis evinced signs that its author\, perhaps Moses\, had gazed through time and seen ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs (misleadingly labelled ‘great whales’ in English translations). Meanwhile\, radical occultists employed clairvoyant powers to look through time themselves\, carrying out research on otherwise tricky topics like the evolution of reptiles into birds. Scholars of literature and science and historians of the earth sciences have so far paid little concerted attention to the writings of these visionaries.  As this paper demonstrates\, they were inspired by and\, contributed to\, the literary and visual genres of palaeontology\, from engravings of duelling saurians to virtual tours of Jurassic swamps. This paper begins by examining two texts by Christian authors\, Cuthbert Collingwood’s epic poem A Vision of Creation (1872) and Samuel Kinns’s miscellany Moses and Geology (1882)\, before turning to the occult world of Elizabeth\, William\, and Sherman Denton’s psychometric series The Soul of Things (1863–74). Building upon techniques from fiction and popular science in their accounts of purportedly genuine visions\, these authors glanced in the rear-view mirror of life’s stately progress. In so doing\, they attempted to convince readers that human eyes could gaze upon extinct monsters. \n  \n13:00-14:00 (CET): LUNCH BREAK  \n  \n14:00-14:45 (CET): SESSION 4 \nChair: Robert Rix\, University of Copenhagen \nSpeaker: Kaja Franck\, University of Herefordshire \nDracula: A Werewolf in Vampire’s Clothing \nBram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is regarded as the definitive anglophone vampire text. This paper argues that Stoker’s Count is as much werewolf as vampire. To do so\, I will consider how folklore regarding werewolves\, vampires and Transylvania were (mis)appropriated in a manner consistent with the colonial and imperialist endeavours of Victorian Britain. Both Emily Gerard and Sabine Baring-Gould were used by Bram Stoker in researching the character of Count Dracula and aspects of both the werewolf and the vampire were included in his representation of the Count. Dracula performs a masquerade of authenticity with meta-textual references to real travelogues\, yet he is a Victorian monster. Stephen Arata’s reading of the novel through the framework reverse colonisation suggests that Count Dracula is monstrous as he symbolises Victorian fears of racial otherness.  Reading the novel through an eco-gothic methodology\, Dracula’s ‘invasion’ can also be read as the return of the wolf to the British Isles. The narrative is indicative of the fear of the animal ‘other’ and the possibility of the nation degenerating into a wilderness state. By contextualising the novel within late-Victorian attitudes towards the wilderness\, and non-British landscapes\, the destruction of Dracula can be read as an attempt to subdue and control the wilderness\, embodied in the (were)wolf.  \n  \n15:00-15:45 (CET): SESSION 5 \nChair: Nanna Kaalund\, Aarhus University \nSpeaker: Will Pooley\, University of Bristol \nWho Were the Witches? France 1790-1940 \nAt the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789\, witchcraft had been decriminalized in France for more than a century. Yet\, from the Revolution to the Second World War\, the French courts continued to deal with the criminal consequences of concerns about living people who used supernatural powers to harm. This paper draws on my database of more than 1000 trials and investigations into frauds\, vigilante attacks\, murders\, and other crimes\, to address two related questions: who was suspected of witchcraft in this period? Did any of these ‘witches’ choose this identity? Some of the answers to these questions are unsurprising in the context of the early modern European precedents. Most suspected witches in cases that led to criminal investigations were middle-aged or even older. Many were close neighbours or distant kin to their accusers. Marginal community members\, such as beggars\, shepherds\, and priests feature prominently. As in the early modern witch trials\, those accused of witchcraft often had generally bad reputations\, and were described as bitter\, angry\, and envious. But there are surprises and changes to note\, too. More accused witches were men than women\, although this national picture needs to be qualified with a regional analysis. Regions such as Normandy are notable as areas where male witches outnumbered women in the early modern trials\, a pattern than continued into the twentieth century\, and distorts the overall picture across France. The most obvious change was in the clustering of accusations: where early modern trials had often had a domino effect of contagious accusations\, many of the modern cases identified individual witches\, or sometimes families. They rarely evoked cabals of many witches.In the twentieth century\, anthropologists generally agreed that accusations of harmful magic were imagined by the accusers and that in reality\, there were no ‘witches’. The cases from the long nineteenth century are a bit more ambiguous. The paper finishes with some thoughts on those individuals who embraced the identity of dangerous witches\, and who sometimes paid for this identification with their lives. \n  \n16:00-16:45 (CET): SESSION 6 \nChair: Emily Vincent\, Durham University \nSpeaker:  Diane Purkiss\, University of Oxford  \nReclaiming the Hag: Witches and Queer Old Age \nIn this paper\, I explore the way in which the body of the postmenopausal woman was understood as monstrous because it could no longer perform its primary functions of reproduction or sexual desirability; how\, then\, could it exist except as an anomaly? For patriarchy\, and heteronormativity\, the answer was something close to extermination\, but within folklore\, and alternative tradition registered both the terrifying power of the hag and her ability to enable younger women to access her kind of power\, a physical power over death itself. I will be looking at comparative myths of Valkyries\, Baba Yaga\, Perchta\, and the Cailleach in an attempt to use the monstrous body of the hag to create solidarity between younger queer people and older forms of queerness\, breaking down the current patriarchy-induced divisions between generations. 
URL:https://cn-csi.com/event/monsters-in-the-nineteenth-century/
LOCATION:Zoom
CATEGORIES:Online Workshop
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SUMMARY:Inaugural ECR Café: Book Publishing
DESCRIPTION:ECR Café\nECR Café\, a pioneering initiative started by the Center for Nineteenth-Century Studies International\, brings scholars and early career researchers together in conversation – learning\, discussing\, and exploring the limits of knowledge. \nThe first ECR Café highlights leading figures in the world of academic and research-driven publishing to discuss their experiences in the print and digital market\, framing knowledge as a goal and finding the means of achieving it. \nInterested in publishing in a journal? What about approaching a publisher with your monograph? We answer all your questions\, from getting accepted to having your name on the cover! \nUnlike other organizations – ECR Café is hosted entirely by Early Career Researchers and open to everyone – from Masters level to postdocs – interested in learning about publishing for the academic or job market. We organize events that cross physical and cultural borders\, with members from across continents and career paths. \nJoin us this weekend to discuss\, question\, and learn about publishing\, research\, and other topics that are of interest to all! \nClick here to join us!  \nProgram details are below. \nLinks will be sent a day before the event. \n  \nMeet & Greet \nWe are also hosting a Meet and Greet session for those who want to chat with us or know more about the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International (CNCSI) and its Early Carer Committee. Meet us to learn about our organization\, and the opportunities we provide for students\, researchers\, and scholars working broadly in Nineteenth-Century Studies and beyond. \nLinks will be sent a day before the event to only those who register. \nClick here to register for the event! But come even if you haven’t found time to register. We welcome one and all. \nClick here to register for the Meet and Greet! We will be in touch soon with the timing and the link. \n  \nWelcome Event \n30th September 2023\, Saturday \nTime: 3 PM GMT onwards \nAll sessions will be recorded \nSchedule \n3:00 PM Introduction to CNCSI: Prof. Bennett Zon \n3:10 PM Introduction to the ECR Committee: Dr. Sreemoyee Dasgupta \n3:15 PM Discussion 1: Publishing your Book by Prof. Laura Lovett (Moderator: Dr. Sreemoyee Dasgupta) \n(20 mins followed by 15 mins Q/A) \n3:55 PM Discussion 2: Publishing in a Journal by Dr. Dara Downey (Moderator: Dr. Madeline Potter) \n(20-mins followed by 15-mins Q/A). \n4:35 PM Discussion 3: Public-Facing Research by Dr. Madeline Potter (Moderator: Pramantha Tagore) \n(20-mins followed by 15 mins Q/A). \n5:15 PM Closing Remarks: Pramantha Tagore
URL:https://cn-csi.com/event/ecr-cafe-september-30/
CATEGORIES:ECR Café
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UID:2499-1693785600-1693785600@cn-csi.com
SUMMARY:Environmentalism in the Nineteenth Century
DESCRIPTION:Join us for this free online event exploring the theme of environmentalism through a nineteenth century lens. Please not all times are Central European Time (CET). \n\n\nExtinction\, industrialisation\, resource extraction\, colonial expansion\, environmentalism\, land reformulation\, capitalism — these entangled areas\, and their impact on the human and more-than-human world\, loomed large in nineteenth-century imaginations across cultures\, as they continue to do in our own.  It was an era in which coal became cheaply and readily available\, emergent tropical medicine blended with prejudicial theories in the colonies to respond to biological threats\, the concept of ‘the Land’ destabilised agricultural identity\, and extinction narratives were being reimagined for their place in the museum. These issues pervaded science\, technology\, industry\, literature\, art\, politics\, and quotidian life to inform diverse cultural responses: whether through ridiculing woolly mammoth preservationists in the periodical press\, or defending natural resources for Nation and Empire through the Royal Agricultural Society. \nThis online workshop\, hosted by CNCSI\, features a series of multidisciplinary talks by an international cast of academic experts exploring nineteenth-century engagements with and theorisations of the environment — from the origins of fossil fuel’s entrenchment in today’s societies\, to emergent conceptualisations of environmentalism\, and to the legacy and relevance of these engagements and ideas to today’s climate crisis. \n\n\nProgramme\n10:45-11:00 (CET): WELCOME ADDRESS \nSpeaker: Bennett Zon\, Durham University \n  \n11:00-11:45 (CET): SESSION 1 \nChair: Emily Vincent\, Durham University \nSpeaker: Karen Sayer\, Leeds Trinity University \nKeyword “the Land”: Meanings and Legacies? \n“The Land remains\, [the cultivation of the soil goes on] …beyond the interests of individuals\, above even the interests of the present generation\, is the interest of the Land itself. … the land must be fairly dealt by\, and the maintenance of its fertility should\, in the national interest\, be the paramount consideration” (Henry Rew\, 1913: v-vi). \nThe aim of this paper is to consider whether the concept of the Land as represented in nineteenth century Britain might be read as an emergent conceptualisation of environmentalism. The idea of “the Land” for agricultural commentators like Henry Rew included the geographical bounds and acreage of the UK\, its natural resources (woodland\, cultivated land\, grazing etc.)\, the soil and underlying geology\, but also something of the nation and its history that lay beyond the ‘human’ world of individual landowners and farmers while connected to the legacy of their work with it. Something in and of itself that persisted\, landowners were its custodians. Highly idealised\, and predicated on inheritance\, “the Land” nevertheless at times seems to have captured a sense of unease at the emergence of the highly capitalised High Farming that not only came to dominate Britain\, but also its colonies. Focusing on the publications of agricultural commentators such as Young\, Caird and Rew\, whose work was treated as authoritative\, the question of the relationship between ‘Practice Through Science’ (the strapline of the Royal Agricultural Society of England)\, High Farming and the emergence of tensions between land as resource\, generating calories for Nation and Empire\, and the Land as something that must be ‘fairly dealt by’ for the future will be weighed. \n  \n12:00-12:45 (CET): SESSION 2 \nChair: Nanna Kaalund\, Aarhus University \nSpeaker: Vanessa Heggie\, University of Birmingham \nTemperature and Temperament: Saving humans from the Environment in the Nineteenth Century \nEuropean expansion and colonialism in the early modern period exposed European bodies to new\, and often threatening environments.  While historians have traced medical theories of acclimatisation\, adaptation\, and seasoning well into the 19th Century\, towards the end of the century attention tends to shift to the new Tropical Medicine\, to germ and parasite driven theories of disease and health in the ‘tropics’. In this paper I look to methods deployed to protect human beings from their environments at the end of the twentieth century; in contrast to large-scale interventions such as swamp or forest clearing\, I want to make a case for the personal environment\, for the everyday and the quotidian. Simple technologies such as food or clothing were blended with complex theories about race and evolution\, in an attempt to ensure the survival of white bodies\, and the preservation of white cultures\, on expeditions and in colonial settlements. \n13:00-14:00 (CET): LUNCH BREAK \n14:00-14:45 (CET): SESSION 3 \nChair: Emma Merkling\, Durham University \nSpeaker: Sarah Wade\, University of East Anglia \nReimagining Historical Natural History Display to Address Twenty-First Century Wildlife Conservation Concerns \nNatural history collections\, many of which were founded in the nineteenth century\, are well placed to address ecological crisis today due to the types of collections in their care. In recent years\, activity in response to this critical issue has been curatorially wide ranging\, including large scale masterplan projects\, temporary exhibitions\, interventions in historical collections\, the commissioning and display of contemporary art\, participatory events and digital engagement activities. Yet these diverse approaches have been united by placing human activities at the heart of environmental breakdown\, foregrounding the entangled reality of the ecologies of life on Earth. While artists and curators have intervened in natural history museums in manifold ways\, they have also reimagined nineteenth century modes of display such as the habitat diorama\, presentations of taxidermy hunting trophies and the aquarium for the 21st century to address the anthropogenic threats facing the planet. This paper examines various instances of this field of practice revealing shifts in how wildlife conservation has been perceived and represented in display from the nineteenth century to the present day. I demonstrate how historical displays resulting from the destruction and exploitation of wildlife have been reorientated to address wildlife protection in the present day. \n  \n15:00-15:45 (CET): SESSION 4 \nChair: Thomas Hughes\, The Courtauld Institute of Art. \nSpeaker: Rebecca Woods\, University of Toronto \nEphemeral Extinction: Woolly Mammoths\, Industry\, and Ice in the Long Nineteenth century \nBy the early years of the 19th century\, the once mysterious elephant bones found fossilized throughout the northern hemisphere\, far beyond the known stamping grounds of tropical elephants\, had largely been accounted for: they were the remains of woolly mammoths\, an extinct ancestor of living elephants described as such by Georges Cuvier in the late 18th century. Interest in these remains persisted\, especially in the context of their potential industrial applications. Mammoth ivory\, like elephant ivory\, could be used in manufacturing. Frozen mammoths—rare specimens whose hair\, hide\, and flesh persisted across millennia\, protected from regular processes of decay by Siberian permafrost—were\, in the eyes of the British press\, natural examples of a technological novelty (frozen meat) in the context of a newly inaugurated imperial trade in frozen and refrigerated meat. These discourses refracted emergent notions of extinction. The abundance of preserved tusks from extinct mammoths in Siberia could be likened to a vast coal field\, poised to rescue African elephants from their own impending extinction\, while Henry Howorth\, antiquarian\, parliamentarian\, and the author of a learned text on “the mammoth and the flood\,” could be pillaried in Punch as the Prime Warden of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Extinct Mammoths. \n  \n16:00-16:45 (CET): SESSION 5 \nChair: Efram Sera-Shriar\, University of Copenhagen \nSpeaker: Fredrik Albritton Jonsson\, University of Chicago \nFossil Futures: Revisiting Nineteenth Century British History in the Age of Planetary Emergency \nThe planetary crisis of climate change unsettles not just present politics but also our sense of the past. In this talk\, I will apply the lens of climate science and energy analysis to suggest a new interpretation of British nineteenth century history that deepens our understanding of how and why fossil fuel became so entrenched in modern societies. Rather than dwell primarily on the factory system as the locus of change\, we need to explore the full range of energy intensive forms of work and consumption that shaped the fossil economy. These sites include the canal infrastructure that made coal mobile and cheap; the deep coal mine\, which was the first workplace to be reshaped by steam engines; the coke-fired iron industry with its close ties to a new fossil protectionist state; and the coal burning household where fossil fuel transformed childcare\, cooking\, and hygiene. My talk tracks the multiple transformations wrought by coal in British society after 1760 from the infrastructure of the canal network and the steam-powered colliery to the coal-fired household and the emergence of a new ideology of fossil growth in politics. Fossil fuel even colonized the future as geologists and politicians debated the duration of the national coal supply. From such historical investigation\, I try to construct a new picture of the origins of the fossil growth imperative\, starting not with the climate denial of big oil in recent decades\, but a much earlier interpenetration of fossil fuel\, state power\, infrastructure\, and ideology which emerged in the period 1760-1880.
URL:https://cn-csi.com/event/environmentalism-in-the-nineteenth-century-2/
CATEGORIES:Online Workshop
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