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.