Registration Open: Centre for Victorian Studies Colloquium 2026 – ‘New Directions in Nineteenth-Century Studies’

Registration Open: Centre for Victorian Studies Colloquium 2026
 – ‘New Directions in Nineteenth-Century Studies’
Explore new horizons in Victorian Studies at our one-day colloquium!
Date: 30 April 2026 
Venue: Royal Holloway, University of London (Egham Campus)

Dear colleagues,

We’re delighted to announce that booking is now open for the Centre for Victorian Studies Colloquium 2026, which this year is on the theme ‘New Directions in Nineteenth-Century Studies’. This interdisciplinary event brings together researchers at all career stages – from PGRs and ECRs to senior scholars – to explore innovative approaches to Victorian and Neo-Victorian literature, culture, and global pedagogy.

Registration

Booking is now open via this link. Registration closes on Monday, 30th March 2026. Early registration is encouraged, as places are limited. As you will see, the registration fee is £25 per person. The registration fee is subsidised by the CVS committee (without this support, the fee would be approximately £50).

Programme (brief schedule version)

9:30 – 10:00 Registration (Tea/Coffee in International Building, Room TBC)

9:50 Welcome and Introduction

10:00 – 10:45 Parallel Research Panels (Lightning Talks Session 1)

10:55 – 11:40 Parallel Research Panels (Lightning Talks Session 2)

11:40 – 12:00 Tea/Coffee Break (Room TBC)

12:00 – 13:00 Roundtable: Global and Decolonial Victorian Pedagogy

13:00–14:15 Lunch Break & Poster & Creative Showcase

14:15–15:45 Public Engagement Workshop

15:45 – 16:00 Closing Remarks & Thanks

16:20 – 18:00 Keynote lecture: Annual Sally Ledger Memorial Lecture

                       Dr Jacob Jewusiak (Newcastle University),

The Age of Consent:

This talk reframes the late nineteenth-century “Age of Consent” debates as a struggle over time as much as law—who counts as “too young,” “not yet,” or “already fallen,” and what those timelines authorise. Reading across W. T. Stead’s “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” (1885), Mayne Reid’s The Child Wife (1905), and the poetry of Toru Dutt (1876) and Sarojini Naidu (1912), I show how consent operates as a genre-making force, organising the rhetoric of rescue in journalism, the domestication of risk in imperial fiction, and the compression of time in lyric. I argue that Dutt and Naidu re-script agency through forms of translation, memory, and futurity that unsettle stadial accounts of temporality. Consent emerges, then, as a discursive arena in which vulnerability and autonomy are negotiated through the intertwined logics of gender and empire.

Venue & Travel

The colloquium will be held at Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham campus. The evening keynote will take place in RHUL’s Picture Gallery. You can find information about how to get here via this link. 

Accommodation

On campus: Hub Guest House – extremely convenient;  please note it is located near a late-night student venue and can sometimes be noisy. You can access booking here.

Egham High Street: Travelodge (very close to the railway station; about a 20-minute walk or a short bus ride to campus)

Other options: including Premier Inn in Staines (One train stop from Egham).

Further details, including the full programme, campus map and parking information, will be published in April. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions or accessibility requirements. 

We very much look forward to welcoming you in this stimulating interdisciplinary event!