Thursday 13th September
9.30 – 10.00: Registration, including breakfast pastries (Senior Common Room)
10.00 – 11.00: Keynote (M40)
Noelle Plack, ‘Alcohol, Power and Identity in the Age of Revolution’
11.00 – 11.15: Comfort Break
11.15 – 12.30: Panel 1 – Alcohol, the Family, and Respectability (Hub1)
– Jean Webb, ‘Alcoholism and the innocents’: a discussion of drunkenness in Charles Kingsley and Hesba Stretton’s writing for children
– Daniel Jenkin-Smith, ‘A rogue; despite his high office’ – The Abuses of Liquor and Liquidity in Trollope’s The Three Clerks
– Ann-Marie Richardson, “Intellectual Rags and Patches”: How Branwell Brontë’s addiction manifests in his sister Charlotte’s novel Shirley (1849)
12.30 – 1.30: Lunch (SCR)
1.30 – 2.30: Panel 2 – Alcohol and Gender (Hub1)
– David Ibitson, Men of Substance: Jerome, Zangwill and New Humour’s Masculine Boozing
– Bob Nicholson, ‘Bosom Caressers,’ ‘Corpse-Revivers,’ and Other Alcoholic Encounters with America in Victorian Britain.
2.30 – 2.45: Comfort Break
2.45 – 3.45: Panel 3 – De Quincey’s Confessions (Hub1)
– Anna Rowntree, Peace and Posthumanism in Thomas De Quincey`s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
– Menglu Gao, ‘Founding Its Empire on Spells of Pleasure’: Brunonian Excitability, the Invigorated English Opium-eater, and Thomas De Quincey’s “China Question”
3.45 – 4.15: Afternoon Tea
4.15 – 5.30: Panel 4 – Empire and Drugs (Hub1)
– Sarah Irving, “Mrs. Gobat smoked a narghile”: authenticity, empire and substance use in Mary Eliza Rogers’ descriptions of Palestine
– Jamie Banks, ‘The Dens of Infamy in the Charlestown District’: Opium Dens and Colonial Anxieties in British Guiana and Trinidad, 1860 – 1900
– Suzanne Bode, Pre-Raphaelite Art and the Influence of Opium on Ways of Seeing
5.45 – 6.45: Keynote, Susan Zieger, ‘Nineteenth-Century Revolutions: Psychoactive, Logistic, Aesthetic’ (M40)
Conference Dinner: Miyagis, Ormskirk, from 7.30pm.
Friday 14th September
9.30 – 10.00: Hangover Breakfast (Sages)
10.00 – 11.00: Keynote, Douglas Small, ‘Sherlock Holmes and ‘Sports Doping’: Cocaine, Profession, and Performance’ (M40)
11.15– 12.30: Panel 5 – Addiction and Morality (Hub1)
– Kevin McCarron, ‘Pale eyed and melancholy’: addiction as moral and scientific failure in the Victorians
– Sarah Frühwirth, Addictive Reading: Sensation Fiction and Substance Abuse
– Sean A. Witters, “Using Addict; or, Is it Working Yet?”
12.30 – 2.00: Lunch with ECR Discussion (Sages)
2.00 – 3.30: Panel 6 – Late Victorian Drug Cultures (Hub1)
– Rebecka Klette, Mercurial Poisons: syphilis and mercury treatment as cause and cure of mental disorders, 1880-1909
– Natalie Roxburgh, University of Siegen, Medication and Social Optimization in Dorian Gray and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
– Abigail Boucher, Aston University, “Dabbling in Delicate Drugs”: Aristocracy, Darwinism, and Substance Abuse in M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud
3.30 – 4.30: Panel 7 – Post-Victorian Dynamics (Hub 1)
– Estelle Murail, Reimagining the nineteenth-century opium scene: the case of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy
– Alyson Brown, Power in the Smoke
4.30 – 5.00: Closing Remarks (Hub 1)
