Friday, November 9

Session I 12:45-2:00pm (concurrent panels)

Panel One: Dickens's Secrets I
Panel Chair: David Bradshaw, Warren Wilson College

• Julie Tyler, Emmanuel College
  "Bleak House's Imperatives of Silence and Speculation: Mute Characters in the Space of the Talking Novel."
• John McBratney, John Carroll University
  "What Connexion Can There Be?": Detection in Dickens's Bleak House
• Susan Reynolds, University of Alabama
  Without the Ties That Bind: The Role of Jo in Charles Dickens's Bleak House

• Heather Miner, Rice University
  "Whole Labyrinths of Social Ethics": Conspiring to Raise the Fallen Women in Gaskell's Ruth
• Charles Williamson, Western Kentucky University
  Familial Ideologies, Working Class Nightmares, and the Gender of Alcoholism: Harriet Martineau and the Drink Question
• Abigail Burnham Bloom, Hunter College
  Victorian Women's Lives: Revealed and Concealed

• Denise Tischler Millstein, University of Alabama
  George Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical and Byronic Secrets
• Patricia Brody
  Letitia Elizabeth Landon: The Secret of her Raw, Bare Powers
• Allison Cooper Davis, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Mopsa and the Mariner: Supernatural Realities

Session II 2:15-3:30pm (concurrent panels)

• Maria K. Bachman, Coastal Carolina University
  Concealing Minds and the Case of The Woman in White
• Heather M. Sowards, Ohio University
  Performing the Heart and Mind: Secret Feminine Identities in Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science
• Susan Bernardo, Wagner College
  Suicide, Secrecy, and Language in Collins's The Law and the Lady

• David J. Bradshaw, Warren Wilson College
  Secrecy and Reticence in John Henry Newman's Loss and Gain
• Patrick Scott, University of South Carolina
  The Ur-Quiver in the Proto-Stiff Upper Lip: Secrecy and Reserve in Keble, Froude, Newman and Clough
• Susan E. Colon, Baylor University
  Secret Sins: Pharisaism in The Heir of Redclyffe

• Alicia Carroll, Auburn University
  The Secret Life of Trees: Inside Out in Wuthering Heights
• Lauren Wood Hoffer, Vanderbilt University
  "Anxious as ever to avoid discovery": Jane Eyre and Charlotte Bronte's Conflicting Desires toward Fame
• Kathleen Conway, Molloy College
  Secrets: A Means to Reflection and Growth in Victorian Novels

Session III 3:45-5:00pm (concurrent panels)

• Anita R. Rose, Converse College
  Unfinished Textual Business in The Beetle and Dracula
• Rebecca King, Middle Tennessee State University
  Secrecy, Denial, and Autonomy in Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Brooke McLaughlin Mitchell, Wingate University
  Secrets, Silence, and the Fractured Self: Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles

• Molly Engelhardt, Texas M University;Corpus Christi
  The Secret is Out: Note-Passing in the Victorian Ballroom
• Leila May, NC State University
  Becky Sharp, Lady Audley, and You: The Sociology of Secrecy
• Alan LaCerra, University of Central Florida
  Narrative Secrecy in Vanity Fair: Names Withheld so as to Be Revealed

• Allison L. E. Wee, Luther College
  A Secret Censorship: The Victorian Home Office vs. Town Talk
• Albert D. Pionke, University of Alabama
  Secrecy, Oath-Taking, and Victorian Elite Public Status
• Deborah Logan, Western Kentucky University
  My only political plot: Martineau the Peacemaker and Corn-Law Repeal

Saturday, November 10

Session IV 9:00-10:15am (concurrent panels)

• Brigitte Knight, University of North Carolina at Pembroke
  Invisible No More: The Secret Lives of Women in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations
• Jim Barloon, University of St. Thomas
  'By Any Other Word': Language 'Under the Rose' in A Tale of Two Cities
• Rebecca N. Mitchell, University of Texas;Pan American
  Literacy and the "Profound Secret and Mystery" of Dickens's Others

• Melissa Purdue, University of Kentucky
  "I married this man, unknown to anyone, of course": Interracial Marriage in Victoria Cross's Anna Lombard and Life of My Heart
• Melanie Ann Hanson, Sam Houston State University
  Alice Meynell's "Punch": Privacy and the "Vulgarizing" of the Wedded Victorian English Woman
• LuAnn McCracken Fletcher, Cedar Crest College
  A narrative hung together but awkwardly: The Odd Womens Critique of Marriage

• JJ Pionke, Harper College
  A (Not So Secret) Identity: Michael Field
• Sharon McGrady, Rutgers University
  Behind the Faces of Faith: William Hale White and the Wordsworths
• Robert P. Fletcher, West Chester University
  The Perverse Secrets of Masculinity in Robert Browning and Augusta Webster

Session V 10:30-11:45am (concurrent panels)

• Michael D. Lewis, University of Virginia
  National and Personal Secrets in Felix Holt, the Radical
• Daniel Cook, Saginaw Valley State University
  The Syndrome of the Secret: Hermetic Excess in George Eliot's Amos Barton

• Emily D. Wicktor, University of Kansas
  Imbued with the Science of Venus: The Sexually Savvy Female in Victorian Pornography
• Robin Barrow, University of Tennessee
  Outraged Silences: The Secret of Sexual Violence in Victorian Fiction
• Joseph L. V. Donica, Bob Jones University
  Clandestine Sodom: Homosexual Love's Social Role in the Nineteenth-Century British Royal Guard

• Michael Claxton, Harding University
  Victorian Conjuring Secrets
• Ginger Frost, Samford University
  "I Could Not Hold Up My Head": Fatherhood, Murder, and Secrecy in Victorian England
• Eleanor Fraser Stansbie, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
  A Victorian Picture Puzzle: Richard Dadd's The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke

Lunch and VI Business Meeting 12:00-1:45pm

Session VI 2:00-3:15pm (concurrent panels)

• Christina Stevenson, UC Santa Cruz
  Secrets and the Sensation Novel: The "Space that Told the Whole Story" in The Woman in White
• Kristina Aikens, Tufts University
  Wilkie Collins and the Lady Laudanum Drinker
• Jenny Kohn, Monash University
  Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Novels-with-a-Secret and the Relational Female Self

• Chris Hagerman, Albion College
  Secret Cyphers, Secret Knowledge and Imperial Power: The Classics in British India
• Leslie Rogne Schumacher, University of Minnesota
  "Contained in the Records": William Gifford Palgrave: Romance, Secrecy, and Pragmatism in the British Foreign Service
• Niharika Dinkar, Boise State University
  Behind the Veil: The Development of a Secret National Identity in India

• Audrey Fessler, University of Wisconsin; Eau Claire
  "The Boy Was a Girl": Reconstructing Gender and Class to Deconstruct Difference in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins
• Stephanie Robinson, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Subversive Shirt-Waists and Coercive Corsets: Transmuting Class and Gender through Dress in Nineteenth-Century Domesticity
• Abby Heller
  Boys Secrets in Victorian Public School Stories: Functioning as Females

Session VII 3:30-4:45pm (concurrent panels)

• Kimberly Manganelli, Clemson University
  Bad Blood: The Tragic Mulatta as Villainess in Florence Marryat's Daughter of the Tropics
• T. Rebecca Kennamer, CUNY Graduate Center
  Re-Reading Ouida: Readerly and Writerly Secrecy in Moths
• Helena Gurfinkel, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville
  Special Victims Unit: Corporal Punishment and the Secret Victorian Bildungsroman in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh

• Patricia Michael, Holy Family University
  Secrets as Strategies of Power in Gaskell and Dickens
• Stephen Arata, University of Virginia
  Singing Fire: Walter Pater and the Secrets of Consciousness
• Heather Shippen Cianciola, Duquesne University
  "A Hiding-Place for Thee": Christina Rossetti and the Power of Secrets

• Deanna K. Kreisel, University of British Columbia
  Not-So-Secret Gardens: Area Railings; or, Suburban Residences and How to Circumvent Them
• Sarah Hoglund, SUNY at Stony Brook
  What Must Remain Hidden: Burial Reform in Early-Nineteenth Century Britain
• Mary Flowers Braswell, University of Alabama at Birmingham
  Mary Eliza Haweis (1848[?]-1898): Who was this Woman and Why Should we Care?

Keynote Address 5:00-6:30pm