Dickens on Screen: Dickens Society Online Event
Call for Papers
“From Whom We Have Great Expectations.” Mr. Charles Lyall, 1861, uploaded for The Victorian Web by George P. Landow.
We’re delighted to announce a new online event to mark Dickens’s passing. On this occasion, our theme does not dwell on the Inimitable’s death, but focuses instead on his ever-expanding life on the big and small screen. Dickens was first adapted for silent cinema in 1901, and since then his work has appeared countless times on film and television. Since Dickens’s Bicentenary in 2012, a number of significant screen adaptations have appeared, including Armando Iannucci’s Personal History of David Copperfield (2019), Steven Knight’s Great Expectations (2023), two Artful Dodger character adaptations, and multiple versions of A Christmas Carol.
For this Dickens on Screen virtual event, we invite short papers of no more than 10 minutes, to be recorded as a video presentation with slides, on any aspect of Dickens in relation to screen culture. Contributions on more recent, individual adaptations are very welcome, as are more wide-ranging discussions of Dickens’s varied global screen history and reconsiderations of Dickens as a cinematic novelist. Papers will be assessed on the basis of their contribution both to our understanding of Dickens and also to the study of his screen afterlives.
The event will be held in the early afternoon (Eastern Daylight Time) on Saturday June 6th. During the session, the video presentations will be shared and a live discussion with time for questions will follow. Accepted speakers will be expected to attend the live online event on June 6th, and further guidelines on recording videos will be provided in due course.
Please send abstracts of 100-200 words and a short bio to the organiser, Chris Louttit, at chris.louttit@ru.nl by May 11th. Decisions will be sent to speakers by May 13th, and video presentations should be shared with the organiser by May 31st. Any queries should be emailed to the address above.