Nineteenth-Century Studies Association 2025

NCSA is my traditional annual conference at this point; this year one of the board members asked me how long I'd been coming, suggesting it was something like three or four. This year was actually my seventh! I've been every year since 2017, barring the conference's two years going virtual for COVID.

This year was held in New Orleans, a city with a lot of nineteenth-century history. As always, I enjoyed the experience; my friend Christiana and Kim also presented as usual, and we met up with a couple other grad school friends who live in the area. I also got to reconnect with my old boss from UT, now at Tulane, and I convinced one of my own UT colleagues to come along. I do feel like all this socialization meant I was a bit less plugged into meeting new people (or even connecting with other conference regulars) this year! 

Lots of good food in New Orleans, of course. I particularly enjoyed eating beignets for breakfast, and I had some good jambalaya. 

This year's theme was "Fusions"; knowing academics, I knew there would be a lot of titles containing parentheses with words like "(in)fusions" and "(con)fusions." Thus I set myself a challenge of coming up with the worst use of parentheses at the conference, and looked up what the longest word containing "fusion" in the dictionary was. Hence, my paper was titled "The (Interdif)fusion of Women into Science in H. G. Wells's Ann Veronica"! But as my friend Christiana once told me, there's no difference between a bad title adopted ironically... and a bad title. I've been mining my never-completed book for conference papers for years now, and I think I am almost out of bits of I haven't presented. I can do Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent next year, but I am pretty sure I have nothing left after that! Does this mean I need to do... new research!?

Speaking of next year, NCSA is switching it up, doing a joint conference with two other organizations (INCS and INCSA, not confusingly at all) in Washington, D.C., in July as opposed to the usual March. Will it be weird? You can't just change things, I love the format and timing of NCSA!

Woo! Spring Break!

As an academic, I do of course get a spring break, but as an academic, I spend my spring break doing exciting things like grading annotated bibliographies and cleaning the house; it never feels like a real break from anything even if I do get to take it easier.

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!

The Return of the Conference

I'm horrendously behind, so I shouldn't be writing this.

The reason I am horrendously behind, though, is worth celebrating, so I am trying to write this quickly in a fifteen-minute lull while I wait for a student.

Last week, I attended my first academic conference in three years.

It was my Spring Break in 2020 when news of the coronavirus really began to spread. I was supposed to be writing my paper for the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association's 2020 conference, but I was having trouble focusing. I was hanging out with two friends who were supposed to be writing their papers for the 2020 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, but had decided to not go because of COVID. Should I be not going myself? Soon the decision was taken out of my hands; NCSA was cancelled. Eventually it would be rescheduled for 2022.

There have been virtual conferences and such, but I have had little stomach for the idea of more Zoom sessions, so I haven't been to a conference since NCSA 2019.*

Some academics like to complain about conferences, or dread them, but I really like them. They have much of the good bits of academia with the bad bits: you get to hear smart people talk about interesting things, and you yourself get to talk about things that your students and colleagues don't really care about in general. I feel like at this point, I am a very good presenter, to be honest, and it's fun to get to talk about (say) George Eliot and Charles Kingsley and Positivism for fifteen minutes. (Twenty would have been nicer!)

NCSA has become my home conference, I guess. It has a very laid-back, friendly vibe. It's not too big or too small. It doesn't seem to attract the kind of people who spend more of their presentations discussing theory than primary sources. It is interdisciplinary, attracting literary scholars, historians, art historians, and musicologists who work on the nineteenth century in America, the UK, Europe, and beyond, and thus causing me to learn interesting things about thing I would not have ever thought about, such as Parisian graveyards in the post-Napoleonic era. Its schedule is very humane.

This was my fourth time attending. Usually I go with my grad school friends Christiana and Kim, but neither could make it this year, which I will admit had me nervous! But I think it is probably the first conference I have gone to without a close friend where I still managed to eat every meal with someone else, and never felt isolated or adrift. There are several people I have seen at NCSA repeatedly now, and several more I hope to see again. I missed getting to catch up with old friends, of course, and I hope it doesn't become an issue next year, too.

Bring on NCSA 2023 in Sacramento!

* Funnily enough, I actually attended five conferences from March 2018 to March 2019: NCSA 2018, ChLA 2018, SFRA 2018, NAVSA 2018, and NCSA 2019. I guess this makes up for my ensuing conference desert.

The Perils of Professionalization: The Tone-Deafness of NAVSA

As this post goes up, I'm driving to the second day of NAVSA 2018 in St. Petersburg, the annual conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association. It's my first time attending NAVSA, and my first year as a member of the organization in several years.

I was a member of NAVSA for a few years in graduate school, though eventually I stopped applying because I was rejected pretty consistently; I think three times in a row. I'd like to think I am pretty good at writing conference abstracts, and never have I been rejected so consistently by a conference. I remember attending my first meeting of the Science Fiction Research Association in graduate school, and during the banquet the president came over to where all the grad students were sitting and asked us what SFRA could do for graduate students. I told him that just by accepting graduate students (most of my friends were consistently rejected, too), SFRA was doing more for me than, say, NAVSA. Eventually I stopped re-upping my membership.

The thing that really irritated me, though, was NAVSA 2013. A pretty common thing for academic organizations to do these days is to "professionalize" graduate students, which is a fancy way of saying that they try to give them tips on how to successfully navigate an increasingly terrible job market for humanities Ph.D.s, and so NAVSA 2013 was preceded by a professionalization workshop.

For some reason, that year's meeting of the North American Victorian Studies Association was held in Venice. The conference was June 3rd through 6th; the professionalization workshop was May 27th through 31st, plus June 7th.

It cost $800!

On top of whatever it costs to fly from North America to Venice (humanities Ph.D. students get very little travel funding), NAVSA was expecting them to pay almost a thousand dollars in order to hear tips on jobs they probably weren't going to get. I found that completely flabbergasting and completely unconscionable. It would have been a whole month's rent for me at the time.

The cynic in me suspected the whole thing was to allow the workshop organizers and lecturers the luxury of extending their Venetian vacation. Nice work if you can get it.

Fast forward to 2018; NAVSA is still doing "professionalization workshops," though this year they do not involve a five-day beach vacation, at least. This year's conference is preceded by a two-thirds-day session and followed by a half-day one, covering the material of the Venice workshop in about one-fifth of the time. As a result, it costs not $800, but $60.

The workshop, however, is staffed by volunteers, so what does that $60 go to?

Apparently, one boxed lunch and a coffee break! I get that conference venues charge ridiculous amounts of money for their food, but $60 for a shitty cashew chicken wrap served with (I assume) a bag of chips and a can of soda? Really? That's the best you could do for a bunch of graduate students who are probably paying for all of this out of pocket? The conference is in downtown St. Petersburg; any one of those students could walk out the doors of the Hilton and just buy a lunch and a coffee literally anywhere and pay less than $60.

It's ridiculous that it should cost this much in general (at some conferences, $60 will get you a goddamn banquet), but it's completely tone-deaf to charge this to underfunded, underpaid, and underemployed graduate students. Like, give this to them for free and let them walk to McDonald's at lunchtime. Or pack some granola bars. These people will not get jobs. You do not need to charge them $60 for that privilege.

I complained about this to a colleague, and she pointed out that the whole idea of "professionalization" was essentially bogus anyway. Because the real problem is not insufficiently "professional" Ph.D.s (though I have seen some pretty poor cover letters), but the dwindling number of full-time Ph.D.-level academic positions, and the persistence of Ph.D.-granting programs in producing graduates for whom jobs do not exist.

According to its web page, my own alma mater produced fifteen Ph.D.s last year. Also, according to its web site, eight of them landed full-time jobs. Two of those were tenure-track. My program is one that trumpets its placement rate, too. That they produce a 50% excess of Ph.D.s is the problem, not "professionalization," and NAVSA is exploiting those desperate students' economic precarity with its continued stream of workshops.

Good Presentations and the Dynamics of Conferences: ChLA and SFRA 2018

In the uncompleted Doctor Who story Shada by Douglas Adams, the Doctor is visiting Cambridge when he hears the whispers of an alien device; he tells his friend Professor Chronotis, "I heard the strange babble of inhuman voices, didn't you?" Chronotis replies, "Oh, probably undergraduates talking to each other, I expect. I'm trying to have it banned." In the same spirit, I propose a ban on graduate students giving conference papers.

Not really (my wife helpfully reminded me that I was still a graduate student just over two years ago), but I recently just got home from doing a whole week of conferences, going straight from the Children's Literature Association (ChLA) in San Antonio to the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) in Milwaukee, and I am Full of Thoughts about Conferences.

Back in March, I went to NCSA 2018, so I've done three conferences in five months, which is definitely the highest density of my academic career thus far. (In grad school, I averaged one per year. Man, non-trivial amounts of funding really help!) It's interesting to compare the culture of conferences; both ChLA and SFRA pride themselves on their friendliness, for example-- multiple people at both conferences mentioned how friendly they were-- but they go about it in different ways. ChLA has a lot of formal structures of friendliness: first-time attendees get a ribbon on their name badge, they can sign up for lunch with an older academic, there are themed lunch groups.

SFRA is more informal in this regard. Its friendliness rises out of the gregariousness of sf fan culture, which is of course made up of a lot of awkward nerds, but there's that sense that you've found your "place" when you arrive at an sf convention, and that applies to SFRA, too. Moreso than any other conference I go to, I feel like I can be reasonably assured that I can talk about a random text (broadly construed) and some random person will know what I'm talking about, which is because a lot of sf scholars are also sf fans, and thus read and watch widely within the genre. Like, I don't work on contemporary sf academically, but I have read enough and am plugged in enough that I can follow a presentation about William Gibson or Twin Peaks or what have you even though I've read/watched neither. Conversely, there didn't seem to be many nineteenth-century scholars there, but everyone knows The War of the Worlds well enough to follow my argument about it. You can grab a random person and have a conversation about Star Trek: Discovery with ease... even if the other person hasn't seen it.

That said, this was my first time in a long time attending an academic conference without a "conference buddy"; at NCSA 2018 and 2017, I was with grad school friends. I knew many people at ChLA, including my roommate, but there was no one I was close friends with; at SFRA, I didn't really know anyone (my last time there was 2015). As an introvert, it can definitely be hard to put yourself out there with total strangers, no matter how "friendly" they claim to be. I always have that deep suspicion that everyone is friends with everyone except me.

I don't know what solution exists here except to keep going to the same conference until people actually do know me. This will probably work better at SFRA than ChLA. ChLA is a good size; I don't know how many attendees there were this year, but there were a total of 122 panels which usually had 3 presenters. SFRA, on the other hand, had a total of 35 panels, with usually 3 presenters, so you tended to bump into the same people more consistently.

There's another cultural difference: if I were to put conferences I've attended on a scale of how much they care about theory, NCSA would be near the bottom. Most attendees tend to present historical and cultural readings in my experience, without much explicit connection to literary or cultural theory. ChLA has more presenters who explicitly draw on theory, but not a ton. SFRA, though, is very theory heavy. I don't know exactly why this is, though one can, well, theorize. Maybe it's that sf studies overlaps with media studies, which I think is more theory-driven; perhaps it's because some of the Ph.D. programs that specialize in sf just happen to be more theoretical (like University of California Riverside); at a stretch, it could be that citing, say, Derrida adds some legitimacy to what was once not thought of as legitimate field.

This brings me back to my proposed ban on graduate student papers. One attendee at SFRA occasionally complained on the #SFRA2018 hashtag on Twitter about people that read papers aloud instead of doing a more free-form presentation-with-PowerPoint style. I don't have a problem with people who read aloud so long as they do it well, personally, and I think literary studies calls for that kind of precision with language depending on the presentation topic. But there is a tendency among presenters, and I would argue that this usually corresponds to inexperienced presenters (though it is by no means limited to them) to read aloud things that should not be read aloud.

Bits of seminar papers or dissertation chapters do not work aloud without tweaking; a mass of citations is hard to follow orally, especially when you're quoting a lot of dense literary theory where it would benefit the audience to slow down and decompress. Some presenters begin with the theory, not getting to the actual primary text of the presentation until five minutes into a twenty-minute paper. I think this asks for a lot of faith from your audience, who want some sense of what the stakes of your argument is going to be. Theory is only useful inasmuch as it gives us a lens onto a primary source, a way of looking at that source that answers some questions about it but also generates new questions. (If your secondary source generates only answers, then that doesn't leave any room for you to contribute.) But if I don't know what questions you're asking, then it's hard for me to follow the theory, or even know why I should.

Sometimes the difficulty of listening is down to language. Formations like "the latter" and "the former" might work in prose where the reader can look back and see what came formerly and latterly, but they are confusing when read aloud, and the listener cannot recall what order you mentioned two things in in your previous sentence. Also also watch your use of fancy language; referring to your paper's introduction as its "opening mise-en-scène" makes me wince a little bit even if it is kinda accurate. (That might be unfair, but there it is.)

Timing is a huge issue. Both ChLA and SFRA lack formal panel moderators. A lot of times this is fine, but some presenters need moderation, in the sense of needing less excess. Some papers are just too long; you can maybe get away with going a minute over, but I think it is a grossly rude imposition on both your fellow presenters and your audience to talk for twenty-five minutes in a twenty-minute slot. (Speaking fast, as some do, might help the timing, but then it exacerbates the issues I discussed in my previous two paragraphs.) Other times, you can just tell the presenter has literally never read this aloud before, and they have no idea how long it will come out at all. (Someone at one of these two conferences indicated they would be cutting and revising on the fly. Like, do your work ahead of time! Just like you make your students!)

There are some papers that go over because of tech issues; the number of people surprised by "presenter mode" in PowerPoint at SFRA surprised me. And if you're smart enough to get a Ph.D., I maintain you should be smart enough to figure out how to embed a video or YouTube clip into a presentation. There are also papers that aren't necessarily over-length, but feel like they are. I think this happens when the paper is just a flow of words without clear structure, so it's hard for the audience to orient themselves in the paper's narrative. I don't know that I'm great at this (or any of these points) myself, but I try to make my paper have clear sections that I signpost with a combination of verbal transitions and pauses between sections.

I don't really remember the first couple papers I gave as a graduate student any more; I'm sure I suffered from many of the same things I am pointing out here. It took me time to develop my own ideas about presentations, as well as a presentation style that works for me and my personality. I do remember presenting in the Comics and Comics Art track at the national American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association (ACA/PCA) annual conference as a second-year graduate student in 2010. It was my third-ever conference paper, according to my CV. I was the only person on my panel of four to not have a PowerPoint, and the only to just read aloud a prepared paper. Later, I overheard one of the officers of the Comics and Comics Art area say to a colleague, "I hate it when people from English present; they just read a paper aloud." Lesson learned, I guess, and indeed, I definitely would not present a paper on comics in such a way again.

I think also these things can be a matter of personal preference, which is good to remember. I left a couple papers in SFRA bewildered and baffled at what I had just heard, and then ran into someone who said, "Wasn't that paper so excellent? I loved it." So perhaps what does not work for me does work for others, so take everything I've said here with a grain of salt.

This post makes it seem like I'm whining and mean and didn't like ChLA and SFRA. Nothing could be further from the truth. Along with NCSA, I think they're the best conferences I've been to; they blow (say) ACA/PCA or the Northeast Modern Language Association out of the water. I gave two well-received presentations, and I heard a lot of excellent papers on a wide variety of topics, and interacted with a variety of generous colleagues and associates. (Also I gave my nemesis, who doesn't know she's my nemesis, the stink-eye at ChLA.)

I know some academics find conferences a waste of time, and man, I will never get an award for networking, but if you're in academia for the right reasons, you ought to enjoy conferences. I like communicating knowledge I've created, but I also like hearing the new knowledge others have created. It's what we're all here for, and the best conferences have the energy of people wanting to tell you what they know, and wanting to hear what others know. I learned about many fascinating-sounding texts I'd never heard of at both SFRA and ChLA, and I learned new and insightful things about texts with which I was already familiar. But even the best conferences, I guess, can be better.

The Vistas of Philadelphia: NCSA 2018

Last year, when I went to the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association annual conference, I blogged, "It was my first time going to that conference, and my first time going to any conference in almost a year. Something that I want to change but haven't yet managed is that I almost never repeat conferences-- there are a lot of conferences I've just gone to one meeting of." Well, I finally did it, because I went to NCSA two years in a row!

It was nice. It's a pretty friendly conference, I think, small enough that you run into the same people repeatedly, and the whole thing has a sense of cohesion and coherence. (I was not a fan of the sprawling Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, nor even of the Northeast Modern Language Association, which both feel big and alienating.) It's nice to run into someone you met last year-- they're like, Oh, how are you!? and then you have a person to grab dinner with, even if last year you just had a fifteen-minute conversation with them in the airport! Plus going with some old grad school friends helped, since you were quickly introduced to people they knew, too. Lots of friendly folk about on the whole.

I didn't take many photos...
but I did get one of this book from the
Union League's library.

Opening reception was at the Union League of Philadelphia, which was swank.

NCSA is interdisciplinary, drawing in English studies folks, but also history, languages (especially French for some reason?), architecture, and art. Sometimes this doesn't work, sometimes it does. My paper was on The Time Machine, culminating and polishing thoughts begun on this blog here and here, discussing how the novel refutes our attempts to read a story into the progress of history. Well, one of the other people on my panel was a French graduate student talking about nineteenth-century exhibitions that attempt to read a story into the progress of history! Nice!

NCSA was held in Philadelphia this year. I don't know if it always happens, but it happened both last year and this, that the keynote dealt with the nineteenth-history of the city in which the conference was being held. This year's came from an art professor who's studied the public parks of Philadelphia. It's a great move, establishing the relevance of nineteenth-century studies for the spaces we move in today.

Next year it's in Kansas City. Maybe I can rack up the same conference three years in a row!

Conferencing

courtesy Lego Grad Student

Last week, I attended a meeting of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association. It was my first time going to that conference, and my first time going to any conference in almost a year. Something that I want to change but haven't yet managed is that I almost never repeat conferences-- there are a lot of conferences I've just gone to one meeting of. Maybe someday, but logistics always seem to get in the way.

NCSA is sort of a mid-sized conference-- not the massiveness of the MLA or even one of its regional affiliates, but not the small intimacy of the Thomas Hardy Association or the Science Fiction Research Association. It's interdisciplinary and trans-regional as well-- unlike, say, the Victorians Institute, it attracts people doing nineteenth-century studies focusing on all kinds of countries (e.g., America, Britain, Italy, France) and across all kinds of disciplines (literary studies, history, art history, architecture).

That was probably both its strength and its weakness. When panels are arranged right, there's a kind of synergy: one of my colleagues from English was on a panel about performance and race with someone who studies theatre and someone who studies film-- there were neat correspondences and connections with their papers, and interesting questions from architecture-minded folks in the audience!

Though I enjoyed my co-panelists' presentations, things lined up a little less well there. You had my paper on three science fiction novels (The English Revolution, Marmaduke, Emperor of Europe, and When All Men Starve), a paper on a digital edition of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a paper on fan participation in a YouTube version of a Jane Austen novel, and a paper on a nineteenth-century pastel artist who used proto-photographic techniques. Supposedly these were united by being about technology, but the uses of technology were so varied as to render connections difficult or impossible. What do my future-set books have to do with insights gleaned into Sartor Resartus by thinking about it as hypertext?

People seemed to like my paper, though, and I found my co-presenters' interesting, too. Unfortunately, I went on the second-last session on the last day! So I wasn't able to parlay that into much of anything.

Maybe next year I'll actually go back? I liked it enough to make that worthwhile, I think.