VISAWUS Online Events Spring 2025
Friday, March 28, 2025: “Current Conversations in Nineteeth-Century Children’s Literature”
9am PT | 12pm ET | 5pm BT
Join via Zoom: https://slu.zoom.us/j/97893377073 (Meeting ID: 978 9337 7073)
Participants:
- Amanda Chapman – Glenville State University
- Patrick C. Fleming – Independent Scholar
- Melissa Shields Jenkins – Wake Forest University
- Colten Biro – Saint Louis University
Our round table panel will feature various threads of recent scholarship on nineteenth-century children’s literature, accepting Marah Gubar’s claim in ‘Artful Dodgers’ (2009) that authors “produced texts that presuppose the existence of socialized, literate, and sophisticated child readers” (25). We will explore how the complexities of the child and children’s literature provide useful global cultural insights into the realities and movements within the nineteenth century. Ultimately, we will return our attention towards where the “Child is father of the Man”—exploring how the nineteenth-century child’s formation via literature and experience reveals something of the adult they would become and the society they would one day join.
Thursday, April 24, 2025: Recent Books & Publishing Now
12pm Pacific /3pm Eastern
This panel will bring together the authors of three recent books by VISAWUS members who will discuss their works as well as their writing and publishing processes. Join us!
Participants:
- Riya Das, Women at Odds: Indifference, Antagonism, and Progress in Late Victorian Literature
- Kellie Holzer, Trans-Imperial Feminism in England and India: Catherine Dickens, Marie Corelli, and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
- Tara MacDonald, Narrative, Affect and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies
2025 Conference
Meet me in St. Louis for VISAWUS 2025: Gateways
October 3-5, 2025
Saint Louis University
Keynote Speaker: Kristin Mahoney, Michigan State University
Please submit abstracts of no more than 200 words along with a one-page CV to
visawus2025@gmail.com by March 1, 2025. Panel proposals are also welcome and should include a
brief panel overview, descriptions of individual papers, and one-page CVs for each panelist.
Saint Louis University is a Catholic, Jesuit institution in mid-town Saint Louis, founded in 1818. The campus and surrounding neighborhood abound with buildings dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Saint Louis University is also close to the St. Louis Art Museum, the Missouri History Museum, the St. Louis Botanical Gardens, and many beautifully preserved Victorian House Museums, including the Samuel Cupples House on campus as well as the Campbell House Museum and Chatllon-Demenil Mansion nearby.
Welcome
The Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States (VISAWUS) is a non-profit scholarly association founded in 1995 by Kathleen Peck to promote Victorian interdisciplinary studies. Our aim is to bring together scholars from across the disciplines with an interest in the Victorian period. Members include graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars with interests in Victorian literature, history, music, art, science, and medicine. We place a strong emphasis on mentoring junior faculty and graduate students.
Our annual conference invites faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars working on the long nineteenth century in Britain and within a broader transnational context to showcase the innovative work being performed in the field. The conference is known as a particularly generous site for networking and collaboration. The conference includes themed pedagogy roundtables where participants have the opportunity to discuss pedagogy with new and seasoned instructors and to get feedback on some aspect of their teaching (an assignment, an approach to the text, or a classroom activity).
Each year we award an exemplary graduate student presenter with the William H. Scheuerle Graduate Student Paper Award.
Information on our next conference is forthcoming.
Membership in VISAWUS is open to all who share an interest in its scholarship and goals. Membership includes a one-year subscription to Victorian Review.
The VISAWUS Constitution (PDF, 2023)