AVSA 2025: Victorian Modernities
AVSA's upcoming conference will be held at the University of Queensland, on 24th and 25th July, 2025.
Keynote speaker: Professor Sally Shuttleworth (University of Oxford)

The call for papers is now open.

“We were wise indeed, could we discern truly the signs of our own time” wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1829, as he urged his contemporaries to discern the “distinctive characters and deeper tendencies” of their age. For many Victorians, the present was an age of profound transformation and self-questioning, marked by rapid industrialisation, urbanisation, and technological innovation. It was an age when global communications and travel became faster and more accessible, thanks to the railways, steamships, and the electric telegraph. Advances in science and technology, from Darwin’s theories to electricity’s integration into daily life, sparked excitement and anxiety. Victorians began to grapple with the complexities of being 'modern,' a term increasingly invoked in debates about progress, tradition, and history. Sociologists, philosophers, and cultural theorists reflected on how these shifts redefined society, while Victorian fictions probed the social and psychological consequences of such changes.

We invite papers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, including Literature, History, Music, Art History, and the History of Science, which explore how the Victorians experienced, understood, and represented their modernities. Topics might include but are not limited to:

Victorian print and media culture, avant-garde movements and new genres
Modern transport and networks of communication
Victorians abroad, tourism, and travel writing
Victorian advances in science, technology, and medicine
Commodity culture and consumerism
Imperialism, nationalism, and colonialism
Modern spaces and temporalities, including the Victorian city
Counter-movements, challenges or resistance to modernity
New social types, such as the New Woman, the Dandy, and the Aesthete
Neo-Victorian re-visions of modernity

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words, along with a title and a 100-word biographical note to Dr Melissa Dickson, at melissa.dickson@uq.edu.au by 31st March 2025.