n their introduction to the "Undisciplining Victorian Studies" special issue of Victorian Studies, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong call for a new approach to Victorian scholarship that "illuminate[s] how race and racial difference subtend our most cherished objects of study, our most familiar historical and theoretical frameworks, our most engrained scholarly protocols, and the very demographics of our field" (370). In light of this productive provocation, this panel seeks to rethink Victorian anxieties around bodies and selves from a transimperial lens. Specifically, we solicit papers that rearticulate Victorian discomfort surrounding bodily vulnerability, regression, desire, and/or permeability in the context of transimperialism, racialization, and/or racial violence.
Papers might address anxieties surrounding any of the following topics:
- Animality, species boundaries, natural selection
- Contagion, disease, debility, disability
- Population, masses, crowds, mobs, urban space
- Dissection, the Anatomy Act, medical experimentation
- Women's bodies/ sexuality (the marriage market, sex work, etc.)
- Industrialization, automation, human/ machine hybrids
- Travel, borders, frontiers, "wilderness"
Submissions will be accepted through September 30th, 2023. Please submit an abstract (mac. 250 words) and brief bio (max. 125 words) to Maham Khan (mkhan39@kent.edu) and Jennifer MacLure (jmaclure@kent.edu).
Feel free to reach out to Jennifer MacLure.
Last modified 12 September 2023