Perspectives on BAVS/NAVSA, Cambridge, 13-15 July, 2009 – Report IV

Guest Post: Stella Pratt-Smith (Balliol College, Oxford)

The ‘Past vs. Present’ theme for this year’s BAVS/NAVSA conference set up an opposition between two opposed moments in time. Nonetheless, in the opening plenary, Peter Galison suggested that the century was driven by a single ‘stoical’ impulse, which increasingly opposed ‘exact’ science to ‘empirical’ art. That viewpoint was expanded in a later plenary by Mary Beard, in relation to the ‘double-vision’ of visitors to Pompeii who aligned dates of original artefacts with those of later excavations, and who came not just “to see the past” but, rather, “the process of how the past might be revealed”. What was most apparent over the three day conference, however, was the operation of much wider-ranging timescales and ways of seeing during the century. It was precisely that multiplicity that fuelled such a unique assortment of hybrid narratives.

The conference was, in that sense, a very Victorian production. Its interdisciplinary basis demonstrated

Perspectives on BAVS/NAVSA, Cambridge, 13-15 July, 2009 – Report III

Guest Post: Martin Dubois (University of Cambridge)

The variousness and dynamism of Victorian encounters with the past is mirrored in our own relationship to our nineteenth-century forebears. This was one of the central themes to emerge from the joint BAVS/NAVSA conference, ‘Past versus Present’ (a title adapted from Carlyle’s 1843 study Past and Present), held in Cambridge between 13 and 15 July. While conference participants tackled a diverse range of subjects and themes, what became apparent from many lectures and papers was the vigorousness of the connection between past and present, both of our own period to the Victorians, and of the Victorians to their predecessors.

It was apt, then, that Peter Galison (Harvard), in the plenary lecture which opened the conference, should emphasise the returns and reshapings involved in the history of scientific objectivity. Focusing on scientific atlases, Galison traced

Perspectives on BAVS/NAVSA, Cambridge, 13-15 July, 2009 – Report II

Guest Post: Alexandra Lewis (Trinity College, Cambridge)

This summer in Cambridge has seen the streets festooned with banners, and set the lecture theatres and concert halls reverberating with the music of discussion in celebration of certain milestones. The 800th anniversary of the University of Cambridge in 2009 coincided, in July, with the international Darwin Festival, marking 200 years since Charles Darwin’s birth, and 150 years since the publication of On the Origin of Species. July also heralded the first joint meeting of the North American Victorian Studies Association and the British Association for Victorian Studies – a milestone in its own right. Here, the intersections between present and past – so topical, multifarious, inspiring – were brought firmly to the forefront of our minds.

For three days, over three hundred Victorianists converged upon Churchill College, Cambridge, united by a scholarly desire to debate the theme: ‘Past versus Present’. Prompted by

Perspectives on BAVS/NAVSA, Cambridge, 13-15 July, 2009 – Report I

Guest Post: Stéphanie Prévost (University of Tours, France)

The theme of the Joint Meeting of the British Association for Victorian Studies and of the North American Victorian Studies Association, held at Churchill College in Cambridge, UK, was ‘Past v. Present’. Alluding to Thomas Carlyle’s 1843 essay, Past and Present, the very title of the conference conjured up the Victorian past – or rather the Victorians’ understandings of their past(s), be they real, reinvented, fictitious or fictional – before our very eyes. By way of an introduction, Peter Mandler, one of the organisers of the conference and a member of the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group which hosted the event, reminded us of the complex and often problematic relationship between the Victorians and their past, which this conference sought to explore and explain.

The diversity of Victorian approaches to their past can partly be explained by the Victorian will for scientific objectivity, an issue addressed by Professor Peter Galison (Harvard) at the first plenary lecture. Galison set out to explain the Victorian conception of scientific objectivity, which he defined as

2007 BAVS Conference at the University of Salford

Guest Post:
Rose Dunleavy (Worcester College, University of Oxford)
Ana Alicia Garza (Queen Mary, University of London)
Gregory Tate (Linacre College, University of Oxford)

The eighth annual conference of the British Association of Victorian Studies, hosted by the University of Salford and organised with great success by Brian Maidment and his team, produced three days of wide-ranging debate on ‘Victorian Cultural Industries and Elites’, and it turned out that Salford was a particularly appropriate venue for this debate. As Brian Maidment pointed out in his opening speech, the BBC intends to move the majority of its operations to Salford by 2011, transforming one of the UK’s first industrial towns into a hub of media activity. This introduction to Salford brought into focus what was to become an important talking-point of the conference: the impact of new forms of technology on our reception of cultural industries both past and present.

We came to the conference armed with bursaries generously given to us by BAVS in exchange for our observing and reporting on the proceedings. Over the course of the three days we were struck by the immense diversity of current academic responses to Victorian culture and by the growing importance of new technologies such as digitisation to the development of Victorian studies. However, many of the conference speakers also reminded their audience that, despite the scholarly possibilities opened up by these technologies, our understanding of Victorian culture remains inevitably partial and incomplete. A comment to this effect made by Margaret Beetham (Manchester Metropolitan University) in the opening round-table discussion set the tone for the entire conference. Beetham asked delegates to consider the significance of the concept of ‘blind spots’ to Victorian studies. What can we learn from the details that were marginalised or left out of the official records by the Victorians? And what is being hidden beneath our own blind spots? Another speaker at the round-table, David Finkelstein (Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh), addressed the current attempts by Google and MSN to digitise major libraries across the globe, and discussion soon turned to the dangers of losing touch with the physical aspect of texts in the rush to make them more accessible through technology. Finally, Ann Featherstone (University of Manchester) joined the discussion by drawing attention to a blind spot in current research: although more plays were published in the nineteenth century than at any other time, this is not reflected in the texts that are being selected for digitisation.

2007 BAVS (British Association of Victorian Studies) Eighth Annual Conference

Guest Post: Muireann O’Cinneide (University of Oxford)

The conference topic, “Victorian Cultural Industries and Elites”, accorded with the ongoing development of interest in Victorian Studies in the materiality of the Victorians’ world, and how our greater understanding of this can inflect our reading of literature. “Cultural industries” as a concept produced some strikingly unified panels on certain key themes, usually those associated with literary production, education and display. Other papers – including my own – took a wider (or, the unkind may suggest, more vague…) approach to what defines a cultural industry and what such industries might produce. The ‘elites’ aspect of the conference theme never really became crucial, although it played interestingly into various papers. Brian Maidment noted that the two themes which himself and his fellow organisers felt emerged especially strongly from the paper proposals involved museums, and spectacle and performance. The key Victorian cultural industries, then, emerged from this conference as centred upon museums and theatres, and the literary and material offshoots of these spaces. Periodicals also proved an important topic, offering as they do a fusion between product-centred discourse and the literary world.

Thursday 30th August:
Arriving on Thursday 30th August, I was relieved to find a conference organisation predicated on the assumption that a large group of wandering Victorianists would need clear directions from the station, easy access to registration, and helpful instructions once they’d got there. All this and more was supplied by the Salford team. The opening Round Table, “Victorian Cultural Industries – New Directions in Research”, set the conference off to a particularly energising start. We were assisted in getting into the mood, so to speak, by the impressively topical surroundings of Peel Hall, a Victorian concert hall in a building that had hosted the Royal Salford Technical Institute when founded in 1896. The round table was introduced by Lucie Armitt, and featured Margaret Beetham (Manchester Metropolitan) on Periodicals, David Finkelstein (Queen Margaret, Edinburgh) on Book History, and Ann Featherstone (Manchester) on Performance. Each plenary speaker’s discussion foregrounded the issue of digitalisation, and its implications for