Hosted at:

Prifysgol Aberystwyth University, UK, Wales, 

and hybrid

Beaches and Borders recur both literally and metaphorically in the Victorian era. Public discourses ranged from the boom in seaside resorts, to various wars, political uprisings, and the expanding reach of Empire. Industrial progress meant that the borders of knowledge and mechanical innovation were constantly being reassessed. Authors grappled with barriers in publication and reception; publications, fictional and otherwise, traversed national borders, and texts, authors, and readers were centre stage or pushed to the borders. Neo-Victorian fiction continues that imperative, questioning the borders of gender and genre. Not only this, but borders remain at the forefront of public discourse and the media to this day (with a lot of rhetoric exposing just how connected to the Victorians we remain – for better or for worse). Beaches are where the sea meets the land, the industrial meets the natural. They are places of the discovery and re-discovery of new lands, genres, and authors for both the Victorians and modern-day scholars. With the rise in beaches as tourist locations came a rise in the sea bathing machine, with the swimming costume being symptomatic of the contentions around women’s clothing and bodies. Like many British beaches, Aberystwyth’s became a public place of crowds but they can also be private places of solitude. Furthermore, the conference’s location in Wales provides a valuable opportunity to bring Wales and Welsh identity into focus and dialogue with the wider world of Victorian studies.

At this hybrid conference, we encourage the theme of Beaches and Borders to be explored in a multiplicity of directions, whether that be in light of a specific moment in history, location, image, or text, or a broader, global, and conceptual approach. We encourage papers on the popular across disciplines including, Victorian popular fiction and Neo-Victorian literature, Welsh Literature in English, art history, and historical geography.

Victorian popular fiction exists on, and beyond, the borders of established canonicity; at VPFA, we aim to explore the metaphorical beaches of Victorian popular fiction to discover or re-discover understudied popular authors, novels, and literary and cultural landscapes.

Submissions from scholars at all stages of their careers, independent researchers, and postgraduate researchers are welcome.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• beaches as tourist sites, as locations for holidays, entertainment and enjoyment
• beaches as places of discovery or re-discovery
• the seaside and health, medical humanities, science and literature
• going from land to the beach, or from the sea onto the beach
• travelling, travel writing and modes of travel
• blue and environmental humanities
• places/spaces tied to industrialisation, especially the railway, the telegraph, the countryside, the suburbs and urbanisation
• individual, national, or global beaches and/or borders
• border movement, immigration, emigration, British Empire
• physical borders in art works, texts, homes, towns, countries, and the world
• metaphorical and liminal borders between genres, and branches of Victorian literature
• the breaking down/traversing of borders
• spiritualism and borders between worlds
• being on the borders, not front and centre, marginalisation
• borders between social classes, between genders, races, the sexes, sexuality and ages
• Welsh identity and Welsh Writing in English in the nineteenth century
• Victorian and Neo-Victorian literature
• the borders of the Victorian periodical press, side-ways reading, ephemera, publishing
• addressing borders in research and scholarship, canonicity, pedagogy and the archive
• addressing borders in teaching the Victorian and Neo-Victorian
• places at the end of the line (road or railway), or end of the world (science fiction, fantasy)

Submission Guidelines:

• Proposals for 20-minute individual papers, or panels of three papers (by individual scholars, or affiliated with another Learned Society) should be submitted to the Conference Team at vpfaconference@gmail.com by 28^th February 2027
• Abstracts should be of no more than 250 words for individual papers, or 700 words for panel proposals, in Word format.
  • Include a brief biographical note (max 100 words), including your institutional affiliation if appropriate, and your Bluesky handle if you have one.
• This conference will be hybrid (via MS Teams). Please state whether you plan to attend in person, or online. If you will be attending online, please indicate what time zone you are in. If you can only make a certain day, please indicate this too.

Please do not hesitate to contact the conference organisers, Emma Butler-Way and Helen McKenzie, at the above e-mail address with any further questions or inquiries.