The Covid-19 pandemic prompted the organizers of the conference to include both pre-recorded and in-person presentations. In addition to dedicated times in the program to view pre-recorded presentations, all pre-recorded papers were made available to registered participants three days in advance. ••• = pre-recorded sessions. *** = link to abstract or complete essay.
1a. Dickens and Sound
- Chair: Trey Philpotts (University of Central Florida)
- Sun Jai Kim (Sangmyung University), Wandering an Acoustic City in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist
- Nanako Konoshima (Kyoto Notre Dame University), Making Silent Voices Heard--Sounds and Echoes in A Christmas Carol
- William Kumbier (Missouri Southern State University), “Great works and massive bridges crossing up above”: Mr. Dombey’s Fraught and Figured Flights
1b. Out of England
- Chair: Claire Woods (Ulster University)
- Katie Bell (University of Leicester), “I am not your Negro”: Navigating Race in Dickens’s American Notes and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
- *** Germana Cubeta (University of Messina), Dickens and the Italians in Pictures from Italy (complete essay)
- Yon Ji Sol (Seoul National University), Transatlantic Citizens of Reform: Dickens’s Nurses and Mary Seacole
1c. Dickens on Screen
- Chair: Ben Moore (University of Amsterdam)
- Rebecca Nesvet (University of Wisconsin), The Angel in the Safe House: Sarah Phelps’s (BBC, 2007) Maternal Fagin
- Christian Gallichio (University of Georgia), “You have no choice but to come with me, Ebenezer”: Sexual Trauma and Technological Conversion in
- Steven Knight’s A Christmas Carol
- Gillian Ballinger (University of the West of England, Bristol), Dickens and Adaptation: Bleak House and Andrew Davies’ 2005 BBC Serialisation
2a. Dickens and Education
- Chair: Sophia Jochem (Freie Universität Berlin)
- Rosetta Young (Haverford College), Dickens’s Hints on Etiquette: Early Boz and the Lower-Middle-Class Public
- Eric Lorentzen (University of Mary Washington), Happy Shepherd-Boys and Closing Prison-Houses: The Importance of Connection in Wordsworth, Dickens, and Tolstoy
- Anna Merz (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “What is life but learning!”: Informal Education in Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend
- Christian Lehmann (Bard High School Early College-Cleveland), Dickens the Latinist
2b. Dickensian Afterlives
- Chair: Rebecca Nesvet (University of Wisconsin)
- Magdalena Pypeć (University of Warsaw), Dickensian Echoes in Heart of Darkness
- Mary Ann Tobin (Pennsylvania State University), A Mystery in Itself: Drood in Matthew Pearl’s The Last Dickens
- Chris Louttit (Radboud University), “Alternative Dickens”: The Graphic Afterlife of the Inimitable in The New Yorker
- Robert Sirabian (University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point), The Intertextual Relationship: Charles Dickens and J. K. Rowling
2c. Watching and Staging Dickens
- Chair: Natalie McKnight (Boston University)
- Katherine Kim (Molloy College), Trying to Control the Narrative: Charles Dickens and Trauma
- Jane Kim (Biola University), Watching the Watchers in David Copperfield and Our Mutual Friend
- Miriam Helmers (University College London), Prompt-Copies and Actors’ Bodies
- Francesca Orestano (University of Milan), Not So Deep, Not So Frozen: Michael Palin, Charles Dickens, and the ‘Erebus’ Expedition
Digital Humanities Roundtable
- Chair: Emily Bell (University of Leeds)
- Emma Curry and Aine McNicholas (Victoria & Albert Museum), Deciphering Dickens
- Hoyeol Kim (Texas A&M University), Dickensian Sentiment and Sentiment Analysis of Victorian Novels
- Emily Bell (University of Leeds) and Lydia Craig (Loyola University Chicago), Dickens Search
- Carolyn Oulton (Canterbury Christ Church University), Can we link now? Going behind the lines in Dickensland, Kent
Reading Groups
- Group A: 'To Be Read At Dusk' with Emily Bell (University of Leeds)
- Group B: 'The Mortals in the House' with Melisa Klimaszewski (Drake University)
- Group C: 'The Prisoners’ Van' with Dominic Rainsford (Aarhus University)
Theatre Roundtable
- Chair: Catherine Quirk (Edge Hill University)
- with Sharon Aronofsky Weltman (Louisiana State University), Dickens and the Broadway Musical
- Peter Orford (University of Buckingham) and Joanna Hofer-Robinson (University College Cork), Editing the plays of Charles Dickens
- Mary Isbell (University of New Haven), Dickens and Amateur Theatricals
- Carolyn Williams (Rutgers University), Melodramatic Form
3a. ••• New Perspectives on Dickens’s Texts
- Chair: Renata Goroshkova (Saint Petersburg State University)
- Lydia Craig (Loyola University Chicago), “We live in such a state of muddle”: Sophia Iselin’s Home Truths for Home Peace and Housekeeping in Bleak House
- April Nixon Kendra (University of Delaware), The Haunting of Charles Dickens: Amelia Edwards and Mr. H
- Joel J. Brattin (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Textual Collation of A Tale of Two Cities
3b. ••• Dickens and Europe
- Chair: Christian Dickinson (South Georgia’s Christian College)
- Shu-Fang Lai (National Sun Yat-Sen University), Dickens and Mathematics: Numbering, Calculating, and Reasoning
- Colton Valentine (Yale University), Affective Travel: Revisiting the Continent in Little Dorrit
- Claire Woods (Ulster University), Le Beau Monde: Dickens on French Decadence and Brexit
3c. ••• Dickens’s Ghosts
- Chair: Katherine Kim (Molloy College)
- Joanna Turner (Loughborough University), “If the courses be departed from, the ends will change”: Marie Corelli and an Edwardian refashioning of A Christmas Carol
- Lorena Macmillan (Anglia Ruskin University), The Afterlife of Charles Dickens: His Posthumous Impact on Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism
- Shari Hodges Holt (University of Mississippi), Dickens “was dead: to begin with”: Charles Dickens’s Afterlife as Neo-Victorian Ghost Buster
4a. ••• Dickens and American Celebrity
- Chair: Iain Crawford (University of Delaware)
- Spencer Dodd (Louisiana State University), Dickens, Charles Lyell, and Peter Pitchlynn: American Notes and U.S. Literary Nationalisms
- Rob Jacklosky (College of Mount Saint Vincent), Negotiating Fame in American Notes for General Circulation (and Elsewhere)
- Catherine Waters (University of Kent), “An Evening with Charles Dickens” on the Nineteenth-Century Lecture Circuit
- Megan Hansen (University of Stuttgart), The Political Heritage of Charles Dickens in the American Press
4b. ••• Bodies and Touch
- Chair: Katherine Kim (Molloy College)
- Melanie Lewis (University of Winnipeg), A Theatre of Hands: The Commodification of/and Monstrous Family in Dickens’s Little Dorrit
- Jolene Zigarovich (University of Northern Iowa), Dickens’s Necropolitics
- Lillian Nayder (Bates College), “Made on an Otranto Scale”: Dickens’s Gothic Body
4c. ••• Dickens in Translation
- Chair: Hoyeol Kim (Texas A&M University)
- Renata Goroshkova (Saint Petersburg State University), Duels for Dickens in Russian Periodicals of the 19th Century
- Eleonora Gallitelli (Independent Scholar), Dickens in the Newly Unified Italy: Critical Reception and First Translation
- Anna Dybiec (Pedagogical University of Kraków), Emotions in Dickens: A Bridge Between English and Polish Cultures
- Julie Tarif (University of Alberta), The Metamorphoses of a Dickensian Classic in Translation
Dramatic and Musical Event
- Introduction: Chris Louttit (Radboud University)
- Performer: Caroline Radcliffe (University of Birmingham), “We mean to burst on an astonished World” – Charles Dickens and The Lighthouse
- After The Dickens Society Players, The Breach of Promise Trial Bardell v. Pickwick (1907), adapted from The Pickwick Papers by J.W. Bengough
Pandemic Roundtable
- Chair: Sean Grass (Rochester Institute of Technology)
- Sean Grass (Rochester Institute of Technology), “Tom shall have his revenge” — Teaching Bleak House in a Pandemic
- Nicole Fluhr (Southern Connecticut State University), Interwoven Threads of Inequality and Health in Bleak House
- Natalie McKnight (Boston University), Dickens and the Disease of Madness Peter Orford (University of Buckingham), False Remedies and Misinformation, as demonstrated by The Miraculous Bambino
- Akiko Takei (Chukyo University), Analyzing the Spread of Infectious Disease in Bleak House
5a. ••• Dickens and Childhood
- Chair: Michael J. Brisendine
- ***Tamara S. Wagner (Nanyang Technological University), “A very Moloch of a baby”: Funny Babies and Victorian Child Care Arrangements (abstract)
- *** Li Liu (University of Warwick), Seeing Jenny Wren as a “Child” through the Bourgeois Lens: Narrative Distance and Absence in Our Mutual Friend (full presentation)
- Katherine Stein (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “To wring the [proverbial] parrots’ necks”: Historical Subjectivity and the Development of Critical Readership in A Child’s History of England
5b. ••• Law and Witnessing
- Chair: Catherine Waters (University of Kent)
- Deborah Siddoway (Durham University), “We must have law and lawyers”: Dickens, Caroline Norton and the Campaign for Women’s Rights
- Adrianne A. Wojcik (Northern Virginia Community College), “The saddest dream that ever was”: The Dickensian Motif of Nuptial Nightmare in the Nineteenth-Century Novel and Matrimonial Law Reform
- Mark Cronin (Saint Anselm College), Charles Dickens, Charles Reade, and the Griffith Gaunt Controversy
5c. ••• Dickens’s Environments
- Chair: Lillian Nayder (Bates College)
- Jiwon Min (Louisiana State University), “The sky was red with flame”: Abnatural and the ecoGothic in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41)
- Michaela Mahlberg (University of Birmingham), Connections and Collocations: What Dickens Can Contribute to Today’s Water Discourse
- Sophia Jochem (Freie Universität Berlin), Fungi and the City: Dickens’s Urban Aesthetic of Decay
6a. ••• Dickens and Class
- Chair: Lydia Craig (Loyola University Chicago)
- Yesim Ipekci (Middle East Technical University), Pip’s Obstructed Bildung: Shame as an “Affective Ideologeme” in Great Expectations
- Meghan Burry (Queen’s University), “Knitting, knitting, counting dropping heads”: Madame Defarge, Domesticity, and Female Violence in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities
- Elizabeth Bridgham (Providence College), Insolent Presumption: The Aspirational Proposals of Uriah Heep and Obediah Slope
6b. ••• Identity Creation and Narration
- Chair: Mary Ann Tobin (Pennsylvania State University)
- Elizabeth Shand (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Sam Weller’s Scrap Sheet on The Pickwick Papers: Negotiating Material Print Identities Alexandra Valint (University of Southern Mississippi), Bleak House as ‘Back-and-Forth’ Multinarrator Novel
- Tiffany Olgun (Royal Holloway, University of London), Dickens and Animalism
6c. ••• Problematic Legacies
- Chair: Christian Dickinson (South Georgia’s Christian College)
- *** James Armstrong (City University of New York), In a Dark Wig: Dickens’s Reinvention of Byron as Steerforth (abstract)
- Meoghan Cronin (Saint Anselm College), Beaters, Cringers, and Dolly Too? Responding to Assaults against Women in Dickens’s Novels
7a. Dickens and Money
- Chair: Adrianne A. Wojcik (Northern Virginia Community College)
- Warren Weiss (Queen’s University Belfast), An Exploration of Dickens’s Money and Debts During the Early Years of His Career
- Ben Moore (University of Amsterdam), Money, Narrative and Representation from Dickens to Gissing
7b. Teaching Dickens
- Chair: Chris Louttit (Radboud University)
- Benjamin O’Dell (Georgia Gwinnett College), From Black Lives Matter to the Workhouse: Building Student Investment in Oliver Twist
- Ashley Nadeau (Utah Valley University), Dickens in Your Ears: Teaching Audiobooks in the Victorian Literature Classroom
- Susan Cook & Elizabeth Henley (Southern New Hampshire University), Dickens and the Digital Archive: Creating a Resource with and for Undergraduates
7c. Dickens and Detection
- Chair: Sharon Aronofsky Weltman (Louisiana State University)
- Andre DeCuir (Muskingum University), “A Lady of a natural detective genius”: Dickens and the Woman Detective in Hard Times and Bleak House
- Helena Kelly (Independent Scholar), “An ancient English cathedral tower?”: Geographical Liberties in The Mystery of Edwin Drood
- Jeremy Parrott (University of Buckingham), A Mystery Still, a Mystery No More: The Story of James Miranda Barry in All the Year Round
Last modified 21 September 2021