Victorian Colloquium
Victorian Colloquium
The Victorian Colloquium is a group of Princeton graduate students and faculty working on the British nineteenth century and related fields. Our primary responsibility is to invite scholars from other universities (as well as Princeton-affiliated scholars) to share their work with us at formal talks, often followed by receptions and dinners that allow students the opportunity to speak more informally with our guests. Along with our neighbors at Rutgers, delegates from the Victorian Colloquium also organize a yearly symposium for graduate students at both universities; the 2017 theme was “The Un/natural Nineteenth Century.” Many members of the Victorian Colloquium are moreover active participants in the Long Nineteenth Century Workshop, an interdisciplinary works-in-progress group for graduate students working in the period. But beyond our purely academic initiatives, the Victorian Colloquium seeks to foster a close intellectual community of students (and faculty!) with shared interests. Happy hours and dinners give Princeton Victorianists a chance to connect across cohorts, and to share advice and experiences. The first events for 2017-18 will be announced in the summer. We hope to see you there next academic year.
Past Events
2022 - 2023
Professor Cornelia Pearsall is Professor of English at Smith College. She is also affiliated faculty in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender, and earned her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Yale University.
2021 - 2022
War Scare: Nuclear Tennyson
The 13th annual Princeton-Rutgers Victorian Symposium, Print Ecologies, will feature three panels of graduate students presenting on interdisciplinary themes from the environmental humanities, media studies, book history, and more.
2020-2021
Friday, February 19
1:30 – 3:00, Panel 1: Capital Accounts
On the Threshold of Friendship: Socialist Sympathy at the Fin de Siècle
Gemma Holgate (Royal Holloway, University of London)
2019-2020
This event has been canceled.
Outline and the Racialization of Surface in Hardy's "Sketch of Temperament"
Reception in the Thorp Library to follow talk.
It Really Works: George Eliot, Trans Studies, and the Rhetoric of Technique
Reception in the Thorp Library to follow talk.
Co-sponsored with the Theory Colloquium.
2018-2019
Thomas Hardy's Poetry: Waiting and the Ethics of Attention
Reception in Thorp Library to follow talk.
Victorians, Obviously
Human Scale: Utopia in the Era of Climate Change
Reception in Thorp Library to follow talk.
Panel Discussion: Ethics and Victorian Studies
Reception in the Thorp Library to follow talk.
2017-2018
Title TBA
Reception in the Thorp Library to follow talk.
Thinking with Characters: Rumination and the Concept of Moral Time
Reception in the Thorp Library to follow talk.
Singing in a Foreign Land: Anglo-Jewish Poetry in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
Reception in the Thorp Library to follow talk.
State of the Field: Victorian Studies
2016-2017
Please join us for a lecture by Chloë Kitzinger, a Perkins-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows, and Lecturer in Slavic Languages and Literatures and Humanistic Studies at Princeton.
We're delighted that Professor Ian Duncan (UC Berkeley) will be coming on Thursday, April 20th at 4:30 to give a talk on "Dickens’s Teratology: The Natural History of Bleak House." His paper explores how the transformist biology of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Geoffroy St.
This graduate student conference will examine how conceptions of the natural and the unnatural fundamentally shape cultural expression in 19th-Century Britain.
The Victorian Colloquium is welcoming Professor Elaine Hadley (U of Chicago) at 4:30 pm in the Hinds Library to give a talk about Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and education as it is figured in labor and economic terms set out by Gary Becker.
Professor Isobel Armstrong (Birkbeck College, Univ. of London), long-term visiting fellow at the Council of the Humanities at Princeton, will speak on "The Victorian Novel: A Challenge to Some Orthodoxies," at 4:30 pm in the Hinds Library.
Please join us on the patio of the Yankee Doodle Tap Room (inside, in case of inclement weather) at 4:30 pm for our annual happy hour. Enjoy the company of fellow Victorianists, learn about the year’s upcoming events, and kick off the fall semester!