Nineteenth-Century British Studies at Rice includes a visiting scholar series called Victorian Studies Seminars. The Victorian Studies Seminar (VSS) brings together graduate students and faculty from a variety of disciplines and institutions in an ongoing conversation about topics in nineteenth-century British studies. In past years, VSS events have included the Disciplinary Flashpoints Conference and Poetry in the Age of the Novel mini-conference as well as reading groups on selected topics. In 2009, the VSS created a Victorian banquet based on the menus discovered by the archival work of Professors Helena Michie and Robyn Warhol-Down.
Rice is also one of the founding members of the Dickens Project. Each year Rice sends two students and at least one faculty member to the summer conference where they gain the opportunity to work with faculty from all over the world and to develop their own pedagogical and scholarly interests.
Rice also enjoys a number of student-led discussion groups including the Late Victorian/Early Modernism group, which reads less canonical primary texts from 1880-1920, and the Victorian Studies group, which selects important critical texts in the field for discussion each semester.
September 26, 10:00 A.M. Eileen Cleere