AVSA 2026: Victorian Soundings
AVSA's upcoming conference will be held at Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand , 25-26 June 2026

Keynote speaker:  Professor Jason Camlot, Concordia University Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies

The Australasian Victorian Studies Association (AVSA) invites proposals for its 2026 annual conference.

From its inception, the interdisciplinary field of sound studies has led to ground-breaking work by scholars of the nineteenth century. Recently, it has continued to expand in intriguing ways, exploring the interdependence of speaking, writing, reading, and listening; the sonic interconnections between the arts, science, and new technologies; and acoustic mediations in imperial encounters with indigenous peoples. We use the term “soundings” to invite very broad interpretations, taking into account its innumerable literal and figurative associations. For instance, the OED tells us that not only do “soundings” signify the literal giving forth of sounds, but they incorporate the more abstract notion of the “sounding board,” related to “information or evidence ascertained as a preliminary step before taking action.” Likewise, “taking soundings,” and “sounding lines” refer to “the determination of any physical property at a depth in the sea or at a height of the atmosphere.” It is time for sounding out afresh the diverse articulations of aurality, and we invite papers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, including literature, art, philosophy, music, and history, exploring how sound and soundings were represented and contested in the global nineteenth century.

Topics might include but are not limited to:

• Silence & sound, noise
• The acoustic colonial contact zone & resistance
• Soundscapes: natural, urban, rural, aquatic or atmospheric
• Eavesdropping, overhearing, gossip & rumour
• Sounds of machines, trains, underground, clocks, whistles, instruments, speaking tubes
• Music: harmony, rhythm, discord, soundful, cultural, waiata, instruments, orchestras, singers, songs, & hymns
• Non-linguistic utterance & the body: laughing, burping, whispering, yelling, auscultation, the sensorium
• Cultural soundings & listening or not listening indigenous, metropolitan, colonial settler
• Aurality: the interdependence of speaking, writing, & reading
• Taking soundings, sounding out the new
• Sound & time, echoes, the ephemeral
• Victorian table talk, conversation, etiquette
• Hearing & writing accents, languages, elocution
• Oratory & public speaking, sermons, prayers, debates, speeches, lectures, eloquence, disfluency, glossophobia
• Performance & theatre: entertainment, ritual, music hall, concert hall, salon
• Hearing voices: uncanny, divine, evil, madness, echoes, God, Satan, ghosts, supernatural
• Poetic and narrative soundings
• Deaf studies & Victorian society, nineteenth-century sign language
• Sounds as warnings: lighthouses, sound signals
• Technologies of recording sound: the phonograph, telegraph, Morse Code, sound boxes, Pitman, etc.
• Sounding fits, speaking in tongues, trances


Please send proposals of no more than 300 words, along with a title and a 100-word biographical note to Dr Helen Blythe, at avsa2026@aut.ac.nz by 31 January 2026.