Keynote Speaker: Dr. Barry Faulk
Barry J. Faulk, Associate Professor of Victorian literature at Florida State University, is the author of Music Hall and Modernity (Ohio University Press, 2004). He has published articles on Victorian literature and popular culture in Victorians Institute Journal, Victorian Literature and Culture, Modernism/Modernity, and Cultural Critique. He is writing a book that historicizes British Rock of the 60s and 70s by tracing its roots in the British music hall.

His lecture attempts to re-periodize our account of the relations between modern intellectuals and mass culture. Faulk identifies forms of radical modernism in the artistic practices of the “Wilde generation,” thereby challenging our traditional association of the “modern” with 20th-century Modernism.  He argues that the representations of late Victorian entertainment by Arthur Symons and painter Walter Sickert participated in a broader endeavor to transform consumption into a communicative practice.

Plenary Speaker: Dr. David S. Shields
David S. Shields is the McClintock Professor of Southern Letters in the Department of English and History at the University of South Carolina.  He is the author of Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), co-author of Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, & Commerce in British America (University of Chicago Press, 1990), The Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), A History of the Book in America (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and co-editor of Finding Colonial Americas: Essays Honoring J.A. Leo Lemay (University of Delaware Press, 2001). He is also the Editor of Early American Literature and Associate Editor of Pearson Custom Library of American Literature.  His current work-in-progress is entitled “Sons of the Dragon: the literature of England's invasions of Spanish America 1570-1806.”  His interests include Photography and the American Stage (1900-1930).

Guest Speaker: Dr. Anthony Jarrells
Anthony Jarrells is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and specializes in eighteenth-century literature and British Romanticism. His recent publications include Britain’s Bloodless Revolutions: 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature (Palgrave series on “Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Cultures of Print,” 2005), and Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817-1825, Vol. 2: Prose Tales (Pickering and Chatto, 2006). He is currently working on a book-length study of the Romantic tale.

Guest Speaker: Dr. William B. Thesing
William B. Thesing is Professor of English at University of South Carolina and specializes in nineteenth-century literature. He is co-editor with Patrick Brantlinger of A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Blackwell, 2005), Victorian Women Poets for the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Volume 199, Gale Research, 1999), English Prose and Criticism, 1900-1950 (Thomson Gale, 1983), and the James Dickey Newsletter.  His other publications include The London Muse (University of Georgia Press, 1982), and Conversations with South Carolina Poets (John F. Blair, 1986).