[Originally published in the January 2024 edition of Post Print, the newsletter of the journal Romance, Revolution and Reform. I wrote this report as a member of the conference's organising committee and as a member of the journal's editorial board.]
We welcomed the new year with our annual conference, held in-person at the University of Southampton. Delegates from far and wide braved early January flood waters to travel and participate in our two-day programme of panels on ‘Labour in the Long Nineteenth Century’. Organised and chaired (virtually) by our incoming Editor-in-Chief, Johanna Harrison-Oram, the conference was comprised of eight panels, two fascinating keynote lectures, and a thought-provoking film screening. Speakers at all career stages travelled from across the UK, Europe and North America to attend. We also heard papers from colleagues who joined us online from India. The diversity of subjects covered within the paradigm of labour, in terms of media analysed, geographical ranges studied and disciplinary perspectives taken, made the conference truly interdisciplinary and stimulating.
Delegates were in agreement that the papers delivered both extended and deepened our sense of how labour can be understood, whether we are thinking historically or even in a more intimate temporal perspective. The collegiality and welcoming atmosphere of the conference were conducive to questions that were considered and reflective. And it is our hope that those who gave papers found the question and answer sessions helpful in the development of their research ideas.
We owe a special thanks to our two keynote speakers: Dr Zoë Thomas (University of Birmingham) and Dr Nick Lawrence (University of Warwick). On Friday, Zoë discussed her new research on ‘Marriage, Collaboration, and Literary Labour in the English-Speaking World, c. 1870-1914’. On Saturday, Nick gave a lecture on ‘The Exceptional Worker in the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination’, which helpfully brought some discussions of labour in American literature to our programme (that was perhaps otherwise mostly concerned with the Old World). Both keynotes were highlights of the event, marrying the literary and the historical, as they did, to interrogate the conference theme from different angles.
Special thanks are also needed for the visual artist Patricia Silva, who joined us live from New York, where they are based, for a special screening and discussion of their short film, Suspensions, Infinite, on Friday evening. Through the film, Patricia ‘examine[s] the language of Portuguese propaganda films to create an experimental essay film on vanishing forms of labour, cycles of exploitation, and the role of human attention within behavioural/surveillance capitalism’. Patricia has kindly requested that if anyone has any further questions, reflections or comments, that they can send these to them via our board member, Will Kitchen (wkitchen@aub.ac.uk), who hosted the roundtable discussion.
The conference closed on Saturday afternoon with our outgoing Editor-in-Chief, Olivia Krauze, launching Issue 6 of the journal. Olivia handed over her position to Johanna and welcomed Sophie Thompson as our new Deputy Editor. Members of the journal’s editorial board present were also honoured to announce the winner(s) of the Best Postgraduate Paper Prize. With so many insightful papers having been delivered, we found the decision hard to make and chose two papers. Congratulations to Megan McLennan, whose paper, ‘Self-Fashioning as Resistance in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor’, was an innovative dissection of nineteenth-century ableism. And congratulations to Rosemary Archer, who delivered the paper ‘Body and Soul: Emotional Labour in Margaret Harkness’ Fin-de-Siècle Journalism and Fiction’ with aplomb and exposed the disparities in emotional labour’s exchange value between different spheres. Thank you to all of the speakers; the invigorating discussions and welcoming atmosphere of the conference would not have been what it was without your presence and ideas.
To conclude, thanks must be given once again to our conference chair, Johanna Harrison-Oram. Large thanks also to Olivia Krauze and Chis Prior, who really were the dynamic duo that ensured the conference ran smoothly. And thanks to my fellow committee members, Will Kitchen, Michelle Reynolds, and Sophie Thompson. We can’t wait to see how the engaging discussions that took place over the two days transform into words on the page and hope, in this vein, that speakers consider submitting to our new call for submissions.
Comments