I write to invite you to the first conference in a year-long series of events hosted by the Clark Library, UCLA on the theme "Victorian Apocalypse." This first event in the core program will be held over Zoom on October 7th and 8th and will bring together cultural critics and historians of science and medicine to explore the late-Victorian idea of a disease-ridden Decadence or maladie du siècle.
This first conference will bring together cultural critics and historians of science and medicine to explore the ways in which the 1890s and turn-of-the-century witnessed in both Europe and North America a turbulent series of fears and fascinations with social types whose ethnic and erotic identities conveyed the idea of a maladie du siècle. This was a period when the Decadent movement in the arts was not uncommonly criticized through metaphors condemning its leprous properties, and when new understandings of bacteriology, epidemiology, tropical medicine, and infectious disease were being undertaken. Further, as several recent critics have acknowledged, the emergence of a seemingly disease-ridden Decadence bore certain degenerate qualities that created the conditions for an identifiable Modernism to emerge in the years leading up to the Great War.
The event will feature the following speakers
- Mack Gregg, University of California, Riverside
- Jessica Howell, Texas A&M University
- Christos Lynteris, The University of St. Andrews
- Monika Pietrzak-Franger, University of Vienna
- Lorenzo Servitje, Lehigh University
- James F. Stark, University of Leeds
For more details and for a registration link, please visit the conference website. As mentioned above, this is the first event in a year-long series. More to come!
Last modified 4 October 2021