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Interior of Samuel Cupples House — Saint Louis University

What did it mean to be healthy in nineteenth-century Britain and its empire? What practices and policies shaped soundness of body, mind, and spirit? Just how well (or unwell) were the Victorians? MVSA 2018 will feature papers and panels on the subject of Victorian health and wellness. Click the following link to register, or view the program.

For the fifth year, MVSA’s conference will include seminars open to graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars on subjects related to the conference theme. Seminar participants pre-circulate 5-7 page papers and discussion is led by senior scholars in the field. This year’s topics are “Alternative Approaches to Health and Wellness,” led by Anne Stiles; “Health and Environment in the Nineteenth-Century British World,” led by Christopher Ferguson; and “In Sickness and in Health: Representing Victorian Illness,” led by Carolyn Day.

Conference Highlights

— Friday, April 20

12:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. |  Registration
1:00 p.m. – 1:15 p.m. |  Opening Remarks
1:15 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. |  Plenary Panel
2:45 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. |  Coffee
3:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. |  Session 1
5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. |  Jane Stedman Lecture – Carolyn Day
6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. |  Welcoming Reception
6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. |  Exhibit at SLU Archives: Victorian Medical Instruments and Rare Books
8:00 p.m. |  Dinner in St. Louis

— Saturday, April 21

7:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. |  Registration
7:30 a.m. – 8:30 a.m. |  Breakfast
8:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. |  Seminars
8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. |  Session 2
10:00 a.m. – 10:15 a.m. |  Coffee
10:15 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. |  Session 3
12:15 p.m. – 1:45 p.m. |  Luncheon, Business Meeting, Presentation of Arnstein Award
2:15 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. |  Session 4
3:45 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. |  Coffee
4:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. |  Session 5
5:30 p.m. |  Dinner in St. Louis
7:30 p.m. |  Concert at Samuel Cupples House: Program includes The Window; or The Songs of the 
                       Wrens (song cycle), words by Alfred Tennyson, music by Arthur Sullivan

— Sunday, April 22

7:30 a.m. – 8:30 a.m. |  Breakfast
8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. |  Session 6
10:00 a.m. – 10:15 a.m. |  Coffee
10:15 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. |  Session 7
12:00 p.m. – 12:15 p.m. |  Presentation of the Burgan Prize, Final Remarks
12:15 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. |  Boxed Lunch

** For early arrivals:  Yopie Prins will be speaking at Saint Louis University on Thursday, April 19, at 4:30 p.m., as part of the Walter J. Ong Digital Humanities Symposium. Her topic will be the Sapphic tradition in women’s poetry.

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Plenary Session

The Jane Stedman Plenary Speaker will be Carolyn Day of the Department of History at Furman University. Professor Day is an expert on perceptions and experiences of disease in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, and is the author of Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease, which was a Times Higher Education Book of the Week in September 2017.

Arnstein and Burgan Prizes

On Saturday, MVSA will award its annual Walter L. Arnstein Prize for Dissertation Research in Victorian Studies. At the close of the conference, MVSA awards the William and Mary Burgan Prize for Outstanding Presentation by a Graduate Student at the conference. More information about both prizes can be found at this link. Applications for the Arnstein Prize are due February 1, 2018.

Venues and Hotel Accommodations

The conference will take place on Saint Louis University’s North (or Frost) Campus; DuBourg Hall, where most conference events will take place, is located at 221 N. Grand Blvd. A campus map is available to download as a PDF. Established in 1818, SLU is the oldest American university west of the Mississippi, celebrating its bicentennial anniversary in 2018. For more information about visiting the St. Louis area, peruse this customized guide to local attractions, which includes restaurant and pub recommendations, lists of cultural events, historic sites of interest, and more.

The Courtyard by Marriott Downtown West has a block of rooms reserved for MVSA 2018 at a convention price of $134 per night; to make a reservation, call Marriott Reservations at 1-800-321-2211 or 314-241-9111. When you reserve your room, you will need to identify yourself as part of the Saint Louis University Midwest Victorian Studies Room Block Group staying at the Courtyard St. Louis Downtown West, located at 2340 Market St. at Jefferson, St. Louis, MO 63103. In order to receive the conference rate, you must make reservations on or before March 30, 2018.

There are a few higher-end hotels in the area for those wishing to stay elsewhere. We recommend The Chase Park Plaza, located in the Central West End; the St. Louis Union Station by Hilton, located downtown at Union Station; and The Sheraton St. Louis City Center Hotel & Suites, located downtown near Union Station. For those seeking budget-friendly accommodations, we recommend the Drury Inn Union Station, located downtown at Union Station; and The Parkway Hotel, located in the Central West End.

Of the hotels mentioned above, Chase Park Plaza, St. Louis Union Station, and Drury Inn Union Station offer reduced rates for travelers coming to SLU (for the Drury Inn, use corporate ID: #309848 when registering to receive the discount). A list of additional accommodations recommended by SLU is available at the linked site.

Transportation and Parking

The Courtyard by Marriott Downtown West is approximately 1.5 miles from the North Campus. For those staying elsewhere or who prefer other modes of transportation, we recommend Laclede Cab Company. To order or reserve a cab, call 314-652-3456 or use their smartphone app, STLtaxi. They charge $3 Flag fee and $2 per mile with no credit card fee. Their flat airport fees are $34 from Downtown and $31 from Midtown or Saint Louis University’s campus, with $4 added to trips leaving the airport. St. Louis also has Lyft and Uber services. A variety of additional transportation options are also available to attendees with disabilities.

For those who would like to walk to campus from the Courtyard by Marriott Downtown West, turn left onto Market St. and then right onto Jefferson Ave. Turn left on Olive St., and follow it as it turns into Lindell Blvd. When you reach the intersection with Grand Blvd., you will arrive at campus.

We recommend that guests flying to the conference go through St. Louis Lambert International Airport. St. Louis Lambert International Airport is serviced by most domestic airlines. A taxi from the airport to Saint Louis University’s campus will cost approximately $40. Public transportation is also available via Metrolink (Grand Station stop; come to the street level and turn north on Grand to reach campus.). There is also a Metrolink stop at Union Station on Market St., three blocks east of the Courtyard by Marriott. Alternatively, GoBest Express Shuttle has offered to make their shuttles available at a discount of 15% off standard rates. The discounted rate is only available to those who book online in advance; click here to make a reservation.

St. Louis also has an Amtrak station, Gateway Station, for those who wish to arrive by train.

For those traveling by car, there are several ways to get to the Saint Louis University North Campus. Detailed driving directions are available in the linked document. SLU’s North Campus has two parking garages open to visitors. You may park in the Laclede Ave. garage (3602 Laclede Ave.) or the Olive St. garage (338 Olive St.). Daily rates are $6 Monday through Saturday, and free on Sunday. If you wish to park at a meter, we recommend that you download the Parkmobile app, with which you can pay and renew your parking from your phone.

Research Interests: The British music festival; sight-singing techniques; the intersection of choral singing and moral reform movements

Selected Publications: Co-author with Steven E. Plank of Historical Dictionary of English Music, ca. 1400-1958 (Scarecrow, 2011); Music and Victorian Philanthropy: The Tonic Sol-fa Movement (Cambridge, 2009); Elgar’s Oratorios: The Creation of an Epic Narrative (Ashgate, 2002)

  

— Select a local rate —

Faculty Visitor | $125.00 USD Grad/Adjunct Visitor | $115.00 USD

     

What was “Victorian Taste?” How did British Victorians at home and abroad discuss, theorize, market, and judge taste? How was taste imagined and envisioned in relation to literary, visual, and musical arts? How did the new knowledge of Britain’s historical and aesthetic past impact tastes of contemporary Victorians? MVSA’s 2017 conference will reflect fresh and current thinking about taste and the Victorians. This includes topics with new perspectives on musical taste in public concert hall and in the domestic parlor, defining good taste, how the Victorians tasted food, the literary consumption of taste, the differences between “authentic” and “imitated,” the exotic within domestic tastes, instilling taste through education, women’s taste as an expression of social and political power, and religion and taste.  Click the following link to register, or download the program.

For the fourth year, MVSA’s conference will feature seminars open to graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars on topics related to the conference theme. Seminar participants pre-circulate 5-7 page papers and discussion is led by senior scholars in the field. This year’s topics are “Victorian Poetry in Good and Bad Taste,” led by Julie Carr, and “Liberalism, Sociability, and Musical/Literary Taste,” led by Phyllis Weliver.

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Plenaries

The Jane Stedman Plenary Speaker at “Victorian Taste” will be Candace L. Bailey of North Carolina Central University, who will deliver a talk entitled “Colliding Values: Women’s Cultural Production in Victorian England and the Antebellum South.” Professor Bailey is a leading social and cultural musicologist, and an expert on music in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. She is a past president of the North American British Music Studies Association.

Hotel Accommodations, Transportation, and Venues

There will be no designated hotel for the 2017 MVSA Conference. If you wish to stay in town, you will want to make hotel or bed and breakfast reservations as soon as possible. Oberlin has a variety of short- and long-stay options for those of all budgets. The closest include the Hotel at Oberlin, a downtown hotel two blocks away from most conference venues, which is currently advertising single rooms at $159 per night, or a bed and breakfast package at $189 per night. There are several bed and breakfasts in the city of Oberlin: the Buckeye and the Frog, the Ivy Tree Inn & Garden, and Shurtleff Cottage (reservations by phone only at 440–774-8033) are all within five to ten minutes’ walk of the conference venues, and have rooms from $100 and up. Additional options in town can be found on Airbnb.

For those with access to a car, there are a number of bed and breakfasts outside of town. Particularly recommended are 1830 Hallauer House, about two and a half miles outside of town, and Georgian Manor Inn, about 25 miles from town. There are also numerous chain hotels within 10-25 miles of town (scroll down to Hotel/Motel).

For air travel, you can fly directly into Cleveland-Hopkins International Airport (CLE) on most carriers, though United Airlines still has the most flights into and out of this airport. Shuttles ($15 each way) are available on Sunday, Monday, Thursday, and Friday, and depart the airport for Oberlin at 10:00 a.m., 12:00 p.m., 3:00 p.m., and 5:00 p.m., and return to the airport each day at 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. A private shuttle can be booked for $55 each way on any day of the week at any time. The trip takes about 45 minutes.

Cheaper flights to the area can frequently be found into the Akron-Canton Airport (CAK). It takes about 75 minutes to drive from this airport to Oberlin. There is no shuttle from this airport, making renting a car necessary.

The closest train station to Oberlin is in Elyria (ELY), a 20-minute drive from Oberlin. Some cabs from the station are available via the Lorain County Cab Company (440-322-6555), Your Driver Taxi (440-522-3437), and Amherst-Elyria Taxi (440-988-8294).

Additional car services and driving directions to campus can be found at the linked sites. Some visitor parking is available behind the Hotel at Oberlin (turn onto Willard Court from either East Lorain Street or East College Street and look for the makred visitor parking lots). Additional parking can be found by the Conservatory complex, off of South Professor Street, but will require notification beforehand, when you register for the conference.

An Oberlin campus map is available to download as a PDF. All of the conference panels will take place in the Conservatory of Music, located at the corner of West College Street and South Professor Street. Friday’s events will take place in the Kohl Building (no. 34 on the map); Saturday and Sunday’s events will take place in Bibbins Hall (no. 13 on the map) and the Kohl Building.

Research Interests: Perceptions of the city and urban life in Britain 18th-20th centuries; 19th-century sonic landscape

Selected Publications: An Artisan Intellectual: James Carter and the Rise of Modern Britain, 1792-1853 (Louisiana State University Press, 2016); “The Urbanization of James Carter: Autobiography, Migration, and the Urban-Rural Divide in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Rural-Urban Relationships in the Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2016); “The Political Economy of the Street and Its Discontents: Beggars and Pedestrians in Mid-Nineteenth-Century London” (Cultural and Social History, 2015); “A Micrometer for Empire: How a Nineteenth-Century Tailor was – and was not – an Absent-Minded Imperialist” (History, 2015)