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.
Upcoming Events
In making incarnation a key term for her fiction, George Eliot exemplifies a broader Victorian effort to transmute Christian sentiment into a secular ideal of sympathy and an aesthetic of realism. At the same time, the critical tendency to situate Eliot in relation to a New Testament paradigm has obscured her engagement…
Past Events
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. Hilaire, popularized by Robert Chambers in Vestiges of the…
This graduate student conference will examine how conceptions of the natural and the unnatural fundamentally shape cultural expression in 19th-Century Britain. From Charles Darwin’s theory of ‘natural selection’ to John Ruskin’s treatise on the ‘Nature of the Gothic,’ the language of ‘nature’ as inevitable and inherent identity…
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. It promises to be a fascinating presentation--one that is equally illuminating about…
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. You are also invited to a reception honoring Professor Armstrong at the home of Professor…
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!