The upcoming Australasian Victorian Studies Association conference will be held at Deakin University in June 2017. Abstracts are due 1 February 2017:

Call for Papers
Victorian Materialities, AVSA Conference
Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
14-16 June 2017
Keynote speaker: Alexis Easley (University of St Thomas)
Deadline:  1 February 2017

In The Buried Life of Things: How Objects Made History in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2014), Simon Goldhill observes that the profusion of objects inhabiting a Victorian drawing room “speaks insistently not simply of a history of taste, but also of the interconnected forces of the industrial revolution, which changes the modes of the production of things, and the imperial project, which changes the modes of circulation of material objects and their owners”. This interdisciplinary conference on “Victorian Materialities” takes up the “material turn” in Victorian Studies to examine the cultural meanings and significance attached to material objects by contemporaries. It aims to explore how objects both produced and reflected Victorian culture. In an era in which the industrial revolution rapidly urbanised Britain and escalated the production and consumption of goods, “things” came to have an increasingly intimate, and sometimes porous, relationship with human experience since the material world was almost always open to self fashioning. A critical focus on material objects can reveal a wealth of information about their users.

Call for Papers – Information and how to apply