The 29th Annual Dickens Society Symposium

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“Dickens, Context, and Co-occurrence”

University of Birmingham: Birmingham, England

REGISTER HERE! 

15-18 July 2024

We are delighted to welcome you to the University of Birmingham! “Dickens, Context, and Co-occurrence” has invited discussion of the various contexts that Dickens’s works are set in, connect to, and imagine. Contexts are where things co-occur – with various effects. For any questions, contact the organisers Michaela Mahlberg and Caroline Radcliffe at dickens2024@contacts.bham.ac.uk.

Please note that you need to be a member of the Dickens Society to present at the annual conference. Membership is conferred by subscription to Dickens Quarterly. Find out more here.

Location:

Birmingham is known for its status as the UK’s “Second City” (after London) and for its industrial heritage. Centrally located in the West Midlands, it boasts excellent transportation access, located less than two hours from London, and has its own international airport. Home to the largest creative sectors outside the capital, it is one of the most multicultural cities of the UK, and also one of the greenest cities in the country. If you are thinking of spending a few days before or after the symposium in Birmingham, you might find this information useful.

The University of Birmingham is England’s first civic university. Cultural assets on campus include the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, the Lapworth Museum of Geology and the Winterbourne House and Garden. Charles Dickens visited Birmingham on several occasions, the most notable time probably occurring in 1853 when he gave his first public reading of A Christmas Carol in Birmingham Town Hall.

Details about travel, accommodation, and the conference programme will be posted and updated here on the Dickens Society website. For any questions, please contact the conference organisers, Michaela Mahlberg at m.a.mahlberg@bham.ac.uk and Caroline Radcliffe at C.Radcliffe@bham.ac.uk.

Call for Bursary Applications:

The Dickens Society annually provides bursaries to support the scholarly development of graduate students, independent scholars, and untenured faculty.

For our Symposium in Birmingham, we will be offering bursaries for various social media responsibilities and assistance during the event.

We will be asking bursary recipients to take over the Dickens Society social media accounts during the Symposium, help with running the conference, possibly write a report of the papers to be disseminated afterwards through the Society’s channels, and contribute a blog post on a topic of their choosing for the Society blog within four months of the end of the event.

To apply, graduate students, independent scholars, and untenured faculty whose papers have been accepted should send a one-page CV with a one-page cover letter to Claire Wood, the Society Secretary, at dickenssocietysecretary@gmail.com by 31 May 2024.

The one-page cover letter should specify your academic status and funding (or lack thereof) and discuss the relevance of the Symposium for your research and professional development. It should also outline the following:

• • Your own ideas for improving the social media presence of the event/any skills with Twitter and other relevant experience.

• • If relevant, a very brief idea for a blog post you might write for the society blog after the event.

• • Any relevant previous experience organizing and/or attending online and in-person academic conferences.

The bursary winners will be announced in early June. If you have any queries, please email dickenssocietysecretary@gmail.com.

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Robert B. Partlow, Jr. Prize

The Partlow Prize recognizes the best essay submitted for presentation at the Symposium by a graduate student, independent scholar, or contingent faculty member. Applicants for the Partlow Prize must submit a complete essay, suitable for 20-minute presentation time, to the Program Committee Chair, Michaela Mahlberg, at m.a.mahlberg@bham.ac.uk by 1 May 2024.

The Partlow Prize carries a cash award of $500 (or, in the case of co-winners, two prizes of $300 each) and a waiver of the registration fee for the Symposium.

Should the essay be of publishable quality, Dickens Quarterly shall have the right of first refusal. We expect to decide on a winner by end of May.

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The David Paroissien Prize

The David Paroissien Prize is awarded each year to the best peer-reviewed essay on Dickens published in a journal or edited collection. The Prize is named for David Paroissien, a founding member of the Dickens Society and also the founder of Dickens Quarterly, which he edited from its first issue in 1983 until his final issue in December 2019. As an editor he was rigorous, tactful, and generous, particularly with younger scholars. Under his direction, Dickens Quarterly attracted contributions from Dickens scholars around the world and became a leading venue for new work in the field.

To nominate (or self-nominate) an essay for the Paroissien Prize, please provide a copy of the essay and a cover email giving the name, email address, and institutional affiliation (if any) of its author. For the 2023 competition (essays published 1 January 2023 – 31 December 2023), send these materials to the Society Secretary at dickenssocietysecretary@gmail.com by 31 January 2024. A three-person committee comprised of Officers and/or Trustees will judge submissions. Please note that, in determining an essay’s eligibility for a given year, the actual date of appearance is what matters, not the nominal date of the journal issue, since it is common for journals to lag behind their publication date. Any author may be nominated for this Prize, whether or not they are a Society member. The Prize carries a cash award of $500 and waives the registration fee for the Symposium at which the recipient will be recognized.

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CFP: Blog Posts for The Dickens Society

We are looking for engaging submissions from scholars at all career stages on any aspect of Dickensian research. We particularly welcome posts from researchers new to the field: undergraduates and new post-graduate students. The blog aims to make research on Charles Dickens’s life and works accessible to all levels of researchers and Dickens enthusiasts.

Submissions should be 800-1200 words in length and authors should also attempt to find and include free-use images to pair with their written work. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• • Reviews/Synopses of books relating to the life or works of Dickens

• • Dickens’s afterlives (influence upon film, television, video games, etc.)

• • Research projects on Dickens (thesis or chapter blurbs)

• • Institutional structures in Dickens (political, social, religious, etc.)

Please email proposals, blog posts or questions to doctorkatiebell@gmail.com.

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Anti-Racism Statement of the Dickens Society

January 8, 2021

In light of the murder of George Floyd by members of the Minneapolis Police Department, the even more recent shooting of Jacob Blake, and the other unconscionable acts of violence inflicted lately and too routinely upon members of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) communities in the United States and around the world, the Dickens Society affirms that it stands in solidarity with BIPOC individuals and organizations. We stand with the courageous protestors demanding racial justice, and we repudiate the institutions and individuals who would deny them the justice to which they are entitled. We reject the police state, white nationalism, white supremacy, and bigotry of all kinds. We affirm that Black Lives Matter.

We study the life and works of Charles Dickens not only because he was a great artist but because, among other reasons, doing so promotes a more complete understanding of racial, economic, and other forms of injustice during the nineteenth century and in our own time. Much discomfort inheres in studying an author who expressed contradictory, sometimes unsatisfactory opinions about people of color during his life. But studying Dickens’s works can illuminate the attitudes about white superiority that undergirded racial oppression and imperial expansion during the Victorian period, and the ways in which such thoughts and attitudes, when rendered artistically by an enormously popular writer, can create durable perceptions of racial difference. Dickens’s extraordinary popularity in the United Kingdom, in the United States, and throughout the British Empire during the last two thirds of the nineteenth century created monumental social and cultural impacts. Yet the period of extraordinary economic expansion that permitted him to have a lucrative career as an editor and popular novelist was built upon the contemporary and historical legacy of slave labor and racial exploitation at home and abroad. In India, Jamaica, Australia, and across Africa, among other places, the national prosperity that sustained Dickens’s career depended upon systematic racial oppression, religious intolerance, resource extraction, and other forms of bigotry and exploitation that in some cases originated and have certainly sustained the very injustices that BIPOC individuals continue to struggle against today.

We recognize that the Dickens Society, and Dickens studies generally, have not acknowledged often or forcefully enough the troubling ways in which Dickens’s works address race, even though a growing number of important critical voices have begun addressing his engagement with fugitive slave narratives, wider forms of economic exploitation grounded in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and fraught structures of imperial expansion. We support and encourage this work. We recognize, but we have not explored fully, the manifold ways in which Dickens’s life and career must be considered in light of their implicit dependence upon the structures of racism that make movements such as Black Lives Matter necessary in the twenty-first century. We commit, therefore, to the crucial task of foregrounding BIPOC voices in and beyond the Dickens Society, encouraging anti-racism among our members and in the study of Dickens generally, and addressing thoughtfully and rigorously the considerations of race that shape both the artistry and materiality of Charles Dickens’s works.