The conference is over! Thank you for participating, and helping us raise over £2800 for the Dickens Museum. Several sessions were recorded and can be viewed on YouTube.
9 June 2020 will mark the 150th anniversary of the death of globally beloved author Charles Dickens (1812-1870). Unfortunately, many planned celebrations have been cancelled or postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To encourage support of research and writing as our world copes with this crisis, and to bring us together for an important anniversary in this time of social distancing, #Dickens150, a virtual transatlantic global gathering, will take place on this date. All proceeds, after covering a minor technology fee, will be donated to the Charles Dickens Museum, London.
The event, which will take place on the video-conferencing platform Zoom, includes over 50 speakers from 10 countries in many different time zones. We have raised over £2700 for the Dickens Museum so far – join us to commemorate the anniversary and raise money to help this important cultural institution survive.
Please note: We’re not necessarily expecting participants to be present all day; the idea is that people can dip in and out to talks/sessions which most interest them, depending on their time zone and the demands of their personal schedule.
All Times in BST: Use Time Zone Converter to calculate
Website: https://dickens150.wordpress.com/
Organisers: Emily Bell, Loughborough University and Lydia Craig, Loyola University Chicago
Tech Chair: Deborah Siddoway, Independent Scholar
9:30am Zoom Main Room Open
10am Welcome and Guidelines
10:15am Keynote 1:
The Plot to Bury Dickens: Capitalising on the Demise of a Victorian Celebrity
Leon Litvack, Queen’s University Belfast
Chair: Emily Bell, Loughborough University
10:55am Break
11:15am Parallel Panels (Breakout Rooms)
Panel 1A: Digital Dickens
Chair: Louise Creechan, University of Glasgow
What do Dickens’s characters do while they speak?
Michaela Mahlberg, University of Birmingham
Viola Wiegand, University of Birmingham
Deciphering Dickens
John Bowen, University of York
Emma Curry, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Misadventures in Dickens Land
Carolyn Oulton, Canterbury Christ Church University
Panel 1B: Communicating Dickens
Chair: Catherine Waters, University of Kent
Dickens’s Ambiguous Publics
Matthias Bauer, University of Tübingen
Angelika Zirker, University of Tübingen
The Power of Law in Oliver Twist: Monks’s Revenge and Oliver’s Suffering
Akiko Takei, Chukyo University
‘These Acres of Print’: Charles Dickens, the News, and the Novel as Pattern
Jessica R. Valdez, University of Hong Kong
Sentimental Transport and Stoic Sacrifice in A Tale of Two Cities
Richard Bonfiglio, Sogang University
12:05pm Changeover
12:15pm Lightning Talks, Session 1
Chair: Lydia Craig, Loyola University Chicago
Dickens and Darwin: The Religiosity of Natural Selection in All the Year Round
Olivia DeClark, University of Delaware
Writing Travel: Dickens’s ‘Road Movies’
Julia Kuehn, University of Hong Kong
Charles Dickens and The Life of Our Lord (1934): Literature, Theology, and Moral Beauty
Esther T. Hu, Boston University
An Interdisciplinary Meta-Biography of Charles Dickens
Shelley Anne Galpin, University of York
12:45pm Lunch
1:30pm Speed Networking
1:45pm Film Exhibition: Dickens & Company
Jeremy Parrott, Independent Scholar
2:25pm Changeover
2:30pm Roundtable 1: Dickens and Contagion
Chair: Lydia Craig, Loyola University Chicago
Pamela Gilbert, University of Florida
Sean Grass, Rochester Institute of Technology
Eric Lorentzen, University of Mary Washington
Natalie McKnight, Boston University
Lillian Nayder, Bates College
Pete Orford, University of Buckingham
3:20pm Time Zone Shift: Welcome and Guidelines
3:35pm Roundtable 2: Futures in Dickens Studies
Chair: Emily Bell, Loughborough University
Malcolm Andrews, University of Kent (Editor of The Dickensian)
Edward Guiliano, New York Institute of Technology (Editor of Dickens Studies Annual)
Natalie McKnight, Boston University (President of The Dickens Society)
Dominic Rainsford, Aarhus University (Editor of Dickens Quarterly)
4:05pm Break
4:20pm Keynote 2
Christmas in Cloisterham: Dickens, serialisation and Edwin Drood’s terrible timing
Pete Orford, University of Buckingham
Chair: Lydia Craig, Loyola University Chicago
5pm Changeover
5:05pm Parallel Panels (Breakout Rooms)
Panel 2A: Theatrical Dickens
Chair: Chris Louttit, Radboud University
‘An Ending in Accordance with your Specifications’: Broadway Solves The Mystery of Edwin Droooooooood
Louise Creechan, University of Glasgow
A Christmas Carol: Reborn… In Two Parts
Tiffany Antone, Iowa State University
Staging a Multiplot Novel in Thirty Minutes or Less: Practical and Impractical Lessons from the Annual Dickens Universe
Adam Abraham, Auburn University
Charles Dickens, ‘Sincerely Repentant’ Playwright
Catherine Quirk, Concordia University
Panel 2B: Dickens and the City
Chair: Leslie Simon, Utah Valley University
A Tale of Two Cities Study-in-Residence Course: Using Dickens to Explore the Concept of “History”
Stephen Himes, Knowledge Travels
Walk Far and Fast: Senate House Library’s Childhood in Dickensian London Exhibition in 10 Objects in 10 Minutes
Tansy Barton, Senate House Library, University of London
Leila Kassir, Senate House Library, University of London
Landscapes of the City and the Self in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations
Alina Cojocaru, Ovidius University
Precarity and Mobility in Little Dorrit
Trish Bredar, University of Notre Dame
Panel 2C: Education, Culture, Society
Chair: Mary Ann Tobin, The Pennsylvania State University
The Role of Soft Power in Dickens’s Ambivalence toward North America
Melina Martin, College of DuPage
Victorian Edgeworth, Irish Dickens: Hunger and Dickens’s Radical Roots
Yon Ji Sol, University of Minnesota
Steerforth, Micawber, and Latin-based Masculinity in David Copperfield
Christian Lehmann, Bard High School Early College
5:55pm Break
6:15pm Lightning Talks, Session 2
Chair: Emily Bell, Loughborough University
Care Communities and the Dickensian Social Model
Talia Schaffer, Queens College, CUNY
Sales, Consumption and Dickens’s Working Women
Anne Summers, Norwich University
Dickens, Decay and Doomed Spirits
Katie Bell, Independent Scholar
Reimagining Melodrama in The Old Curiosity Shop
James Armstrong, City University of New York
Two Recent Oliver Twist Comics
Christian Lehmann, Bard High School Early College
Mistletoe and Carnage: An Adaptation of Dickens’s Christmas Classic
Shannon Scott, University of St. Thomas
6:45pm Changeover
6:50pm Parallel Panels (Breakout Rooms)
Panel 3A: Teaching Dickens Digitally
Chair: Esther T. Hu, Boston University
How to Teach Dickens Asynchronously: COVE and COVID-19
Dino Franco Felluga, Purdue University (General Editor of COVE)
The Social Nature of Teaching Dickens Before, During, and After COVID-19
Katherine J. Kim, Molloy College
The Victorian Web: A Classroom and Critical Dickens Resource.
Philip Allingham (Contributing Editor, The Victorian Web)
Panel 3B: Dickens, Adaptation and Influence
Chair: James Armstrong, City University of New York
Heart of Darkness?: Dickens in Dialogue with Himself via H.G. Parry’s The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep
Gina Dalfonzo, Dickensblog
‘A Mystery in Itself’: Drood in Matthew Pearl’s The Last Dickens
Mary Ann Tobin, The Pennsylvania State University
Beyond the Attic: Rethinking Dickens and Little Women
Matthew Redmond, Stanford University
Panel 3C: Bleak House : Its Sounds and Environments
Chair: Matt Poland, University of Washington
‘It Must be Heard’: Modern Authorship and the Storytelling Tradition in Bleak House
Jennifer Tinonga-Valle, University of California, Davis
Living Gothic Spaces: Reconsidering the Bleak House Dark Plates
Holly Wiegand, Boston University
Fire and Flood: Ecological Apocalypse and Female Agency in Bleak House
Jennifer Heine, University of Southern California
7:40pm Changeover
7:45pm Speed Networking
8pm Q&A with Armando Iannucci, interviewed by Lucinda Hawksley
8:30pm End
Rooms close by 9pm
#Dickens150 