Forthcoming events at the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies:

Conference Information

This interdisciplinary conference, convened by Birkbeck's Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, in partnership with the Department of English, University of Melbourne, and software developers Constraint Technologies International (CTI), will take place on 6-7 July 2007 at Birkbeck College, Malet Street, Bloomsbury.

The two-day conference will explore the relationship between minds, bodies and machines in the long nineteenth century.  Recent research on the Enlightenment's frontier technologies has established that era's preoccupation with developing machinery that could simulate the cognitive and physiological processes of human beings.  According to some critics, however, these Promethean ambitions were shelved during the nineteenth century, when the android as artefact was relocated to the realm of the imagination, where it became a threatening figure. According to this reading, the android as scientific project and a figure of possibility only re-emerges in our own era. The aim of this conference is to test this claim by exploring the continuities and discontinuities in the imagining of the human/machine interface in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries.

The conference programme will include plenary addresses, seminars and workshops.

Keynote Speakers

Dr Caroline Arscott (Courtauld Institute of Art), ‘ Mutability and Deformity: Models of the Body and the Art of Burne-Jones'

Professor Jay Clayton (Vanderbilty University), ‘Victorian Epigenesis: Inherited Behaviour without Genetics'

Professor Steven Connor (Birkbeck), ‘Air-Looms and Influencing Machines'

Professor Iain McCalman (University of Sydney), ‘A Radical's Conversion: Spirit, Mind and Natural Selection in the thought of Alfred Wallace.'

Professor Peter Otto (University of Melbourne), ‘Minds, Bodies and Virtual Reality in Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon Machine'

Professor Jonathan Sawday (University of Strathclyde), ‘Calculating Engines: Minds, Bodies, and Machines on the Eve of the Enlightenment'

Professor Kevin Warwick (University of Reading), ‘Upgrading Humans via Implants – Why Not?'

Dr Elizabeth Wilson (University of New South Wales), ‘Artificial Minds and the Machinery of Affectivity: The Case of Walter Pitts'

Click here for a draft programme:

Click here to register:

For further information, visit the conference website at: www.mindsbodiesmachines.org/conferences.html .

Florence Marryat and Popular Women Novelists 1860-1900

A One Day Conference – 24th November 2007

Institute for English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1

This conference seeks to draw attention to the life and work of Florence Marryat (1838-1899) — a fascinating yet now largely marginalised figure of nineteenth-century literature and culture and other popular women novelists from the second half of the nineteenth century. Besides her activities as an avid spiritualist, Marryat was a prolific novelist, an editor for the London Society magazine from 1872-1876, an actress, a dramatist, a public orator, a wife, a mother and a woman who enjoyed great popularity not only in Britain but also in the United States. Moreover, her novels and spirit books were translated into French, German, Polish and Greek — a fact which clearly demonstrates Marryat's success and marketability across fin-de-siècle Europe. Although her contemporaries, authors and editors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ouida, Marie Corelli and Ellen Wood, have attracted major academic interest in the past two decades, Marryat remains unfairly obscure. This one-day symposium seeks to address Marryat's multi-faceted career across a wide range of Victorian disciplines.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

? Marryat and spiritualism

? Marryat and the London Society

? Marryat on the Stage and/or behind the Scenes

? Marryat and sensation fiction

? Marryat and social change

? Marryat and her contemporaries

? Marryat and India

Keynote speaker: Professor Kate Newey.

Postgraduate students are particularly welcome.

Conference fee: 30GBP Postgraduate fee: 20GBP

Fee includes tea/coffee and post-conference wine reception.

Please send abstracts of no more that 200 words to either Greta Depledge or Tatiana Kontou by Monday 3 rd September 2007.

For further details and a booking form contact:

Greta Depledge: depledgeg@aol.com

Tatiana Kontou: T.Kontou@sussex.ac.uk

This conference is supported by the Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies, Birkbeck.

Studying the Nineteenth Century @ Birkbeck

Birkbeck College offers a wide range of opportunities for study and research in the nineteenth century. This page provides an overview of this diversity, arranged by departments within the college and affiliated programmes.

Faculty of Arts

School of English and Humanities

School of History, Classics and Archaeology

School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media

Faculty of Continuing Education

Faculty of Continuing Education

The London Consortium

The London Consortium

Studying the Nineteenth Century in the School of English and Humanities

The School offers a range of nineteenth-century teaching and research from BA onwards. The BA English degree offers various options on this period including popular courses on ‘Fiction 1780-1830', ‘US Literature 1776-1900', ‘The Victorian Novel', ‘The 1850s' and ‘The Fin de Siècle'. The department offers a truly interdisciplinary MA in ‘Victorian Studies', in collaboration with the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, and the Faculty of Continuing Education.

Many of those who take the Victorian Studies MA go on to join the vibrant research student community that exists within the department. With over 100 research students, the School of English and Humanities boasts the largest body of graduate students in English Studies in the University of London. Post-graduates organise a thriving Nineteenth Century Reading Group, and the Graduate Research Group provides a forum for students to present work in progress to their peer group.

Eleven of the department's staff offer specialisms in this period, with research interests ranging from High Romanticism to Victorian Taxidermy to the Egyptian Gothic, and are happy to hear from those considering research in this field. For further details, please see individual staff members.

Studying the Nineteenth Century in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology

The school offers a wealth of BA and MA options on nineteenth-century topics. Undergraduate options include 'Love and intimacy in Anglo-American culture since 1800', 'Rethinking the Victorians', and 'Colonial encounters: race, identity and cultural exchange in the British empire'. The MA programme incorporates courses on, for example, 'Civil society from the seventeenth century to the present', 'Darwin, Darwinism and the modern world' and 'Alternative medicine'.

The following staff in the School of History have research interests in nineteenth-century Britain: Dr Harry Cocks, Dr David Feldman, Professor Catherine Edwards, Professor Daniel Pick, Dr Jan Rueger, Dr Chandak Sengoopta, Dr Frank Trentmann. Please consult the School's webpage for more details. There are regular staff and student research seminars both of which sometimes deal with nineteenth-century themes. In addition, David Feldman and Frank Trentmann are convenors of the seminar in British History, 1815-1945 at the Institute of Historical Research.

Studying the Nineteenth Century in the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media

Research and teaching in the school reflects a strong interest in Nineteenth-century visual culture. Particular strengths include Victorian photography and the early moving-image; design history; Victorian femininity; the visual culture of the metropolis; and obscenity and the Victorian regulation of visual culture.

Six of the department's staff have research specialisms in aspects of the long nineteenth century. For further details please see individual staff profiles . Professor Lynda Nead can offer PhD supervision in 19th-century British visual culture, gender and visual representation, the city and visual culture. In addition, Patrizia Di Bello supervises research relating to photography and its representations as well as aspects of visual culture in the nineteenth and twentieth century, with particular reference to issues of gender and femininity in modern art and modernism, art and mechanical reproduction, photography and memory.

For information about course options and opportunities to study nineteenth-century art at undergraduate level in this department please click here.

The department has an active postgraduate research community. A series of Postgraduate seminars are held each year which reflect the broad range of interests within the School. Please contact Lynda Nead for further details: l.nead@bbk.ac.uk . A postgraduate writing group is held several times a term, in which research students meet to discuss the writing process. Please contact Gabriel Koureas for further details: g.koureas@hist-art.bbk.ac.uk

Further research projects associated with the department that may be of interest to 19 readers include:

THE LONDON PROJECT: The Early Film Business in London, 1894-1914

NATIONAL INVENTORY RESEARCH PROJECT (NIRP) aims to help museums research and catalogue their collections and to present catalogue data on a publicly accessible website. It is concerned in the first instance with non-British Continental oil paintings between 1200 and 1900 in UK public collections.

Studying the Nineteenth Century in the Faculty of Continuing Education

There is a rich seam of nineteenth century teaching and research in Birkbeck's Faculty of Continuing Education. As well as the dedicated Victorian Studies certificate and diploma courses, there are over 25 open access modules and day schools relating to the period on the Literature, History, Garden History, History of Art, and Music programmes. Professor Laurel Brake, who convenes the literature strands, is an expert on Victorian periodical literature, and is currently working on a major biography of Walter Pater and directing AHRB-funded project on nineteenth-century serials. Art historian Dominic Janes' work on ‘flesh' and idolatry is shedding new light on Medievalism in the early Victorian church, whilst in history Matt Cook's recent book looks at homosexuality in late nineteenth-century London. Cook has also been working with Birkbeck's new chair of History, Professor Daniel Pick, on a web-archive of primary source material relating to 19th century conceptions of deviance (for password contact m.cook@bbk.ac.uk). Richard Clarke, of Conservation and Science Studies, is researching the early years of the RSPB, and is planning a further study on the links between conservation and anti-vivisection, suffrage and temperance groups.

Studying the Nineteenth Century at the London Consortium

The London Consortium directed by Steven Connor, is a collaboration between Birkbeck, Tate, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Architectural Association.

The London Consortium offers opportunities to postgraduate (MRes and PhD) students wishing to pursue interdisciplinary research on nineteenth-century topics.