Dickens Project Graduate Conference 2025

UCLA is hosting the Dickens Project‘s Graduate Conference in 2025.

Dates: February 15–17, 2025. President’s Day Weekend.
Location: Royce Hall 306 & 314, UCLA, Los Angeles

Thank you to our conference sponsors

 

contacts
graduate coordinator Mary Shannon, maryshannon@g.ucla.edu
faculty coordinator Jonathan Grossman, jhg@ucla.edu

 

Participants will stay at the UCLA Guest House (parking not included)
Free continental breakfast & coffee available Sunday & Monday mornings. Please take advantage!

UCLA Campus Map

 

Sunday, 7:30pm–9:30pm, Conference Dinner
Professor Grossman’s house
1218 Stratford Ave
South Pasadena, CA 91030

Carpools will be arranged at the conference.
Please let us know if you will have a car and can drive people.

Schedule

Royce Hall 306 & 314

Saturday, February 16

12:30pm–1:15pm
Arrival & Registration

1:30pm–3:00pm
Panel I

3:15pm–4:45pm
Panel II

5pm Keynote
Hilary Schor, University of Southern California

6:30pm buffet dinner

[exhibit?]

Sunday, February 17

8:45am coffee

9am–10am
Panel III

10:15am–11:45am
Panel IV

Lunch
[optional lunch panel?]

1:15pm–2:45pm
Panel V

3pm–4:30pm
Panel VI

7:00pm–9:00pm
Conference Dinner, Professor Grossman’s home

Monday, February 18

8:30am–10am
Panel VIII

10:15am–11:45am
Panel IX

11:45am–12pm
closing

 

Panels

These are the panels from 2019 to give you a sense of the diversity of topics!

Panel I: tying the not
moderator
Elsie Michie (Rice)

panelists
Ryan Vera (CUNY)
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: Truths Universally Acknowledged or Otherwise

Jane Shmidt (CUNY)
“I Am Not at All Happy as I Am”: Narcissistic Love and Mastering the Past in Dickens’ Great Expectations

Beth Hightower (Rutgers )
Jane Austen, or The Secret of Silence

Panel II: vital dickens
moderator
Devin Griffiths (USC)

panelists
Laura Hayes (Iowa)
“There’s Animation!”: The Articulation of Death in Our Mutual Friend

Diana Rose Newby (Columbia)
The Vitalist Ethics of Exposure in Bleak House

Ji Eun Lee (UCLA)
Jostling: Unintentional Collision in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit

Panel III: phantasmorgia
moderator
Carolyn Williams (Rutgers)

panelists
Brianna Beehler (USC)
Charlotte Bronte’s Paper Dolls

Meredith McCullough (Rice)
Liquid bodies liquid waste: Victorian women, drowning, and commercial metonymies

Panel IV: war & legal audiences
moderator
Cornelia Pearsall (Smith) & Hilary Schor (USC)

panelists
Bianca Perez-Cancino (Indiana)
Authority and Disobedience at Home and at Sea in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South

Kristen Hanley Cardozo (UC Davis)
“The Reader Shall Hear It Now”: Narrative Purpose in The Woman in White

Lucy Soomin Kim (Vanderbilt)
The Mass Culture of the Jury in Great Expectations

Panel V: writing & reading publics

moderator
Michael Cohen (UCLA)

panelists
Abigail Droge (UCSB)
Charles Dickens Makes Friends

Jennifer Tinonga (UC Davis)
Hand-Crafted, Machine-Made: Collaborative Creativity in Little Dorrit

Randi Mihajlovic (Rice)
On Women and the English Public: Hesba Stretton’s Mid-Century (Woman) Postal Worker

Panel VI: reading metalepsis
moderator
Robyn Warhol (Ohio)

panelists
Ellen Bistline (UCLA)
Realism, Initially: Perceiving the Superfluous in Wives and Daughters

Cole Ryberg (Southern Methodist)
Generic Tension, Narrative Expression: Minor Characters and the Metaleptic Influence in Oliver Twist

Matthew Redmond (Stanford)
Book Time in Charles Lamb and Washington Irving

Panel VII: qu e  e   r
moderator
Kathleen Frederickson (UC Davis)

panelists
Tara Thomas (UCSC)
Metamorphic Decadence and Queer Futurity in Michael Field’s To an Exile

Brendan Whitmarsh (York)
Henry James, Stone Butch, and the Sculptural Imagination

Miranda Steege (UCR)
Murder Husbands and Spirit Grabbing: Navigating Consent Through Form

Panel VIII: dis-senses-ability
moderator
Elsie Michie (LSU)

panelists
Rochelle Davis (Tennessee)
tbd

Austin Lim (San Francisco State)
Utopian Ableism: Work, Health, and Age in News From Nowhere

Riley McGuire (U Pennsylvania)
The Dumb Detec(k)tive: Sensation, Sign Language, and Adapting the Mute Role