Each year following the Dickens Universe, the Dickens Project hosts a smaller conference during the winter. During this conference, graduate students have an opportunity to present their work and develop their professional skills in a friendly environment. Because the conference is well-attended by Dickens Universe participants, grads can reconnect with peers from the past summer’s conference, receive feedback on their ongoing scholarly work from the faculty of the Dickens Project, and continue building relationships with their colleagues in Victorian studies.
This year, the Dickens Project Winter Conference will be held at the University of Kentucky, Lexington KY, on February 23-25, 2017. The Winter Graduate Conference is supported in part by the Friends of the Dickens Project.
PANELS & PRESENTATIONS
| Reading Then and Now Moderator: Jill Rappoport, University of Kentucky |
| "Henry James's Strategic Formalism in 'The Figure in the Carpet'" Jeffrey C. Kessler, Indiana University, Bloomington |
| "When Books Read People: Dickens, Gaskell, and the Business of Sympathy" Matthew C. Connolly, Ohio State University |
| "Reading Behind the Curtain: The Austenian Heroine's Stock of Quotations" Christina Jen, Rutgers University |
| Hauntings Moderator: Renee Fox, University of California, Santa Cruz |
| "'Mists and Shadows of the Past:' Miasma and Memory in David Copperfield" Darby Walters, University of Southern California |
| "Victorian Ghostbusters" Allison Clymer, University of Tennessee |
| "Burying 'All Bad Things': The Construction of Memory's Eden in Dickens's America" Caroline Wilkinson, University of Tennessee |
| Characters and Categories Moderator: Nancy Henry, University of Tennessee, Knoxville |
| "Ambassadors of Elsewhere: (Dis)engaging with Minor Characters in Dickens's Fiction" Kristen Starkowski, Princeton University |
| "'I give men pleasure openly:' The Pantomime Dancer as Queer Relic in Michael Field's Roman Trilogy" Tara Thomas, University of California, Santa Cruz |
| "'We are too Menny:' Characters, Kinds and Categories in Hardy's Jude the Obscure" Rebecca Ehrhardt, University of Southern California |
| Human/Non-human Moderator: Carol MacKay, University of Texas, Austin |
| "Human-Animal Corporality and Mortality in Representations of Animal Mourning" Valerie Stevens, University of Kentucky |
| "Jude the Obscure, Tragic Language, and the Formal Element of Tone" Donald Carpenter, Rice University |
| Victorian Children Moderator: Daniel Stout, University of Mississippi |
| "Living in Coal: Disability, Transcorporeality, Jonas Hanway, and the Bodily Passages of Chimney Sweep Literature" Jeremy Goheen, University of Texas, Austin |
| "Quarantining the Precocious Child in Tom Brown's School-days" Mallory R. Cohn, Indiana University, Bloomington |
