This year, I've been saying that my real spring break is NCSA, the annual conference of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association. Usually in mid-to-late March, NCSA is my opportunity to be away from home and kids (I do love my kids but I don't love the bedtime routine), to do something fun (i.e., go to panels), and to hang out with my friends.
I have three grad school friends who do nineteenth-century stuff, but I don't know that all four of us have ever made it to NCSA at once since I first attended in 2017. But this year we managed to make it happen, and not only that, but two of them brought their spouses and children! So we were able to get in some good socialization; in particular, some of the kids I had never even met. While the four of us would go to panels, the spouses would take the kids to do fun things around the city.
But of course the panels are fun things. I say it a lot, but it bears repeating: I wouldn't be in my line of work if I didn't think listening to smart people say smart things was a worthwhile use of time. Some academics can sneer about conferences, but I always secretly suspect those people are self-centered narcissists, the kind of person who is smart but doesn't believe anyone else can be smart. But I always learn about such interesting things at conferences!
NCSA in particular is the best, and I don't just say this because my friends go there and I get to hang out on my employer's dime. The conference is interdisciplinary, so there are presenters from literary studies, history, art history, and more; it's also transnational, so there are people who work on British, American, German, Italian, and so on. Sometimes this has its downsides, of course (people who work in different disciplines and fields can be interested in things you just are not), but often you get to learn about some neat things that overlap with your own work... or even don't and are just interesting!
Just some presentations (not by my grad school friends) that I particularly enjoyed (no slight to anything I saw and left out, I saw a lot!):
- Reilly Fitzpatrick from Baylor University on the rights of women in Middlemarch (I had never thought about the pregnancy plotline in Middlemarch before... of course there are so many things happening in Middlemarch it is impossible to think about all of them)
- Celeste Seifert from the University of North Carolina on vivisection in Arthur Machen
- Shelby Lynn Jones from Purdue University on General Lew Wallace (author of Ben-Hur) and his time as ambassador to the Ottomon Empire
- Danielle Nielsen from Murray State University on the depiction of academic disciplines in H. Rider Haggard's She (which I have not read but clearly need to)
- Antje Anderson from University of Nebraska-Lincoln on the early short fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt (which is usually taken as being about white people who she thinks can be read as mixed-race; she is working on a new critical edition of Chesnutt's fiction)
- Meoghan Cronin from Saint Anselm College on U.S. adaptations of Dickens novels for children (I asked a question about Cranford... more evidence that I am turning into my advisor)
- Laura White from University of Nebraska-Lincoln on the now-forgotten-but-then-popular British children's author Mrs. Molesworth (Laura is working on a project about children's fantasy, and I enjoy getting to hear about a new piece of it every year)
- Lillian Durr from Missouri State University on Frankenstein's creature as nonbinary
- Corrie Kiesel from Louisiana State University on the depiction of folkways and gossip in The Ring and the Book (which I read the summer after graduating college and have not thought about since!)
- Alyssa Culp from Illinois Wesleyan University on how Bavarian morgues were made scientific and professional in the nineteenth century
- Sarah J. Reynolds from the University of Indianapolis on eclipses in the nineteenth century
- Victoria Russell from Keele University on the influence of Erasmus Darwin on nineteenth-century radical movements (as someone who worked a bit on Charles Darwin and nineteenth-century radical movements, this was super-interesting)
My own presentation this year was about George Gissing's Born in Exile, one of the novels in the chapter of the book manuscript I am currently working on. The conference theme was "thresholds" and I discussed Born in Exile as a novel about the threshold of professionalization—I think it's the first British novel (by a significant writer, anyway) about what we would now called a professional scientist, and the novel explores how that would change science from the earlier era of the "devotee." (A typology I am greatly indebted to Robert Kargon for.)
One of the other things I like about NCSA is its integration into the local community. The conference is always three days; the second day always has a keynote by an historian who works on something relevant to the city in which the conference is being held. This year that was Emily Bingham, who wrote a book about "My Old Kentucky Home," the minstrel song that is still sung at the opening of the Kentucky Derby, with some mild sanitizing. It was a topic I didn't know anything about but found very illuminating. (The composer of the Kentucky state song never visited Kentucky; another fun fact is that he also composed what is now the Florida state song, and he also never visited Florida.)
Then in the afternoon of the second day there are no panels, but the conference does organize official excursions; this year my friends and I went to Oxmoor Farm, a farm in Louisville that was occupied by the same family from the 1780s to 2005! It was expanded several times over the centuries, and was a great window onto the history of the area. (I think the tour guides in these situations are always excited to have a group of experts come along, ready to nerd out over Zachary Taylor or whatnot. Actual quote from one tour participant upon hearing what the site archaeologist had uncovered in the slave residences: "Half-dimes!? Are you shitting me!!?")
I returned home tired but excited. And also energized to actually work on my book. Will this summer be its summer!?
Next year's NCSA will be in New Orleans, with the theme of "Fusions." I will be there, of course!
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