The Northeast Victorian Studies Association grew out of an interdisciplinary Five-College Victorian Studies Seminar, a group of scholars from Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the Amherst Campus of the University of Massachusetts, initiated by Michael Wolff, who had joined the University of Massachusetts faculty in 1970. In April 1971, Michael Wolff and Maurianne Adams (then at Smith) put together a conference on "England in the 1870s: A Decade of Conflict." Many of NVSA's most faithful members as well as a number of its future officers were part of that conference.
Other conferences, one on poverty, one on William Morris followed, and it was decided to hold a 1975 conference, "The Victorian Family," in Worcester, hosted by Assumption College. At that conference the organization of NVSA was proposed, adopting as its primary task the sponsorship of a yearly conference. The next year, at a conference at Ramapo College on "Pasts and Futures," the NVSA constitution was approved; Maurianne Adams became the first president and Robert Keane the secretary-treasurer. The 1977 conference, "Crime and Punishment" at Boston College, saw the approval of the genesis of the Victorian Studies Bulletin and the election of Flavia Alaya (president), Carole Silver, and Robert Keane as the organization's officers.
Highlights from succeeding conferences include the 1984 meeting at Hofstra which focused on a reconsideration of Walter E. Houghton's landmark study, The Victorian Frame of Mind, twenty-seven years after its publication. The next year's conference, "The Victorians and the Supernatural," hosted by Rhode Island College and Brown University, featured a memorable spiritualist demonstration by a member of the London Psychical Research Society. In 1988, the meeting "Victorian Others" at Scranton College climaxed in a descent into a real coal mine. In 1991, at the University of Rochester conference on "Victorian Endings", we honored George Ford, a long-time supporter of NVSA, for a lifetime of contributions to Victorian studies. In 1992 at the Rutgers conference, "Victorian Space and Place," the Saturday night entertainment was a professional production of "Princess Toto" by W.S. Gilbert and Frederic Clay, adapted and directed by Nina daVinci Nichols.
In 1989 the Coral Lansbury Award, to help support the travel of a graduate student giving a paper, was established in memory of our third president, and in 1993 another such award in memory of George Ford. In 1995 Glenn Everett designed and continues to manage the NVSA website, valuable in itself and for its comprehensive set of links to Victorian sites on the web. The family of Sonya Rudikoff established a NVSA prize in 1999 for the best first book of the year in memory of Sonya, a long-time member of the organization.
The organization tried to hold conferences in both the northern reaches of the northeast and the southern end, but not until 2002 did we get to Canada. The format of the annual conferences has largely remained unchanged: a three-day conference, Friday afternoon through Sunday morning. Friday night always includes a reception and Saturday night a banquet and entertainment (highlights of which have been two Victorian balls). The Saturday business lunch has over the years become a highlight with a lively debate over choosing the next year's conference topic, initially presided over by Michael Wolff and subsequently by Jonathan Rose. Starting in 1996, the Sunday afternoon tour of a local site became a Friday afternoon visit to special collections in the different colleges and universities.
In 1996 at the Villanova conference on "Victorian Spectacles," NVSA began a new tradition, a Sunday morning roundtable on teaching Victorian literature and culture. In 1998 at Smith College ("Victorian Worlds: Anthropologies, Ethnicities, Geographies"), another new tradition began when Christopher Herbert was invited as a keynote speaker, delivering a talk on "Frazer and the Sacredness of the Image." The organization subsequently turned the Saturday morning session into an invited panel addressing issues in the discipline such as "Future Directions for Victorian Studies" (1999, speakers including James Eli Adams, Helena Michie, and Herbert Tucker); "Interdisciplinarity at the Breaking Point" (2000, speakers Amada Anderson, Lynda Nead, and Judith Walkowitz); "Periodization and the 19th Century" (2001, Jay Clayton, George Levine, Susan Wolfson, and Ruth Yeazell), and "Knowing the Past" (2002 , Chris Bongie, Richard Dellamora, Kate Flint, Carolyn Williams), (2003, Leo Marx, Leah Price, Herbert Sussman, and Ron Thomas).
NVSA CONFERENCES:
| 1975 The Victorian Family. Assumption College
1976 Pasts and Futures. Ramapo College 1977 Crime and Punishment. Boston College 1978 Victorians and the World Abroad. Hofstra University 1979 Victorian Mythologies. Rhode Island College 1980 Victorian War and Violence. University of Pennsylvania 1981 Britain in the 1880s. University of Hartford 1982 Victorians and Money. Drew University 1983 Loss and Failure in the Victorian World. Boston College 1984 Framing the Victorians. Hofstra University 1985 The Victorians and the Supernatural. Rhode Island College and Brown University. 1986 Victorian Work and Workers. Yale Center for British Art 1987 Victorian Food, Fun, and Games. Wheaton College 1988 Victorian Others. Scranton College 1989 Evolution and Revolution. Rhode Island College 1990 Disguises, Dreams and Deceptions. Princeton University |
1991 Victorian Endings. University of Rochester
1992 Victorian Space and Place. Rutgers University 1993 Victorian Waters. Rhode Island College 1994 Victorian Interiors. New York University 1995 Victorian Beasts and Beauties. Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1996 Victorian Spectacles. Villanova University 1997 Victorian Anxieties. University of Hartford 1998 Victorian Worlds: Anthropologies, Ethnicities, Geographies. Smith College 1999 Victorian Memory. Yale Center for British Art 2000 Victorian Breakdowns. The Graduate Center. CUNY 2001 Victorian Nocturnes. Brown University 2002 Victorian Origins and Excavations. Queen's University (Canada) 2003 Technologies and Media in the 19th Century. Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2004 The Sacred and the Profane. Cornell University 2005 Victorian Collaboration. American University 2006 Victorian Fatigue. Drew University 2007 Victorian Cosmopolitanism. Harvard University |
NVSA Officers
1976-1977 Maurianne Adams (president), Robert Keane (secretary-treasurer)
1978-1980 Flavia Alaya (president), Carole Silver (vice-president), Will
Dvorak (secretary-treasurer)
1981-1983 Coral Lansbury (president), Gerhard Joseph (vice-president)
1986-1989 Will Dvorak (president), Judith Wilt (vice-president), Earl Stevens
(secretary-treasurer)
1990-1992 Jonathan Rose (president), Jacqueline Jaffe (vice-president)
1993-1997 Anne Humpherys (president), Glenn Everett (vice-president), Joan
Dagle (secretary-treasurer)
1998-2000 Rhoda Flaxman (president), James Buzard (vice-president)
2000-2004 Jonathan Loesberg (president), Terri Hassler (vice-president)
2004-2006 James Eli Adams
(president), Suzy Anger (vice-president)
2006- Jonah Siegel
(president), Suzy Anger (vice-president)
Winners of the NVSA/Sonya Rudikoff Prize for the Best First Book of the Year
| 1999 | Yopie Prins, for Victorian Sappho. Princeton University Press. |
| 2000 | Alison Winter, for Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain. University of Chicago. |
| 2001 |
Jonah Siegel, for Desire and Excess: the
Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art. Princeton University Press; Honorable Mention: Rick Rylance: Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850-1880. Oxford University Press. |
| 2002 | Nicholas Dames, for Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870. Oxford University Press |
| 2003 | Priya Joshi, for In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India. Columbia University Press. |
| 2004 | Seth Koven, for Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian |
| 2005 | Suzy Anger, for Victorian Interpretation. |
Questions, Comments? Email:
geverett@stonehill.edu
Page created by G. Everett
Last updated on Wednesday, November 29, 2006
by G. Everett