iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Submit an abstract to NVSA, 16-18 April 2027, at Seton Hall! Conference theme is— TRASH —with a wide purview from waste management & sanitation to muckraking & "trashy" texts, from sweeps & scavengers to body-snatchers, & all manner of surplus and residuum... 🗑️ 300-word abstracts by October 15! 🗑️

"View of a Dust-Yard" engraving: women and children dig and sift through a 19th-century "dust-yard," dogs and ducks nearby, overturned cart and smokestacks in background

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Mary Mullen @marymullen.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

NVSA CFP for 2027: Trash northeastvictorianstudies.wordpress.com/wp-content/u...

northeastvictorianstudies.wordpress.com

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John MacNeill Miller @snarlsdickens.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Victorianists! The CFP for the 2027 Northeast Victorian Studies Association (NVSA) is now up and we are accepting proposals! The theme is Trash, in any and every sense of the word. More here:

northeastvictorianstudies.wordpress.com

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

It was a true pleasure to review Natalie Prizel's phenomenal _Victorian Ethical Optics: Innocent Eyes and Aberrant Bodies_ for Genre! All interested in #Victorian literature and art, + in histories of #disability and queerness, read this book! #OpenAccess here: read.dukeupress.edu/genre/articl...

read.dukeupress.edu

Victorian Ethical Optics: Innocent Eyes and Aberrant Bodies | Genre | Duke University Press

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

read.dukeupress.edu

Victorian Ethical Optics: Innocent Eyes and Aberrant Bodies | Genre | Duke University Press

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

If you need to read about snow-crystals for some reason today, I have something for you… ❄️ ❄️ ❄️

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Catherine Quirk, PhD @catherinequirk.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

And once you’re nicely beveraged, join the Theatre Caucus at 8 in the Hampton Ballroom for Lady Audley’s Secret!!! @navsa2025.bsky.social

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

If you’re at @navsa2025.bsky.social please join us for the 🍃VCOLOGIES HAPPY HOUR🍃from 7-8 this evening!!! We’ll be in the Marquee Bar and Lounge: complimentary beer/wine for grad students, first come, first served!

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Reposted by Daniel Williams

Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

Reposting now the images load correctly—dm me if you need a free link! ❄️ Thx to Vcologies friends, esp. @kateflint.bsky.social, @devo3000.bsky.social, Liz Miller, @mortizrobles.bsky.social, @benjaminmorgan.bsky.social—& @pfyfe.bsky.social, one of two v. helpful readers! ❄️ doi.org/10.1093/jvcu...

doi.org

Crystal Forms: A Victorian Aesthetics of Accident

Abstract. This essay uses the snow-crystal studies of the meteorologist James Glaisher and his wife, the illustrator-photographer Cecilia Glaisher, as a ca

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 12/10/2025

“Crystal Forms: A Victorian Aesthetics of Accident” is out in JVC! I read James/Cecilia Glaisher’s snow-crystal images as a case study in accidental aesthetics—unsettling familiar stories about representation, mechanical objectivity, and lookalike forms in science + art ❄️❄️❄️ doi.org/10.1093/jvcu...

Screenshot of article abstract. Text:

Abstract. This essay uses the snow-crystal studies of the meteorologist James Glaisher and his wife, the illustrator-photographer Cecilia Glaisher, as a case study to describe a nineteenth-century aesthetics of accident, to assess its limits, and to draw wider lessons for the history of scientific and artistic representation. The argument is in two parts. The first examines the Glaishers’ accounts and images of snow-crystal morphology across a range of print media, from scientific periodicals to art journals. I argue that they pivoted from an empirical and taxonomic inquiry toward an aesthetics of design, developing representational strategies that emphasized symmetry. The latter part of the argument identifies two lessons we can draw from this case study. First, I complicate a narrative in the history of science that takes snow-crystals as exemplary of a nineteenth-century epistemic shift in styles of representation, from ‘truth to nature’ in hand-drawn images to ‘mechanical objectivity’ in photomicrography. The Glaishers’ case, I suggest, confounds this narrative of the ascendancy of mechanical reproductive techniques. Second, I contend that these images have an aesthetic kinship with projects of iterative representation in twentieth-century art, and anticipate conundrums about ‘pseudomorphism’. The Glaishers’ snow-crystals offer a compelling way to talk about quasi-identical forms in science and art, not so much by discriminating among them than by accommodating, even celebrating, the variety of causal stories and contexts that surround them. Their project reveals a nascent aesthetics of accident in the Victorian era whose legacy can be traced in, and help us understand, later representational forms.

Woodcut engraving of a snow-crystal with symmetrical laminae, in white lines on a solid ox-blood red background.

Woodcut engraving of two identical snow-crystals superimposed, in white on a solid dark green background, with a smaller cross-section showing the structure of the double crystal at lower left.

Woodcut engraving of a snow-crystal with complex symmetrical needles and short laminae, in white lines on a solid Prussian blue background.

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 12/10/2025

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

Join the ranks of fabulous recent essays on the #Victorian Pacific + #Romantic lyric; on museums, collections, archives; on ecology, hydrography, atmosphere; on immunology, race and portraiture; and more! compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1741...

compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Literature Compass

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Reposted by Daniel Williams

Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

My periodic call for pitches to the 19th-Century Networks section of ✨Literature Compass✨: Do you have a state-of-the-field essay to propose on #Romantic or #Victorian topics? a little-known or understudied author to spotlight? Please get in touch! compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1741...

compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Literature Compass

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Literature Compass

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

🌊 Please read Lindsay Wilhelm's marvelous state-of-the-field essay on the ✨ VICTORIAN PACIFIC ✨, out now in Literature Compass!!! compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

ABSTRACT: Despite (or perhaps because of) its distance from Britain, the Pacific islands occupied complicated symbolic and material terrain in Victorian culture. Home to major settler populations in New Zealand and Australia, the Pacific was also an exotic tourist destination, the setting for popular adventure novels and travelogues, a field laboratory for the burgeoning disciplines of ethnography, biology, and race science, and one of the last battlegrounds in the global scrabble for resources. This essay surveys the small but rich body of scholarship that has emerged over the past 30 years to elucidate Victorians' engagements with the Pacific. In particular, this essay highlights the unique challenges and opportunities posed by its study: attending to the Pacific requires us to rethink our terminology, expand our archives, refine our methods, and interrogate our approach to Indigeneity. As such, a survey of scholarship on this still somewhat marginal subject offers insights into the state of Victorian studies more broadly, at a juncture in which the field is reorienting itself toward the global.

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Laurence H. Tribe @tribelaw.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

What this long and detailed NYT piece calmly calls an “extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual” is in fact a blatantly unconstitutional usurpation of Congress’s Article I powers and delegation of the President’s Article II duties. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/u...

nytimes.com

Elon Musk’s Blitz Shakes U.S. Government as He Sweeps Through Agencies

The billionaire is creating major upheaval as his team sweeps through agencies, in what has been an extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual.

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Reposted by Daniel Williams

Darby Saxbe @darbysaxbe.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

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Reposted by Daniel Williams

Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

6th annual 💥Vcologies Early Career Paper Prize💥! Please share/RT! If you have a paper that fits the bill, “ecological thinking in the Anglophone world from 1750-1945,” do consider submitting! Deadline: Jan. 31, 2025 Award: $250

The Vcologies Working Group announces the 2025 Early Career Paper Prize.

The prize recognizes work by rising scholars that exemplifies the Vcologies effort to consider ecological thinking in the Anglophone world from 1750-1945.

Early career scholars working in any field are eligible. Graduate students and contingently employed colleagues are especially encouraged to submit. "Early career" is defined as a scholar of any rank or affiliation who is working toward a PhD, or who has received the PhD in the past three calendar years (2021 or later). PhDs from 2020 are also eligible to apply in cases where parental duties or medical leave have affected research.

The winning paper will be selected according to three criteria: (1) Potential significance for Victorian studies and its relation to the study of ecology, broadly construed; (2) Quality and depth of scholarly research and interpretation; (3) Clarity and effectiveness of presentation.

Papers will be anonymized before being forwarded to three judges.

The prize award is $250
Submission Guidelines

The prize is open to papers of no more than 3,500 words (not including notes, image captions, or references) written by early career scholars.

Please submit papers in MS Word or PDF (with no identifying information on the document itself), along with (as a separate document) a cover sheet stating (1) your name, (2) year of Ph.D. (or year expected), (3) name of your degree-granting institution, (4) title of your essay, and (5) contact information, to Kathleen Frederickson at kfrederickson@ucdavis.edu.
Submission deadline is January 31, 2025.

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

“Uncopyrightable” is the longest word in English to use each of its letters no more than once. —Christian Bök

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

how, specifically, does freezing research dollars hurt your state's economy? link for deets by state. keep in mind this is separate from all the other programs that support public schools, provide food for kids, supplies for hospitals, equipment for infrastructure. www.faseb.org/science-poli...

faseb.org

Federal Research Funding Data

We advance health and well-being by promoting research and education in biological and biomedical sciences through collaborative advocacy and service to our societies and their members.

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

✨“the realist novel’s embrace of doubtful futurity is fundamental to its efforts at verisimilitude.”✨ Gratified by this alert, generous, sympathetic review of my book by Alicia Rix in @thetls.bsky.social! buff.ly/4asoJpL

buff.ly

Indecision in the Victorian novel

“You can never be sure of weather till ’tis past”, gloomily avers Michael Henchard, the hero of The Mayor of Casterbridge. A familiar and profitless

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Reposted by Daniel Williams

The TLS @thetls.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

'...the habit of speculation is rife in Victorian fiction, and particularly incurable among Thomas Hardy’s fortune-tellers and gamblers.' Alicia Rix on indecision in the Victorian novel

buff.ly

Indecision in the Victorian novel

“You can never be sure of weather till ’tis past”, gloomily avers Michael Henchard, the hero of The Mayor of Casterbridge. A familiar and profitless

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

buff.ly

Indecision in the Victorian novel

“You can never be sure of weather till ’tis past”, gloomily avers Michael Henchard, the hero of The Mayor of Casterbridge. A familiar and profitless

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 14/10/2024

And our Introduction to ✨Collecting, Collections, and Collectors in the Long Nineteenth Century✨ is free to read! compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Introduction: Collecting, Collections, and Collectors in the Long Nineteenth Century

You have to enable JavaScript in your browser's settings in order to use the eReader.

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 14/10/2024

"Collecting, Collections, and Collectors in the Long Nineteenth Century" includes work by Margaret Gray * Alice Little * Lindsay Wells * Sophia Franchi * Lindsey Chappell * Sezen Ünlüönen * Tim Sommer * Brandon & Lindsay Katzir compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1...

compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Collecting, Collections, and Collectors in the Long Nineteenth Century: Literature Compass

Click on the title to browse this issue

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 14/10/2024

✨the Special Issue of Literature Compass✨ I edited with Jake Risinger is out! 🗃️ Collecting, Collections, and Collectors in the Long Nineteenth Century 🗃️ features a wide range of essays on the period's collecting practices in art, music, & science: compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1...

compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Collecting, Collections, and Collectors in the Long Nineteenth Century: Literature Compass

Click on the title to browse this issue

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 14/10/2024

compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Collecting, Collections, and Collectors in the Long Nineteenth Century: Literature Compass

Click on the title to browse this issue

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Manuel Sousa Oliveira @msousaoliveira.bsky.social · 28/05/2024

Join us tomorrow to learn about 🧐philosophy, the 💥apocalypse, and the 🌎environment! Ted Toadvine "The Memory of the World: Unraveling the Allure of Eco-Apocalypse" CETAPS+ Cultures of the Future Talks Wed, May 29, 2024 Online Register here: videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 08/04/2024

🌞A good day to contemplate Larkin’s quirky but moving poem, “Solar”: “Single stalkless flower / You pour unrecompensed”🌞

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 08/04/2024

🌞Gerard Manley Hopkins on a solar eclipse shortly before his conversion: “I saw it all up the City Road, to such a pass have natural phenomena come.”🌞

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 08/04/2024

🌞A good day to contemplate Larkin’s quirky but moving poem, “Solar”: “Single stalkless flower / You pour unrecompensed”🌞

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 08/04/2024

🌞Gerard Manley Hopkins on a solar eclipse shortly before his conversion: “I saw it all up the City Road, to such a pass have natural phenomena come.”🌞

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 30/01/2024

publication day! with ginormous thanks to all the inspirers and conspirers, and pre-orderers! let the wild rumpus start! www.versobooks.com/products/303...

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 06/03/2024

And I argue that reading for uncertainty in this way yields a rich account of the dynamics of thinking and acting in the Victorian novel, a fresh understanding of realism as a genre of the probable, + a vision of literary-critical judgment as provisional and open-ended. cambridge.org/9781009436113

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 06/03/2024

In imaginative explorations of unsure reasoning, hesitant judgment, and makeshift action, Victorian novelists cultivated distinctive responses to uncertainty as intellectual concern and cultural disposition + participated in the knowledge work of an era shaped by numbers cambridge.org/9781009436113

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 06/03/2024

🌞The Art of Uncertainty🌞 shows how Victorian novelists—Eliot, Collins, Thackeray, Hardy, and later Conrad—drew on science, math, philosophy, and the law to develop unique forms of thinking, judging, and acting in the face of uncertainty. cambridge.org/9781009436113: 20% off w/ TAU2024

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 06/03/2024

✨The Art of Uncertainty: Probable Realism and the Victorian Novel✨ is out with Cambridge UP! Available in US/UK (cambridge.org/9781009436113), 20% off w/ TAU2024 Huge thanks to all who shepherded it into print and to Kate Flint & Clare Pettitt for including it in their series!

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 06/03/2024

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 16/10/2023

5th annual 💥Vcologies Early Career Paper Prize💥 is open! Please share/RT! Wider remit than before, “ecological thinking in the Anglophone world from 1750-1945”… Consider submitting a paper by Jan. 31, 2024, for $250!

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Johanna Winant @johannawinant.bsky.social · 07/09/2023

Please read our open letter to the WVU Board of Governors published in the Boston Review today. @jessiew.bsky.social , @rosecasey.bsky.social and I wrote it together and we mean every word.

bostonreview.net

An Open Letter from Faculty at West Virginia University - Boston Review

The crisis here spells disaster for the future of public education.

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 04/08/2023

Ruskin slashes Renaissance painters, unwittingly slays X: “There is little harm in their works being purchased at high prices: their real influence is very slight, and they may be left without grave indignation to their poor mission of furnishing drawing-rooms and assisting stranded conversation.”

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Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 27/07/2023

How to make a decorous entrance to Bluesky, according to Thomas Carlyle: “If John Mill were to get up to heaven, he would hardly be content till he had made out how it all was. For my part, I don’t trouble myself about the machinery of the place...”

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