NAVSA 25 will examine the unfinished qualities of the Victorian period. Across panels and keynotes, seminars and gatherings, we will together focus on the unevenly enduring aspects of nineteenth-century life: the irregularized loop effects, webs, and ripples that resonate between the period of Victorian modernization and its aftermaths today. We therefore invite consideration of social and political legacies, philosophical aftereffects, and cultural inheritances, while calling for attention to formal effects of duration, delay, and persistence in Victorian thought itself. Our goal will be to emphasize a global nineteenth century in whose aftermaths we now live.

The legacies of Victorian globalization range from a climatological emergency originating with carbon burned in Manchester factories to the racialized divisions of labor that persist in today’s cleavage between “Global North” and “Global South” —as well as the cultural, institutional, and aesthetic forms in which those material facts have been expressed and contested. Gender and…