Events
BAVS Annual Conference
BAVS is proud to host a yearly conference. To host BAVS 2026, 2027, or 2028 please complete the expression of interest form here.
BAVS 2025 will be hosted at the University of Oxford.
In 2024, BAVS collaborated with NAVSA, AVSA, VI and DACH-V on EVENT (https://www.event2024.org/), an international ‘flightless’ conference, with seventeen hubs across four continents. In place of a large-scale annual conference, delegates attended the hub that was geographically closest to their home and work. The UK had five hubs: 1) Stirling, 2) Cardiff, 3) Hawarden, 4) Belfast and 5) Lancaster.
The 2023 BAVS conference was hosted at the University of Surrey (31 August – 2 September 2023). The 2022 BAVS conference was held at the University of Birmingham (1-3 September 2022).
In recent years, BAVS has also organised various smaller activities such as the BAVS@Home series of online events, Victorian Valentines, Undisciplining Victorian Studies, ‘Florence Nightingale – Beyond the Lady with the Lamp’ and Violence, Vaccination, and Immigration in the Socio-Literary Imaginary. There has also been a series of ‘BAVS Talks’ events, videos of which are available to view online.
The BAVS Events Fund frequently supports members to run conferences, workshops, training courses, exhibitions, and networking events related to Victorian Studies. Event reports are published in the BAVS Newsletter.
BAVS Talks 2025
Join us for a special event organised as part of the year-long celebrations to mark the 25th anniversary of the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS).
Events funded by BAVS include:
London Victorian Studies Colloquium, “Repairing Research in Victorian Studies”, 7-9 April 2022, Royal Holloway University of London.
The LVSC, held 7-9 April 2022, was a space for PG and ECR students to make connections, share research and develop their own research community – something which has been greatly missed for the past few years. For many delegates, even those two or three years into a PhD, it was their first in person event. The generous funding from BAVS meant that we were able to reduce the overall cost of attending, which was especially valuable considering the career stage of our delegates. We had eighteen delegates in total and just under half of our delegates chose to stay on campus at RHUL, creating a residential environment in which delegates could build meaningful professional relationships.
“Breaking Barriers: Nineteenth Century Visual Culture in the Woke Age”, January 27th, 2021, Edge Hill University.
MeToo, BLM, LGBTQ+ rights, Extinction Rebellion – these are just some of the social movements that have contributed to the woke age. Moments of great change and reflection often make us think about our own social responsibility, be that our historical research, or what kinds of history we’re interested in. The long nineteenth century was also a time of furious debate, intense anxiety, and substantial progress, but its outdated views on gender, race and other pressing social issues remain in the visual epitaphs all around us, from statues to monuments, buildings to paintings. It is our social responsibility to rethink these objects and consider how they are represented and interpreted in the now.
Edge Hill University and The British Association of Victorian Studies are welcomed speakers from a range of backgrounds to talk about how their research on long-nineteenth-century visual culture interacts with changing social attitudes and ideas, considering the uncomfortable, problematic and even liberating experience of revaluating art and its legacies.
· Keynote: Laura Eastlake (Edge Hill University), “The Victorians and Cleopatra: Unwriting the Greatest (Orientalist) Love Story Ever Told”
· Patricia Pulham (University of Surrey), “‘Touching Statues: Reading 19thC Narratives of Sexual Violation in the MeToo Era”
· Nichole Cochrane (University of Exeter, BAVS/BARS 19C Matters Fellow), “Bonaparte in Britain: Popularity, Propaganda and the Lives of ‘Great’ Men”
· Gemma Shearwood (Uni of York), “The devil on his shoulder’: considering Flaxman’s memorial to the Early of Mansfield in relation to the memorial of Charles Watson”
· Rebecca Senior (Henry Moore Postdoctoral Fellow), “Commemorating colonialism: Monuments, oppression and visual culture in Britain during the long nineteenth century”
“Women and Humour in the Long Nineteenth Century”, June 2021, King’s College London
Wit is a prominent feature of nineteenth-century culture that encompasses genres from satire to nonsense. Well-known examples range from Dickens’s humorous sketches to joke pages in magazines, and from political cartoons in the tradition of Cruikshank and Gillray to music hall routines. Women’s participation in these discourses, however, still goes underacknowledged or even completely unrecognised. This reflects on cultural attitudes of the present day as well as the nineteenth century. While feminist comedy is now a genre in its own right, the question ‘Can women be funny?’ is still regularly posed. In popular imagination of the nineteenth century, women are the subjects of humour rather than humourists themselves. The centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act brought back into the public eye many contemporary cartoons ridiculing the suffragettes, and the strikingly similar earlier satires on the New Woman.
This interdisciplinary conference is interested in women’s active participation in humour and comedy in the long nineteenth century, as comic writers, artists, and performers. We will seek to address the reasons for the perceived absence of women from comic discourse, whether because their work was not recognised as humorous, because they issued it under male pseudonyms, or because they encountered resistance from a cultural establishment that regarded comedy as a male domain.
Participants may want to address topics including:
- Satire
- Parody
- Nonsense and the absurd
- Humour and the New Woman
- The role of politics
- The periodical press, specifically women’s magazines
- Women as subjects and objects in comedy
- Women, fashion and humour
- Humour and politics
- Women, profession, and satire
- Woman satirists
- Women, humour, and poetry
We welcome papers on individual female humourists which may include, but are not limited to Sarah Green, May Kendall, Margaret Harkness, George Egerton.
“The Tower of Mystery: The Literary History of Severndroog Castle”, public lecture at Severndroog Castle in Greenwich, London, Sunday 7 June
Speakers: Ellen Bulford Welch (University of Sheffield) and Jonathan Taylor (University of Surrey)
Join us at the picturesque Severndroog Castle on Shooter’s Hill in Greenwich for a BAVS- funded public lecture celebrating the launch of a new virtual exhibition about the castle’s literary history. We will be exploring the important role that Severndroog plays in texts by Charles Dickens, James Malcolm Rymer, Lucy Clifford and E. Nesbit, its popularity as a nineteenth-century leisure attraction, and its implication within Victorian debates about class and gender.
Directions to the castle can be found at https://www.severndroogcastle.org.uk/visit.html#gettinghere.