Victorian Expansions: Cross-Cultural Migrations
Event details
The Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, in collaboration with the Centre for Modern Studies and the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at York, is pleased to announce the return of its Victorian Studies conference, on the topic of “Victorian Expansions: Cross-Cultural Migrations.”
The Victorian age witnessed the mass movement of peoples and ideas, from empire-builders and settlers migrating to colonial peripheries, to artists, writers, and thinkers from around the world moving to the imperial metropole to create eclectic literary, artistic, and musical forms and genres that combined global influences. In a contemporary climate increasingly characterised by anti-immigration rhetoric and policy, “Victorian Expansions: Cross-Cultural Migrations” will gather interdisciplinary research by postgraduate students and senior scholars to uncover the inherent diversity and dynamism underlying Victorian, and indeed British, culture and identity.
The conference aims to promote the view of the long nineteenth century as characterised by the mobility and convergence of peoples, ideas and artistic forms, thus offering a historical counternarrative to the isolationism and anti-immigration sentiments that increasingly shape our current moment.
Conference registration
- Free student admission: £0
- General admission (faculty members/Fellows/members of public): £20.00
- Optional boxed lunch: £6.65
Please email brittany.scowcroft@york.ac.uk with any accessibility or dietary requirements.
Registration closes at 9am on Wednesday 15 April.
Schedule of events
10am to 10.30am
- Registration and Welcome.
- Coffee will be provided.
10.30am to 12 noon
Panel 1: Colonial (Self-)Constructions
- Fariha Shaikh (University of Birmingham): “Reading Across Boundaries: T. N. Mukharji’s Travelogue and Short Stories”
- Abdul Sabur Kidwai (King’s College London): “Drawing the Line: Indian Muslim Self-fashioning in Victorian London”
- Tarini Bhamburkar (University of Bristol): “Feminist Cross-currents: Interview with an Indian Woman in a British Women’s Periodical”
12 noon to 12.15pm
- Coffee break
12.15pm to 1.15pm
- Creative Reading with Professor Emily Zobel Marshall, Professor in Postcolonial Literature at Leeds Beckett University and author of poetry collections, Bath of Herbs (2023) and Other Wild (2025).
1.15pm to 2.15pm
- Lunch
2.15pm to 3.30pm
Panel 2: Conflict at Home and the World
- Jessica Valdez (Louisiana State University): “The Intimacy of Global War: Migrating Plots and Sensational Trade in Wilkie Collins’s No Name.”
- Danielle Nielsen (Murray State University): “Traumatic Rhetoric: Women’s Ethos in the Survival Narratives of the 1857 Uprising.”
3.30pm to 3.45pm
- Coffee break
3.45pm to 5.15pm
Panel 3: Cross-Cultural Currents
- Samantha Lukic-Scott (University of York): “Cross-Cultural Spheres of Art and Manufacture: Britain and German States in the Victorian Era”
- Charlotte Wilson (University of Oxford): “The Migration of Healthcare from the Home to the Professional”
- Ruth-Anne Walbank (Warwick University): “Hellish Migrations: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in the Poetry of the Cotton Famine (1861-1865)”
6pm to 7.30 pm
Keynote (public lecture)
- Title: “'This strange Dream upon the water': Charles Dickens Drowning in Venice"
- Speaker: Professor Ankhi Mukherjee (Professor of English and World Literatures, University of Oxford)
- Venue: Physics Lecture Theatre (P/L/002), Exhibition Centre - School of Physics, Engineering and Technologies Building
Venue details
Wheelchair accessible
Hearing loop