Summer 2024 Conference Presentations

2024 SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing) Conference

July 1-5, 2024
University of Reading and Online

Madeline will present her paper, “Access and Accessibility in Digital (De)collections,” at the 2024 Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) Conference, a hybrid conference in which she will be participating remotely. This paper explores ways in which periodical texts—particularly serials—can be made more approachable, legible, and accessible through digital projects that place texts within historical and aesthetic contexts with an eye toward universal design. Madeline will use her project, The (De)collected War of the Worlds (decollected.net), to show how one might reconfigure and recontextualize a periodical text to highlight meanings that can become obscured through republication as volumes.


Victorian Popular Fiction Association Conference

July 15-17, 2024
Canterbury Christ Church University and Online

Madeline will present her paper, “Corrupted Spaces and Places in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as Illustrated by Matt Kish,” at the 2024 Victorian Popular Fiction Association Conference, a hybrid conference in which she will be participating remotely. This paper reads Heart of Darkness as descended from, and indebted to, the kind of masculine adventure fiction and imperial romance seen in the Victorian popular press. With a focus on setting and characters’ psychological responses to physical environments, Madeline examines Kish’s depictions of people and places both within and outside of the Congo, and illuminates Kish’s visual-critical suggestion that one cannot return from an imperial space to a European space without bringing the corrupting influence of empire home.

Edinburgh History of Children’s Periodicals

Madeline’s essay, “Scottish Stereotyping, Highlandism, and Stevenson in Young Folks Paper” appears in The Edinburgh History of Children’s Periodicals (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Her chapter examines how depictions of Scotland and Scots in this children’s story paper reflect broader late-Victorian attitudes and might have shaped young readers’ perceptions of complex historical and cultural contexts related to Scotland and its inhabitants. The collection as a whole marks the first major history of magazines for young people from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. Bringing together periodicals from Britain, Ireland, North America, Australia, New Zealand and India, this book explores the roles of gender, race and national identity in the construction of children as readers and writers. It provides new insights both into how child readers shaped the magazines they read and how magazines have encouraged children to view themselves as political and world subjects.

Multimodal Comics

Madeline’s co-edited (with Drs. Chris Murray and Julia Round) collection, Multimodal Comics: The Evolution of Comics Studies (Intellect, 2024) has just been published in the United Kingdom and is being distributed by the University of Chicago Press. The collection showcases a selection of essays from ten years of Studies in Comics (journal) archives alongside several new pieces on the subject of multimodality in comics. It explores interactions between comics and other media and technologies, employing a wide range of theoretical and critical perspectives. By focusing on key critical concepts within multimodality (transmediality, adaptation, intertextuality) and addressing multiple platforms and media (digital, analog, music, prose, linguistics, graphics), this collection expands and develops existing comics theory and addresses multiple other media and disciplines. This volume demonstrates the evolution of comics studies over the last decade and shows how this research field has engaged with various media and technologies in a continuously evolving, multimodal artistic and production environment.

Madeline at NeMLA 2024 (Two Panels)

2024 NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association) Convention

March 7-10, 2024
Sheraton Boston, MA

Madeline presented two papers at the 2024 Northeast Modern Language Association Convention. The first, “Multimodal Approaches in the Undergraduate Victorian Studies Classroom,” describes the development of an upper-division undergraduate course (“Digital Victorians”) that models ways in which humanities courses can incorporate digital materials, tools, and methods into individual and collaborative projects. It was part of the panel, “An Excess of Expression: Multimodal Pedagogy in the Humanities.”

Her second presentation, “Geologic Time, Climate Anxiety, and Hope in Environmental Literature Classrooms,” was part of the “Geologic Time: An Eternal Excess” roundtable. This paper explores the concept of solastalgia: a term coined by Glenn Albrecht to describe a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home’ when that place has been changed, especially by climate disruption. Madeline described her students’ climate anxiety and shared example texts from her courses that evoke and provoke solastalgia.

Summer 2023 Conference Presentations

2023 SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing) Conference

June 26-30, 2023
Online

Madeline will present her paper, “Digital, Archival, and/or Collaborative Approaches in the Victorian Studies Classroom,” at the 2023 Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) Conference, which will be held online. This paper describes the development of an upper-division undergraduate course (“Digital Victorians”) that models ways in which literature courses can move beyond reading texts in facsimile to incorporating digital materials, tools, and methods into individual and collaborative projects. In learning-through-doing how Victorians read, students contribute to a greater understanding and articulation of the course subject than would be possible through more “traditional” engagements with Victorian literature.


2023 ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment
+ AESS (Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences) Conference

July 9-12, 2023
Portland, Oregon

Madeline will present her paper, “Teaching Literature of the Environment at a Jesuit Institution,” at the 2023 joint conference of the ASLE and AESS, which will be held at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. This paper describes the development of three complementary courses on literature of the environment at the University of Scranton that contribute to its Environmental and Sustainability Studies concentration. Guided by the Society of Jesus’ Universal Apostolic Preferences and other principles of Catholic environmentalism, and through a combination of literary studies and community-based learning, these new courses demonstrate the power of literature to further environmental justice.

Value for Money in Young Folks

Editor, Reader, and Value for Money in Young Folks” appears in the Autumn 2022 issue of Victorian Popular Fictions. In this article, Madeline explores some of the ways in which the paper’s editors built their community of readers, explained changes to the paper’s length, format, and price and incorporated reader contributions to promote circulation. Through an examination of interactions between “the Editor” (James Henderson’s editorial team) and readers of Young Folks, she charts a concerted effort to keep readers persuaded that every change made to the paper was in service of value to the consumer.

Madeline at NAVSA 2022

2022 North American Victorian Studies Association Conference

September 29 – October 2, 2022
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA

Madeline will present her paper, “Just Late-Victorian Voices in the (Partially-)Digital Classroom,” at the 2022 North American Victorian Studies Association Conference, which will be held at and near Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This paper is part of a roundtable entitled, “Just Assignments: Rethinking Student Work in the Victorian Studies Classroom,” which includes presentations from several educators using innovative methods to teach Victorian Studies in varying classroom settings. In her presentation, Madeline will speak to her experiences teaching and designing three courses on Victorian periodicals using digital materials, tools, and methods.

Summer 2022 Conference Presentations

2022 Joint Conference of the International Graphic Novel & Comics Conference
and the International Bande Dessinée Society

June 21 – July 1, 2022
Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Ireland

Madeline will present her paper, “Marvel Comics and the Ethics of Responding to 9/11,” at the 2022 Joint Conference of the International Graphic Novel & Comics Conference and the International Bande Dessinée Society, which will be held at the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dublin, Ireland. Through an examination of Marvel Comics’ multifaceted diegetic and extra-diegetic responses to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, this paper argues that while on the surface, post-9/11 Marvel comics like The Amazing Spider-Man (vol. 2) #36 may read as oversentimental and aggressively patriotic, they also present a clear moral and ethical stance on the tragedy.


2022 Victorian Popular Fiction Association Conference

UNABLE TO ATTEND DUE TO ILLNESS

July 13-15, 2022
Loughborough University, England

Madeline will had planned to present her paper, “The Diseased Victorian Masculine Adventure Narrative in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as Illustrated by Matt Kish,” at the 2022 Victorian Popular Fiction Association Conference, which will be held at Loughborough University in England. This paper reads Heart of Darkness as descended from, and indebted to, the kind of masculine adventure fiction and imperial romance seen in the Victorian popular press. It argues that Matt Kish’s 2013 illustrated edition of the novella presents the masculine adventure as self-consuming, and highlights the sickness of late-Victorian empire and its potential to infect its perpetrators across the ocean.

Madeline at RSVP 2021

2021 Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Conference

September 7-12, 2021
Temple University, Pennsylvania

Madeline will be participating in a Q&A regarding her paper, “Detection Drawn: Taxonomizing Illustrated Periodical Detective Stories,” as part of the 2021 Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Conference, which will be held virtually and hosted by Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. This paper describes a taxonomy for illustrations of late-Victorian periodical detective stories published in The Strand Magazine, The Ludgate Monthly, and The Harmsworth Magazine. A video recording of Madeline’s presentation, as well as related files, are hosted here.

Summer 2021 Conference Presentations

2021 Midwest Victorian Studies Association Conference

May 21-22, 2021
Auburn University, Alabama

Madeline will present her paper, “Thinking Periodically: Victorian Serialized Fiction and the Accessible Digital ‘Edition’,” at the 2021 Midwest Victorian Studies Association Conference, which will be held virtually and hosted by Auburn University, Alabama. With an emphasis on access and accessibility, this paper explores ways in which Victorian serialized novels can be presented through digital projects that place them within their periodical contexts. One such project is Madeline’s The (De)collected War of the Worlds.


2021 Victorian Popular Fiction Association Conference

July 14-16, 2021
University of Greenwich, London

Madeline will present her paper, “Imageless Imagetext: Illustration Excluded from Collected Late-Victorian Periodical Fiction,” at the 2021 Victorian Popular Fiction Association Conference, which will be held virtually and hosted by the University of Greenwich, London. This paper explores visual absences in several popular works of late-Victorian periodical fiction from which illustrations have been excluded, including works by H. G. Wells, R. L. Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Morrison, C. L. Pirkis, and L. T. Meade.