Dickens and the Visual Imagination

An international two-day conference to celebrate the bicentenary of Charles Dickens

This conference, hosted by the Paul Mellon Centre in London and the University of Surrey in Guildford, will explore the interfaces between art history and textual scholarship through the work of Charles Dickens. The conference programme will also feature a reception at the Watts Gallery in nearby Compton, Surrey, to coincide with the gallery's exhibition Dickens and Art.

Plenary speaker: Professor Kate Flint (Rutgers University). Other speakers TBC.

Dickens is renowned for the richness of his visual imagination and his publications encouraged readers to interpret his words with and through their accompanying illustrations. Not only was Dickens deeply engaged with ideas of the visual in his writing, but his work has also provoked responses from artists across multiple disciplines within the Victorian period and beyond. The conference seeks to build on recent interdisciplinary work (such as that of Kate Flint and Isobel Armstrong) that illuminates nineteenth-century understandings of visual culture. By focussing the conference through a writer whose work is embedded in the visual imagination, Dickens will provide a test case for examining and theorising the connection between text and image across two hundred years of cultural history.

Further information at: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/english/research/dickens2012/index.htm

Please submit proposals (of up to 250 words) by Wednesday 30 November 2011 at: http://www.ias.surrey.ac.uk/workshops/dickens/cfp.php

Please email any enquiries to: g.tatesurrey.ac.uk