Friday 13 May 2016

All conference sessions and presentations will be held in Rm 7.45 Run Run Shaw Tower at the Centennial Campus of the University of Hong Kong. This building is close to MTR HKU Station (Exit C1) and a 10-minute walk from Hotel Jen (via HKU Station Exit B2).

08.30-09.00        Coffee and Registration

09.00-09.30        Welcome
                            Derek Collins (Dean of Arts), The University of Hong Kong

09.30-11.00        Culture and Democracy
                            Chair: Nan Zhang

“The True Apostles of Equality”: Democracy and Culture in Mill and Arnold
Nan Zhang, Fudan University, Shanghai

Walter Pater, Moral Sexlessness, and the Autonomous Subject
Dustin Friedman, The National University of Singapore

A Radical Relationship: Anarchism and Democracy in Late-Victorian Fiction
Haewon Hwang, The University of Hong Kong

11.00-11.30         Coffee Break

11.30-13.00        Politics Translated: China, Britain, and America
                            Chair: Niketa Narayan

Free Trade and the Anxious Evangelism of Extraterritorial Printing: Revising President John Quincy Adams’s “Lecture on the War with China” (1841) for The Chinese Repository
Kendall Johnson, The University of Hong Kong

Bulwer Lytton: The Prometheus of Political Novels to China
Weiqing Zhang, The University of Minnesota Duluth

13.00-14.30        Lunch (Senior Common Room)

14.30-16.00        Narratives of Marginalization and Isolation
                            Chair: Julia Kuehn

Becoming Minoritarian or Becoming Lucy in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
Jungah Kim, Sogang University

“Going forth homeless and alone”: Isolation, Inclusion, and the Gentleman in Basil
Niketa Narayan, The University of Hong Kong

George Eliot: Felix Holt, the Radical
Julia Kuehn, The University of Hong Kong

16.00-16.30        Coffee Break

16.30-17.45        KEYNOTE:

Democratic Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Fiction: First Sentences
Isobel Armstrong, The University of London

17.45-19.00        Drinks

19.30-21.30        Dinner
                            Heichinrou – Causeway Bay

Saturday 14 May 2016

09.00-10.30        The Practice of Popular Politics
                            Chair: Jessica R. Valdez

The Popular Public and their Social and Political Participation
Clara Dawson, The University of Manchester

Samuel Butler: The Settler Colonialist as Practical Democrat
Simon During, The University of Queensland

H.G. Wells on Popular and Material Democracy
Miles Link, Fudan University, Shanghai

10.30-11.00        Coffee Break

11.00-12.15        Migrancy and Movement
                            Chair: Douglas Kerr

Radical Responses to Migrancy around 1850: The Political Picaresque
Josephine McDonagh, King’s College London

12.15-14.00        Lunch (Bijas)

14.00-15.30        The Victorians and Democratic Form 
                            Chair: Johnson Chan

Mr. Alf’s Caricatures: Journalistic Characterization in the Novels of Anthony Trollope
Jessica R. Valdez, The University of Hong Kong

The Prosody of Prose Poetry: Looking at Wilde in a New Fashion
Johnson Chan, The University of Hong Kong

Neo-Victorian Graphic Narrative as a Democratic Form
Elizabeth Ho, Lingnan University

15.30-16.00        Coffee Break

16.00-17.30        Democracy and the University: A Roundtable Discussion
                            Chair:   Jessica R. Valdez

This roundtable engages with recent debates surrounding the role of the university and the intellectual in the public sphere. Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong and chancellor of the University of Oxford, recently argued that “universities should be bastions of freedom in any society,” but that this freedom is under assault at universities in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Hong Kong. This roundtable asks participants to think about the relationship between the university and intellectual engagement, academic freedom, and contemporary politics. How do we define academic freedom, and is it under assault? What is the role of the humanities in fostering a democratic culture?

Isobel Armstrong, The University of London
Simon During, The University of Queensland
Timothy O’Leary, The University of Hong Kong