The 35th Annual Dickens Universe, and the “Long, Wide Nineteenth Century” conference, both sponsored by the Dickens Project, were held consecutively 31 August- 08 August 2015, and attended by faculty Dr Michael Collins and graduates Elvan Mutlu and Dalene Fisher. The focus of this year’s Dickens Universe was Martin Chuzzlewit and American Notes. The transatlantic nature of both texts brought a range of faculty and graduate students to the conference, including Americanists and Victorianists.
One of the most important aspects of Dickens Universe was the chance for close interaction between graduate students and faculty. But Dickens Universe is not solely an academic conference. Those in attendance at the universe ranged from Dickensians—non-academics who are devoted Dickens enthusiasts—to highly-published faculty experts, making the interaction and discussion rich and purposeful, and at times, unexpected. We learned colloquial names for Charles Dickens, such as, “Chuckie-D” whilst also being challenged by scholars such as Jill Lepore (Harvard), Robert-Douglas-Fairhurst (Oxford), Ruth Livesey (Royal Holloway), and Meredith McGill (Rutgers) to re-examine Dickens’s influence and legacy in American transatlantic narrative.
Daily plenaries, graduate breakout sessions, workshops, and seminars made this week especially useful. Graduates choose a weekly “job” that is essentially a training session. Jobs included pedagogy, writing, presentation and publication. Additionally, sessions were offered in dissertation, reviewing and reporting. In addition to attending the one-session reviewing and reporting workshop, Mutlu and Fisher attended a daily publication workshop. This practical session covered everything from the shape and content of a publishable journal article, to useful overviews of the submission and revision processes. What was the most helpful is that two editors from highly credible publications visited the workshop to offer insight and answer questions. These editors were Ruth Livesey from the Journal of Victorian Culture, and Jonathan Grossman from Nineteenth-Century Literature. This workshop was led by Carolyn Williams (Rutgers)
Dickens Universe was preceded by an academic conference. Sponsored by the Dickens Project, “The Long, Wide Nineteenth Century” was a broadly focused conference that gave voice to emerging as well as established scholars in Victorian studies. Dr Michael Collins presented “Dickens’s ‘Illimitable Dominion’: Transatlantic Print Culture and the Spring of 1842,” which was very engaging and quoted by several keynote speakers throughout the daily lectures.
What was new to us in this conference was the layout of the panels. Each panel included a moderate and a synthesiser who summed up the papers and reflected on them. These five-minute talks at the end of the panels helped us to engage more on the topic and refresh our opinions and comments. The keynote lecture of the conference was delivered by Caroline Levine (Univ. of Wisconsin Madison) and was titled ‘Length and Breadth and Depth: Taking the Measure of the Nineteenth Century’. This conference was very beneficial for the graduate students because the papers included in the panels were very wide-ranging. The panels ranged from sensation novel to late-Victorian travel writing, time and space in Victorian period to transatlantic transformations and Victorian poetry to Print culture.
We also attended a professionalization session on reviewing and reporting which was led by John Bowen (University of York) and Jim Adams (Columbia). In this section, we discussed several book reviews and reports written for different journals and had the chance to hear both scholars’ opinion and experience through the reviewing process.
Victorian Tea presented by Friends of the Dickens Project gave us the opportunity to have a sense of Victorian period with the tea served in beautiful porcelains and more discussion on the Victorian times.
On the final day of the Universe, we attended the Victorian Dance which was the closing event of the project. Several professional dancers in their Victorian costumes gave us classes and we had the chance to practice our skills throughout the night.
With its dears, squirrels and raccoons, the beautiful campus of Santa Cruz was on the top of a hill from where you could get a splendid view of the city of Santa Cruz and the Pacific Ocean. The social events during the week included the afternoon tea, guided walks across campus, post-prandial potations, Grand Party hosted by Friends of the Dickens Project and graduate parties after the evening lectures which brought faculty members and graduate students together in a more informal atmosphere, which also made our Dickens discussion go on after the lectures and seminars. Each party was presented with a special theme, either we got a name from Martin Chuzzlewit or we went through the pictures from the novel and found ourselves in an actual Dickensian world.