Victorian Expansions: Cross-Cultural Migrations

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 is via the Online Store. 

1. Free student admission: £0 

2. General admission (faculty members/Fellows/members of public): £20.00

3. Optional boxed lunch: £6.65 

 

Please email brittany.scowcroft@york.ac.uk with any accessibility or dietary requirements. 

Registration closes at 9:00am on Wednesday 15 April. 

Schedule of events:

Venue: Hendrix Hall (D/L/028), Derwent College, Block L, Heslington Campus West, University of York

10-10:30 am: Registration and Welcome.

Coffee will be provided.

10:30 - 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 - 12:15 pm: Coffee Break

12:15 pm - 1:15 pm

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).

1:15 pm - 2:15 pm: Lunch

2:15-3:30 pm

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” 

3:30 pm - 3:45 pm: Coffee Break

3:45 - 5:15 pm

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)”

6 pm - 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 - Physics and Electronic Engineering Building, Ground Floor, Heslington Campus West, University of York