Nineteenth-Century Group
- Schedule
- Who we are
- Archive
- Resources
2023-24
Mary Shannon (UCLA)
“Wild Liberty Amidst the Watery Wastes”:
Travelling England’s Fen Commons in the Poetry of John Clare
Tuesday
November 28
4pm
Kaplan 250
Haley Suh (Irvine)
“Pause one, second, and third”:
Labor Interrupted in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, A Tale
Tuesday
January 16
4pm
Kaplan 250
Miranda Hoegberg (UCLA)
Plotting Sex from The Rape of the Lock to Sense and Sensibility
Tuesday
March 12
4pm
Kaplan 250
Oriah Amit (UCLA)
tbd
Tuesday
April 16
4pm
Kaplan 250
Jessica Cook (UCLA)
Ada Lovelace and the Creation of Universal Machine Language
Tuesday
May 14
4pm
Kaplan 250
Dustin Friedman (American University)
Olive Schreiner’s Settler Aestheticism
Thursday
June 6
4pm
Kaplan 250
(followed by our annual end-of-the-year dinner)
The 19th-Century Group is an interdisciplinary research colloquium for the study of British literature and culture broadly and openly defined, including trans-Atlantic exchanges, empire, and more. We are interested in the long nineteenth century, including the second half of the eighteenth century and the Edwardian period.
The group holds about two or three meetings each quarter. Our primary purpose is to provide a place where UCLA graduate students and faculty can share their work in progress in the form of a pre-circulated paper. We also host visiting scholars on occasion. All welcome. You need not be from UCLA.
If you’re interested, please sign up for our mailing list by emailing: jhg@ucla.edu.
Graduate Coordinator: Mary Shannon
Faculty Coordinator: Jonathan Grossman
2022-23
Jesslyn Whittell (UCLA)
“’Practical utility’, property, and excess in Spence”
Tuesday
November 1
4pm
Kaplan 193
[hiatus due to strike]
Michael Cohen
“On Conventionality: The History of an Unloved Aesthetic”
Wednesday
January 18
4pm
Kaplan 193
Lesley Thulin
“Disability and Capitalist Form in Byron and Shelley”
Thursday
February 23
4pm
Kaplan 250
Kiel Shaub
“Art & Science in S.T. Coleridge and I.A. Richards: The Experimental Basis of Dueling Critical Infrastructures”
Tuesday
March 7
1pm
Kaplan 193
Rachel Birke
“White Venus: Automatism & Reproduction in Bram Stoker’s Dracula”
Tuesday
April 25
4pm
Kaplan 250
Bethany Johnsen
“Continual Violence to Character”
Tuesday
May 23
4pm
Kaplan 250
Oriah Amit
“Urgent Fictions: The Precautionary Writings of Olive Schreiner and Erskine Childers”
Tuesday
June 13
4pm
Kaplan 250
2021-22
Sophie Rickless (UCLA)
Queer Maternal Desire in Vernon Lee’s “Dionea”
Thursday
October 28
2:00pm pst
Hum 193
Jessica Cook (UCLA)
Ada Lovelace, Computing, and Lewis Carroll’s “Hunting of the Snark”
Monday
November 22
12pm pst
zoom
Winter Quarter
Oriah Amit (UCLA)
H. Rider Haggard’s Doctor Therne and the Liberal Politics of Public Health
Tuesday, February 15
4:30pm
Kaplan 193
Yangjung Lee (UCLA)
A Guilty Emancipation:
The Legacies of the 1833 Compensation for Slave-Ownership in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale
Monday, February 28
4pm
Kaplan 193
Spring Quarter
Michael Meagher
“Debased and Crumbling Atoms”:
Eugenics and the Synecdochal Logic of the Miniature
in H.G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay
Tuesday, April 19
4:30pm pst
Amy Wong (California Dominican)
Multilingual Talk and White Cosmopolitics
Tuesday, May 17
2pm pst
Tuesday, May 17: Please join us for our annual End of the year dinner!
2020-2021
Fall
reconvening: short social hour & brief discussion
of working and dissertating in these times
Tuesday, October 20
4pm–5pm
[zoom link via email]
Kiel Shaub (UCLA)
“Modeling Genius:
Performance and Pedagogy in Coleridge’s Royal Institution Lectures”
Tuesday, November 17
4pm–6pm
[zoom link via email]
Winter
Jessica Cook (UCLA)
“A Sound, and nothing but a Sound”: Poetic and Mathematical Nonsense
Tuesday, February 16
2pm–4pm
Spring
Michael Vignola (UCLA)
Reform Equalities: John Stuart Mill and George Eliot
Tuesday
April 20
4:15pm PST
Yangjung Lee (UCLA)
The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, Informal Empires, and the Global Trade System
Tuesday
May 11
2pm PST
Fariha Shaikh (Birmingham)
Opium: Imperial Violence and the Formation of the Commodity Frontier
Tuesday
June 1
10am PST
Annual End-of-Year Dinner at Plateia
2019-2020
Fall
Sara Lodge (St. Andrews)
“Bongs, Dongs and Nonsense Songs: Edward Lear’s Music”
Wednesday
October 23
4pm–5:30pm
Kaplan 193
Lilly Lu
“‘To Excite and To Feel’: Theorizing Gratitude in Jane Austen’s Emma”
Wednesday
November 20
4pm–5:30pm
Kaplan 193
Winter
Ji Eun Lee
“Wooshing: The Country and the City of No Telos in H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay”
Tuesday
January 28
4pm–5:30pm
Kaplan 193
Jacqueline Barrios
“Chinese Riot in London: Reporting Away East Asian Occupation of the British Metropole”
Tuesday
March 10
4pm–5:30pm
Kaplan 193
Spring
Our Spring events are cancelled. Stay safe.
2018-2019
Fall
Ji Eun Lee (UCLA)
“Prowling: Non-Humans in Bram Stoker’s Dracula”
Wednesday
October 17
4pm–6pm
Kaplan 193
Lilly Lu (UCLA)
“Assuming Innocence: The Ingénue’s Vehicle for Satire in Frances Burney’s Evelina”
Wednesday
November 14
4pm–6pm
Kaplan 193
Winter
Crescent Rainwater (UCLA)
“‘I want bad things—strong bad things’:
Fin-de-Siècle Aestheticism and Female Modernism in Dorothy Richardson’s Backwater (1916)”
Wednesday
January 23
4pm–6pm
Kaplan 193
Michael Vignola (UCLA)
“Anthony Trollope’s Leap in the Dark: Phineas Finn and the Temporality of Reform”
Wednesday
February 13
4pm–6pm
Kaplan 193
Dickens Project Graduate Conference
February 16–18, 2019
Royce 306 & 314
Register to attend the conference with Michael Vignola.
Rachel Teukolsky (Vanderbilt)
“Disraeli, Arendt, and the Fascist Novel”
Monday
March 4
4pm–6pm
Kaplan 193
Spring
Jessica Cook (UCLA)
“Victorian Future Memory”
Wednesday
April 24
4pm–6pm
Kaplan 193
Jacqueline Barrios (UCLA)
“London Bound: Ships, Space and the Transurban Imaginary”
Tuesday
June 4
4pm–6pm
Kaplan 193
Followed by our Annual End-of-Year Dinner
2017-18
Oriah Amit (UCLA)
“‘Perfect Security’: Surveillance and the Problem of Securing Commodities in the Wake of the 1851 Great Lock Controversy”
October 23
Hum 193
4pm
David Russell (Oxford)
“John Ruskin, Iconoclast”
November 15
Hum 193
4pm
Angelina Del Balzo (UCLA)
“The Arabian Nights on an Illegitimate Stage”
November 15
Hum 193
4pm
Samantha Morse (UCLA)
“Reconsidering the ‘Dreadful’ in Sweeney Todd and the Victorian Penny Press”
February 15
Hum 193
4pm
Kiel Shaub (UCLA)
“‘Darwin’s Beautiful’: Coadaptation as a Problem of Evolutionary Aesthetics”
March 12
Hum 193
4pm
Kathleen Frederickson (UC Davis)
“Sex on the Commons”
May 5
Hum 193
4pm
Michelle Radnia (UCLA)
“Afterlife of the Grecian Urn: Pastiche and Keatsian Aesthetics in Charles Lamb’s ‘Old China’”
June 5
Hum 193
4pm
2016-17
Chris Looby (UCLA)
“Not to Mention (the marmorean unconscious)”
October 25
Hum 193
4pm
Michael Vignola(UCLA)
“Embodying the Multitude: Classification and Deviation in George Gissing’s The Nether World”
January 17
Hum 193
4pm
Jacqueline Barrios (UCLA)
“Affecting Dombey: Susan Nipper as Domestic Worker of Fiction”
Wednesday
February 15
Hum 193
4pm
Terry Robinson (Toronto)
Signs of the Times: Deaf Education and the Rise of Melodrama
a joint meeting with the 18thc colloquium
April 13
Hum 193
4pm
Claire Jarvis (Stanford)
“Almost Trollope”
May 5
Hum 193
4pm
Cailey Hall (UCLA)
“A Sociability of the Bowels”
May 17
Hum 193
4pm
Crescent Rainwater (UCLA)
“Netta Syrett’s Nobody Fault: The Story of a Feminist Aesthete”
June 7
Hum 193
4pm
followed by our traditional end-of-year dinner
2015-16
Katie Charles (UCLA)
“‘Who is Speaking?:’ Interpolated Tales in Obi and The Female American”
October 13
Hum 193
4pm
Tag-a-Thon: Yellowbacks
Hosted by Ellen Truxaw & Jonathan Grossman
October 27
Young Research Library
12-2pm
Melissa Bailes (Tulane)
“Literary Plagiarism and Scientific Originality: The “Trans-Atlantic Wilderness” of Goldsmith, Aiken, and Barbauld”
Thursday
January 21
Hum 193
4pm
Sharon Marcus (Columbia)
“The Drama of Celebrity: Attraction”
Monday
February 22
Hum 193
4pm
Joseph Lavery (Berkeley)
“Loving the Alien: Japan and the Victorian Tradition”
March 1
Hum 250
4pm
Christopher Rovee (LSU)
“Shelley’s Immaturity”
April 20
Hum 193
4pm
Beatrice Sanford Russell (USC)
“Whispering by Niagra: Subtelty in and Age of Revolution”
May 4
Hum 193
4pm
Lindsay Wilhelm (UCLA)
“‘Art for the Sake of Life’: The ‘Life-Enhancing’ Aesthetics of Vernon Lee and Bernard Berenson”
May 25
Hum 193
4pm
followed by our traditional end-of-year dinner
2014-15
Crescent Rainwater (UCLA)
“‘To Give Myself on Paper to a Crowd of Scoffers’: George Egerton. The Yellow Book, and the Anxiety of Authorship”
October 27
Hum 193
4pm
Adriana Craciun (UC Riverside)
“The Disaster of Franklin: Victorian Exploration in Today’s Arctic”
November 13
Hum 193
4pm
Simon Reader (Harvard)
“Charles Darwin’s Styles of Inconsequence”
January 26
Hum 193
4pm
Irene Tucker (UC Irvine)
The Moment of Racial Sight: A History (book discussion)
February 23
Hum 193
4pm
Kevin Lambert (Fullerton)
“Victorian Cyborg Publishing: Samuel Butler, Industrialized Print and Automatic Reading”
April 20
Hum 193
4pm
Amy Wong (UCLA)
“Disfluency in Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors”
May 26
Hum 193
4pm
End-of-year Dinner!
2013-14
Cristina Richieri Griffin
“The History of Pumpernickel: Incarnating the Omniscient Narrator in William Makepeace Thackerasy’s Vanity Fair”
October 29
Hum 193
4pm
Alethia Smith
“Blue China of Japan: Orientalism, Aesthetics, and Chinese Culture in Wilde”
November 12
Hum 193
4pm
Jack Caughey
“The Practical Fictioneer: The Making of the Self-Making Writer”
January 16
Hum 250
2pm
Ellen Truxaw
“Dickens Decorated Initials: Interdiegetical Linsk and Narrative Counterfactuals in Master Humphrey’s Clock”
April 22
Hum 193
4pm
Susan Zieger (UC Riverside)
“‘A Malady of Dreaming’: Reverie, Personality, and Media in The Picture of Dorian Gray”
April 29
Hum 193
4pm
Juan Sanchez
“England and Spain and the Domestic Affections: Felicia Hemans and the Politics of Literature”
May 13
Hum 193
4pm
Dan Couch
“Repetitious Reading: The Shock of the Refrain in “Bartleby, the Scrivner: A Story of Wall-Street”
May 27
Hum 193
4pm
End of the Year Dinner
2012-13
Lindsay Wilhelm (UCLA)
“The Irresistible ‘Vibration of Long-Past Acts’: Vernon Lee, Heredity, and the Supernatural”
October30
Hum 193
4pm
Katie Charles (UCLA)
“Dickens’s Self-Encounters”
March 5
Hum 193
4pm
Michael Nicholson (UCLA)
“A Singular Experiment: The Creature as Scientist in Frankenstein”
March 12
Hum 193
4pm
Ruth Livesey (University College London)
“Lessons from America: Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, and the Spectre of Abandonment”
April 16
Hum 193
4pm
Sharon Marcus (Columbia)
“The Celebrity System”
May 9
Hum 193
4pm
Devin Griffiths (USC)
“The Shape of Comparative History”
May 14
Hum 193
4pm
Anthony Camara (UCLA)
“For a Darker Ecology: Vital Matters in the Weird Fiction of William Hope Hodgson”
June 4
Hum 193
4pm
End of the year dinner
2011-12
Josie Richstad (UCLA)
“Fashionable Character”
October 13
Hum 193
2pm
Aaron Kunin (Pomona)
“Wilde in the Age of Ideas”
October 18
Hum 193
5pm
Katie Charles (UCLA)
“The Problem of Education in Middlemarch and Mill on the Floss”
December 6
Hum 193
4pm
Jonathan Grossman
Charles Dickens at 200: an afternoon of bicentennial birthday events
7 February 2012
“A Tale of Two Cities and the Passengers of History” (12:00pm talk, Hum 193)
“‘….the Sum of a Life’: Charles Dickens at 200” (1:30pm exhibit opening Young Research Library)
David Lean’s Great Expectations (movie, 3pm Hum 193)
Ronjaunee Chatterjee (UCLA)
“Sequencing Alice: Various Infinity and Singularity in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass”
February 28
Hum 193
4pm
Ryan Fong (Davis)
“(Re)reading Kipling’s India”
March 13
Hum 193
4pm
Dehn Gilmore (Caltech)
“‘Truly it was Astonishincg’: The Exhibition, the Sensation Novel and the Culture of the Spectacular”
April 10
Hum 193
4pm
End of the Year Dinner
2010-11
Andrea Henderson (UCI)
“From Symbol to Symbolic Logic: Victorian Liberalism and the Mathematicization of Language”
October 26
Hum 193
4pm
Amy Wong (UCLA)
“Sympathy and Reading Dickens’s Sketches by Boz as Reportorial Storytelling”
November 16
Hum 193
4pm
Erika Wright
“Dickens in Quarantine: Social Theory, Narrative Acts, Little Dorrit”
January 25
Hum 193
4pm
Nancy Armstrong (Brown)
“What is the Contemporary Novel”
March 3
Hum 193
4pm
Bryan Rasmussen (California Lutheran)
“The Enthography of Enchantment”
May 10
Hum 193
4pm
Justine Pizzo (UCLA)
“Fractured Forms, Fragmented Bodies: The Precipitation of Character in Bleak House”
May 31
Hum 193
4pm
End of the Year Dinner
2009-10
Neil Hultgen (CSU Long Beach)
“Melodrama, Leprosy, and Transactional Feelings in Stevenson’s ‘The Bottle Imp'”
October 20
Hum 193
4pm
Cristina Richieri Griffin (UCLA)
“Alice Mewell’s Maternal Poetics: Writing the Rythms of Womb, Fetus, & Child”
November 17
Hum 193
4pm
Martha Vicinus (U Michigan)
“Cosmopolitan Depth: A. Mary F. Mary Robinson (1857-1944) and the Middle Ages”
January 19
Hum 193
4pm
William Cohen (Maryland)
“Queer Universalism and the French Oscar Wilde”
March 30
Hum 193
4pm
Ian Newman (UCLA)
“The Politics of Landscape in Thomas Holcroft’s Anna St. Ives”
April 27
Hum 193
4pm
End of year dinner
June 2
2008-09
Helena Michie (Rice)
“Victorian(ist) ‘Whiles’ and the Tenses of Historicism”
October 14
Hum 193
4pm
Jim Caufield
“”Most Free from Personality’: Arnold’s Method of Ethical Exemplarity”
November 25
Hum 193
4pm
Josie Richstad (UCLA)
“Fashioning the Fashionable Novel: The Social Exclusivity of English Fiction, 1824-1848”
March 3
Hum 193
4pm
Jami Bartlett (Irvine)
“Throwing Things in Thackeray”
May 5
Hum 193
4pm
Elizabeth Miller (UC Davis)
“Measured Revolution: Poetry and the Late-Victorian Radical Press”
May 28
Hum 193
4pm
End of year dinner
2007-08
Noah Comet (UCLA)
“Felicia Hemans and the “exquisite remains” of Modern Greece”
October 16
Hum 193
4pm
Matt Dubord (UCLA)
“Free, Brave, and Personal: Art and Politics m Henry James’s The Tragic Muse”
November 6
Hum 193
4pm
Adam Lowenstein (UCLA)
“‘Suprises that struck the hour’: The Tragic Muse and the Representational Crisis of the Jamesian Serial”
November 20
Hum 193
4pm
Dustin Friendman (UCLA)
“‘Untidy lives’: Negativity and Desire m the British Kunstlerroman, 1866-1919”
January 28
Hum 193
4pm
Kate Bergren
“The Romantic Epigraph in Lydia Maria Child’s Anti-Slavery Writing”
March 4
Hum 193
4pm
David Kurnick (Rutgers)
“Acoustics in the Thackeray Theater”
March 18
Hum 193
4pm
Katherine Isokawa
“‘The Motor’s Come to Stay’: Reading Motion in Howard’s End”
April 29
Hum 193
4pm
2006-07
Josephine Richstad (UCLA, English)
“‘Proofs of so wild a story’: Authority at Stake in Bram Stoker’s Dracula”
October 31
Hum 193
4pm
Julie Codell (ASU, Art History)
“Indian Travelers’ Narratives: The Guest Discourse & Reversing the Grand Tour”
November 14
Hum 193
4pm
Jim Masland (UCLA, English)
“Authoring a British Identity: Narratives of Afro-Caribbean Masculinity”
January 16
Hum 193
4pm
Joseph Childers (UC Riverside)
“Mr. Mukharji Goes to London”
February 6
Hum 193
4pm
Anna Kornbluh (UC Irvine)
“‘Money expects Money’: The Economic Problem of Satire in The Way We Live Now”
April 24
Hum 193
4pm
Hilary Schor (USC)
“George Eliot and the Curious Bride; or Maidens Choosing”
May 17
Hum 250
4pm
2005-06
Adam Lowenstein (English)
“Henry James and the Evolution of the Art-Novel”
October 12
1301 Rolfe
4pm
Ayelet Ben-Yishai (Berkeley)
“Victorian Commonalities: Gossip, Fiction and the Problem of Legal Positivism”
November 1
1301 Rolfe
4pm
Noelle Chao (UCLA)
“At the Border of Musical Letters: Technologies of Recording in Scott”
November 29
1301 Rolfe
4pm
Kent Puckett (Berkeley)
“Before and Afterwardsness in Henry James”
January 31
2310 Rolfe
5 pm
Anne Stiles (UCLA)
“H.G. Wells and the Evolving Brain: Reading the Neurological Romance”
February 21
1301 Rolfe
4pm
Dickens Project Winter Graduate Conference
February 17 – 19
Royce 306 & 314
John Plotz (Brandeis)
“Nature and Knowledge: Race and Portable Culture in Daniel Deronda and Theophrastus Such”
February 23
1301 Rolfe
4pm
Matt Dubord (UCLA)
“Romantic Stories, Prosaic Findings: The Detective Function in Hound of the Baskervilles”
March 7
Rolfe 1301
4pm
Shelley Salamensky (Theater, UCLA)
“Sexing Syntax: Wilde Language & Desire in Three Fin-de-Siècle Romans-à-Clef”
April 25
1301 Rolfe
4pm
Heather Wozniak (UCLA)
“Taming the Gothic on Stage: Strategies of Adaptation”
May 9
1301 Rolfe
3pm
Dustin Friedman (UCLA)
“‘Artificial Artlessness’:
Euphuism and ‘the task of poetry’ in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean”
May 23
Rolfe 1301
4pm
2004-05
Joanne Tong
“Building Empire: The Semi-Detached House of Britain and Hong Kong”
November 9
Rolfe 1301
4pm
Gerhard Joseph (CUNY)
“Sounding the Strangeness of the Poet’s Name: “Tennyson, Tennyson, Tennyson””
November 17
Rolfe 1301
4pm
Kirstie McClure
“Political Truths, Statistical Frictions: The ‘Condition of England Question’ chez Carlyle and Elsewhere”
November 30
Rolfe 1301
4pm
Alison Harvey
“Historicizing Ireland: Tradition, Modernity, and the ‘Personal Element’ in the Works of Emily Lawless”
January 11
Rolfe 1301
4pm
Melissa Sodeman
“‘Tattered Dulcinea’: The Ruins of Romance in Frances Burney’s The Wanderer”
February 10
Rolfe 1301
4pm
Jonathan Grossman
“The Speeding of the Pickwick Coach” work-in-progress: chapter one
April 21
Rolfe 1301
4pm
Tricia Lootens (U of Georgia)
“Two Elephants in the Parlor? Barrett Browning, Racialized Poetess Writing and the Diffusion of Victorian Poetry”
May 12
Rolfe 1301
4:00pm
2003-04
Organizational Meeting
October 9
Rolfe 2310
3pm
Jim Caufield (UCLA, English Dept)
“England Green in Tooth and Claw: W. H. Hudson and the Ideological Thrust of Edwardian Nature Writing”
November 17
Rolfe 2310
4pm
Lindsey Traub (Cambridge)
“Lessons of the Mistress :
Henry James and Women’s Writing”
December 1
Rolfe 2310
4pm
David Lloyd (USC)
“The Political Economy of the Potato”
January 26
Rolfe 1301
4pm
Speed, Technology, and the Invention of Change, 1800-1919
Conference Organized by Jonathan Grossman
March 22
9:30am-5:30pm
Royce 314
Anne Stiles (UCLA)
“Jekyll and Hyde and the Double Brain”
April 20
3:30 pm
Rolfe 2310
2002-03
Open mtg to share research interests–some brief bios [group founded]
November 7
1301 Rolfe
4pm
Discussion of George Levine’s Dying to Know
February 11
2310 Rolfe
Brown bag lunch discussion of conferencing
April 16
1301 Rolfe
12:30pm
Jill Galvan on Trilby
May 7
1301 Rolfe
4pm
Allison Kroll on Hardy
May 21
1301 Rolfe
12:30pm
Faculty Coordinators
Jonathan H. Grossman (2002–2014)
Anahid Nersessian (2015–16)
Jonathan H. Grossman (2016–2017)
Anahid Nersessian (2017–18)
Jonathan H. Grossman (20018–2020)
Graduate Coordinators
Melissa Sodeman (2005–06)
Matt Dubord (2006–07)
Josie Richstad (2007–08)
Katherine Isokawa (2008–09)
Dustin Friedman (2009–10)
Cristina Richieri Griffin (2010–11)
Amy Wong (2011–12)
Ronjaunee Chatterjee (2012–13)
Katie Charles (2013–14)
Lindsay Wilhelm (2014–15)
Cailey Hall (2015–16)
Ellen Truxaw (2016–17)
Michael Vignola (2017–18)
Jessica Cook (2018–19)
Samantha Morse (2019–20)
Yangjung Lee (2020–21)
Lilly Lu (2021–22)
Miranda Hoegberg (2022-23)
Digital Projects
- Yellowback Novels
https://www.flickr.com/photos/yellowbacks/ - Cruikshank
http://cruikshank.ucla.edu/
Clark Library: Oscar Wilde & le fin de siècle
Sadleir Collection
One of the premier collections of nineteenth-century novels. Housed in YRL special collections.