Seattle

The Seattle Hub will take place from September 27-29, 2024, with panels on Friday and Saturday (27-28th) and an optional field trip on the morning of Sunday the 29th. All sessions will be held on the beautiful University of Washington campus, designed on Ruskinian principles by John Charles Olmsted, and featuring views of the Cascades, Olympics, Mount Rainier, and Lake Washington (when it isn’t raining, that is). 

We welcome papers on all aspects of Victorian studies. We also invite presenters to think locally (as well as globally), asking what it means to bring Victorians studies to Earth here, in Cascadia, on the Salish Sea at the edge of the Pacific, on the shared lands and waters of the Coast Salish people who have inhabited them since time immemorial. We will be hosting a plenary roundtable on the topic “Victorians in/and/on the Pacific,” in conjunction with the UC-Davis Hub, which will open the conference on Friday morning. 

Since all papers will be available in written form on the central conference website, we encourage participants to take this as an opportunity to think expansively and experimentally about the presentation format. We invite presentations ranging from short “lightning talks” and/or experimental presentations, to those focused on pedagogy and strategies for teaching Victorian materials in our region, as well as more traditional conference papers. 

Finally, we hope to include an (optional!) field excursion on Sunday morning as part of the conference program. More information is available on the CFP page.

Program

View the Seattle hub program here.

Sponsors

The Seattle hub is grateful for the following sponsors: The Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington and the UW English Department.

Hub Leaders

Confirmed Speakers

Seattle speakers for the joint plenary roundtable with the UC Davis Hub will include Elizabeth Hope Chang, Alexander Dick, and Matthew Poland.

Elizabeth Hope Chang, author of the critically-acclaimed books Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in the Nineteenth Century (Stanford 2010) and Novel Cultivations: Plants in Global British Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2019). Alexander Dick is an associate professor of English at the University of British Columbia and author of Romanticism and the Gold Standard: Money, Literature, and Economic Debate in Britain 1790-1830 (Palgrave 2013) as well as numerous articles and chapters. He is currently at work on a project tracing the connections between the highland clearances in Scotland and the Pacific Northwest, where many displaced highlanders later settled. Matthew Poland is a recent PhD graduate of the University of Washington, where his dissertation The Global Migrations of George Eliot and Charles Dickens won the Distinguished Dissertation Award from the UW Graduate School in 2022. Poland has published articles and edited a special issue on the global circulation of Victorian literature and media. 

Visiting Seattle and UW

Transportation

Seattle is readily accessible to regional visitors via train (Amtrak), bus (Flixbus), car, and ferry (either WA State Ferries or the Victoria Clipper). The University of Washington campus is located in the “U District” in Northeast Seattle, and readily accessible to the rest of the city via Link Light Rail, as well as city buses and bike paths. 

On campus parking is also available on a pay-per-day basis in the N-20 Lot below Padelford Hall, which houses the English Department. Note: ADA-accessible parking for the conference venue is available at Lot N22. 

Lodging

Hotels close to campus include The Graduate, College Inn, and Silver Cloud, all of which are within a 15 minute walk to the conference venue. It is also an easy light rail ride to the many hotels in downtown Seattle.

Things to Do

The U District is home to many restaurants, many either clustered along “the Ave” or in “U Village” an open-air shopping mall just down the hill from campus. Capitol Hill, Downtown Seattle and the International District also offer a host of world-class dining options, from numerous cuisines.
In addition to the conference panels, UW is home to several sites and resources of interest to Victorianists, including the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture and the UW Library Special Collections, which houses an extensive collection of Kelmscott Press books among other nineteenth-century materials, as well as an excellent book arts collection. A self-guided Indigenous Walking Tour of campus will also be available for conference participants.

Contact

For inquiries, email organizers@event2024.org.