Victorian Mixed Media

Victorians Institute Annual Conference

19-20 October 2012

The conference will feature papers presented by 70+ scholars from around the country and abroad. The plenary speaker will be W. J. T. Mitchell, the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. Professor Mitchell’s talk is titled “Seeing Madness:  Insanity, Media, and Visual Culture.” He is the author most recently of Seeing through Race (Harvard University Press, 2012); earlier books from the University of Chicago Press include What do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (2005) and The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (1998). He is the editor of the journal Critical Inquiry.

The conference will also feature a celebration of the bicentenary of the birth of Robert Browning, with three panels of papers devoted to his work, followed by a plenary address by Herbert F. Tucker, the John C. Coleman Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Professor Tucker’s lecture is titled, “Unsettled Scores: Structure and Play in Browning’s Music Poems.” He is the author of Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790-1910 (Oxford 2008) as well as Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism, and Browning’s Beginnings. He is also editor of the Blackwell Companion to Victorian Literature and (along with Dorothy Mermin) Victorian Literature: 1830-1900.

As part of the conference, “Robert Browning, 1812-1889—The First Modern Media Poet: A Bicentenary Selection from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection” will be on display in VCU Cabell Library Special Collections Department from the start of the conference until the end of the semester.

There will also be a musical and a theatrical performance.

More information can be found at the conference web page.