Professor and Chair of English Eileen Cleere delivered a paper at the meeting of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, held from July 21–24 in Washington, D.C. The conference was a collaboration with the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, the International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, and Smithsonian American History and American Art Museums. Her paper, “The Complicity Machine: Assault, Trafficking and Abuse in Charlotte Mary Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family (1865),” is part of a larger project that seeks to reframe what sexual assault, grooming, and trafficking might look like in Victorian domestic fiction, especially in the wake of #MeToo.

Professor and Chair of English Eileen Cleere participated in a roundtable at the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) annual meeting in Toronto, Canada from January 8–11. The roundtable featured conversation about how literature can help us navigate institutional spaces where faculty labor is increasingly gendered and generational. Her paper, “Becoming a Minor Character,” discussed the temporal mismatch between the timeline for meaningful institutional transformation and a “move fast and break things” incentive structure that requires immediate and assessable outcomes.

Professor and Chair of English Eileen Cleere presided over her final conference as President of Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) in Genoa, Italy from June 18-21. In that capacity, Cleere ran a board meeting, planned upcoming conferences in Washington, D.C., Dallas, TX, and Rome, Italy, and introduced the keynote speaker, Professor Clair Pettitt, for a lecture held at the Palazzo Ducale (Doge’s Palace). Cleere also delivered a paper titled “The Quickening: Pregnancy and Pronatalism in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility,” and participated in a special roundtable called “Slowing Down Time: Embodied and Generational Resistances to Speed and Acceleration.” Her roundtable talk was titled “Becoming a Minor Character,” and suggested that the Victorian novel can help us understand models of institutional service generationally, with specific focus on the gendered and generational labor often required to sustain work in public facing (PH) and community facing (CEL) initiatives.

Professor of English Eileen Cleere delivered a paper at Baylor University’s Armstrong Browning Library as a part of EVENT 2024, a hub conference sponsored by the North American Victorian Studies Association on September 19–21. Her paper was titled “Laugh Track: Pregnancy and Pronatalism in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.”

Professor and Austin Term Chair in English Eileen Cleere presided over the 39th meeting of INCS (Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies) in Cincinnati, OH, March 21-24, under the theme of “Trans-Turns in the Nineteenth Century.” In addition to whipping Board votes for a successful overhaul of the organization’s bylaws and constitution and announcing prizes and initiatives at the membership banquet, Cleere chaired a panel on “Theorizing Trans-historically.”