CFP: Women Staging and Restaging the Nineteenth Century (II)

Call for papers for the conference ‘Women Staging and Restaging the Nineteenth Century (II)’, an international conference to be held at the University of Valencia between 18 and 20 October 2023.

The relation between women and the entertainment industry throughout the nineteenth century in Great Britain has been widely studied by Bratton (2011), Davis (2000, 2002), Donkin (1995), Davis and Donkin (1999), Gale and Gardner (2000), Newey (2005), and other scholars since the 1990s. Neo-Victorian appropriations of the nineteenth century on stage were celebrated in the 2016 special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies “Performing the Neo-Victorian” guest edited by Palmer and Poore, who aptly identify the recent and growing presence of the Victorians on the British theatrical scene in an ‘increasing variety of ways’ (1). Some such ways were already scrutinized in Poore’s monograph Heritage, Nostalgia and Modern British Theatre (2012) and later by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman (2020) in her approach to the modern American musical. Yet, as demonstrated by the first Women Staging and Restaging the Nineteenth Century international conference celebrated in 2022 under the auspices of the Department of English and German (UV), there are still research avenues in the field to explore.

Connections between contemporary theatrical productions by women who revisit and re-stage the nineteenth century, or the ways in which Victorian stage practices have informed Neo-Victorian fiction and theatre written by women were debated at the 2022 conference. As a follow-up to such discussions and funded by the GVA Research Project (AICO/2021/225), we open the CFP for the Women Staging and Restaging the Nineteenth Century II international conference to be held at the Universitat de València between 18 and 20 October 2023. This is the final conference in a series of academic events organised as part of a three-year funded research project on women and entrepreneurship in the entertainment industry of the nineteenth century and its afterlives.

In the second edition of the conference, it is our intention to broaden the scope of the discussion by including the following topics. Firstly, we are interested in reconsidering how women’s theatrical activity is reflected throughout the nineteenth century in various traditions and cultures and, in terms of its projection towards the present day, the incorporation of transnational and/or transatlantic perspectives. In addition, how the plastic arts and other cultural industries, such as cinema, influence nineteenth-century female theatrical practice and neo-Victorian stagings respectively. Another major axis of the discussion will be focused on classical receptions of female cultural production related to the performing arts throughout the nineteenth century, as well as the forms of such reception today through, for example, the recovery of productions or texts.

Call for papers

The conference will be held in person at the Universitat de València with the hope that it will expand our discussion on the relation between women and the nineteenth-century stage with papers and panels that consider (but are not limited to) the following range of topics and areas of research:

• Nineteenth-century women staging the nineteenth century worldwide
• Nineteenth-century women staging the nineteenth century from a transnational and transatlantic perspective
• Nineteenth-century women staging the nineteenth century in the colonies
• Classical receptions and women actresses, playwrights and managers in the nineteenth century and its afterlives
• Neo-Victorian re-stagings of the nineteenth century by women
• Contemporary women playwrights and artistic directors looking at the nineteenth century
• Nineteenth-century actresses, women playwrights and managers at present
• Fictional recreations of (neo-) Victorian actresses, playwrights, managers, and producers in novels, in film and on the stage
• Rewritings of nineteenth-century spectacle in (neo-) Victorian and contemporary fiction by women writers
• Rewritings of nineteenth-century spectacle in (neo-) Victorian and contemporary theatre by women playwrights

Please use the online form to submit proposals of 250-300 words with a short biography (100 words) by 5 May 2023. Speakers are expected to present papers of 20 minutes with Q&A at the end.

Confirmed keynote speakers are:
Jim Davis (University of Warwick)
Viv Gardner (University of Manchester)
Fiona Macintosh (University of Oxford)
Kate Newey (University of Exeter)
Benjamin Poore (University of York)

Main organizers: 

• Laura Monrós Gaspar (UV)
• Rosario Arias (UMA)
• Victoria Puchal Terol (VIU)

Advisory board:

• Mireia Aragay (Universitat de Barcelona)
• Stefano Evangelista (University of Oxford)
• Isobel Hurst (Goldsmith, University of London)
• Begoña Lasa Álvarez (Universidade da Coruña)
• Janice Norwood (University of Hertfordshire)
• Beth Palmer (University of Surrey)
• Lin Pettersson (Universidad de Málaga)
• Eugenia Perojo Arronte (Universidad de Valladolid)
• Antonija Primorac (University of Rijeka)

All details can be found via this link: https://esdeveniments.uv.es/95242/detail/women-staging-and-re-staging-the-nineteenth-century-ii.html?private=7b4431cf049f70df50e7