Call for papers

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Please note that the deadline for abstract submission has now passed. To view the conference programme, please click through to the ‘Programme’ tab.

Nineteenth Century Numbers: British Association for Victorian Studies Annual Conference 2013

29-31 August 2013, Royal Holloway, University of London

The site of Mount Lee, Egham, consisting of ninety-five acres, was selected and conveyed to the trustees in May, 1876…  [Royal Holloway] covers more ground than any other college in the world, forming a double quadrangle measuring 550 feet by 376 feet… The recreation hall, with its superb collection of pictures, cost upwards of £90,000… There are all modern sanitary appliances, and complete systems of electric and gas lighting, and steam heating… The College and Sanatorium together have cost considerably over one million sterling, the munificence of the benefactions being altogether without precedent in this country.
— The Observer, 20 June 1886.

The BAVS conference 2013 will be held at Royal Holloway, University of London which was founded by the Victorian entrepreneur and philanthropist Thomas Holloway at Egham, Surrey in 1886. The College and the nearby former Holloway Sanatorium are products of surplus wealth accumulated in the course of Holloway’s activities as financier, in the large-scale manufacture of patent medicines, and in mass marketing – including advertising to Britain’s overseas colonies. While its theme reflects these institutional origins, the Conference aims to explore the relevance of numbers to nineteenth-century studies in a wide variety of ways. We welcome proposals for papers and panels which speak to the interdisciplinary conference theme broadly and innovatively.

Call for Papers

Mass culture, mass politics and reform; crowds, population, over population; Malthus and Darwin; proliferation and extinction; the residuum and the best circles.

Collecting and cataloguing; replication; periodicals and serials; prosody and metre; music and rhythm; architecture and proportion; sequence and sequels.

Mathematics; statistics; geometry; time and technology; timetables and navigation; mass mobility; computation; money; finance and economics.

The one and the many; duration; the infinite; age and aging.

Research methodologies in the digital era; quantitative and qualitative; corpus linguistics; periodization; information overload.

Deadline for abstracts: 28th March 2013. Please submit all abstracts to bavs2013@gmail.com. Enquiries about proposing themed panels can be sent to ruth.livesey@rhul.ac.uk or juliet.john@rhul.ac.uk.