George MacDonald Bicentenary Conference (UK)

Borderlands: George MacDonald Between Worlds


The theme of this conference marking the bicentennial of George MacDonald's birth is Borderlands. For almost two centuries, George MacDonald has delighted and challenged his readers through his short stories, novels, essays, fairy tales, poetry, and sermons. MacDonald plays with and transgresses boundaries between the quotidian and the fantastical, theology and literature, home and abroad, secular and sacred, life and death. His identity as a Scotsman in England positioned his relationships and writings between the worlds of English literature and Scottish literature.

As a champion of the arts, the musicality and visuality of his texts merged mediums and inspired new vistas. His liminality plays out through his literary interpreters and successors, in the past and in the present, within the narrow world of MacDonald studies and in the broader ways his ideas and stories shape thinking in literature and theology as well as science, theater, fine arts, history, social justice, and education.


Confirmed Keynotes include


Paul Fiddes

Paul Fiddes

Paul S. Fiddes is Professor of Systematic Theology in the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the Emeritus Principal (President) of Regent’s Park College, and an Honorary Fellow of St. Peter’s College, Oxford. At present he directs an inter-faith research project on ‘Love in Religion’ based in Oxford, with Muslim and Jewish collaborators. He has written or edited over 30 books and 150 articles, and has also published a novel, A Unicorn Dies. He has a particular interest in the interface between theology and literature, and three recent books are Iris Murdoch and the Others: A Writer in Dialogue with Theology (Bloomsbury, 2021), Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis: Friends in Co-Inherence (Oxford University Press, 2021), More Things in Heaven and Earth: Shakespeare, Theology and the Interplay of Texts (University of Virginia Press, 2022).

Alison Millbank

Alison Millbank

Alison Milbank is Professor of Theology and Literature at the University of Nottingham, having taught previously at the Universities of Virginia and Cambridge. She is particularly interested in literature that questions the limits of the material world, particularly the Gothic from Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Literature (Macmillan, 1992) to God and the Gothic: Religion, Romance and Realism in the English Literary Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her monograph, Dante and the Victorians (Manchester University Press, 1998 & 2007) examines George MacDonald’s employment of the Commedia in imagining a positive purgatorial afterlife, while MacDonald is also shown to be an influence on Tolkien in her Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real (T & T Clark, 2007). She has a strong interest in ecclesiology, with For the Parish: A Critique of Fresh Expressions(SCM, 2010), co-written with Andrew Davison and more recently, The Once and Future Parish(SCM, 2023) and is currently working on a genealogy of Anglican eco-theology and divine immanence from the Scientific Revolution onwards.

Mark Knight

Mark Knight

Mark Knight is Head of Department and Professor of Literature, Religion, and Victorian Studies in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. He edits the journal Literature and Theology and has published several books on literature and religion in the long-nineteenth century. Currently, he is editing The Cambridge Companion to Religion in Victorian Literary Culture and writing a monograph on Oscar Wilde and religion.

Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson

Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, PhD St Andrews, publishes and lectures internationally on George MacDonald, 19th century Britain, the Inklings, Faith & Arts, and Ecology & Community. She is on the Advisory Board of Inklings journal VII and MacDonald journal NorthWind, a founding Board Member of C.S. Lewis & Kindreds Society of Eastern & Central Europe, and co-chair of the George MacDonald Society. She has recent chapters in The Inklings & Culture (2020), An Introduction to Child Theology (2022), and Unsaying the Commonplace (2024). With Michael Partridge she co-edited Informing the Inklings: George Macdonald & the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy (2022; shortlisted for a Mythopoeic Award), and she has written introductions to multiple MacDonald texts (in English and Romanian), including Lilith (2022), Hope of the Gospel (2023), and the full-text graphic novel of The Golden Key (2023). Kirstin also crafts online pieces for organizations such as The Rabbit Room, Radix, and ArtWay, where some of her lectures, teaching, and podcast interviews can also be found. When not MacDonalding, Kirstin directs Windstone Farm Linlathen, a nonprofit that seeks to facilitate and encourage community through ‘Theology, Ecology, & the Arts’ in the Ottawa Valley, Canada. There she delights in (re)introducing academics (amongst others) to MacDonald’s beloved Book of Nature.

Other participants include: Malcolm Guite

Malcolm Guite

Malcolm Guite (PhD, Durham) is the President of the George MacDonald Society. Life Fellow and former Chaplain at Girton College, Cambridge, he teaches and lectures internationally on theology, literature, and the arts – with MacDonald, Coleridge, and the Inklings as frequent features. Also a musician and a poet, Malcolm has published multiple anthologies, and many of his poems have been set to song. His current work – an Arthurian epic, Merlin’s Isle: The Grail Sequence – found some of its inspiration in Phantastes. Malcolm is especially interested in the imagination as a truth-bearing faculty, as evidenced in his most recent collection of short essays, Sounding Heaven and Earth (2023). Other of his publications include Faith, Hope and Poetry, Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lifting the Veil: Imagination & the Kingdom of God.

Danny Gabelman

Daniel Gabelman (PhD, St Andrews) is Head of English at King's Ely in Cambridge. He is the author of George MacDonald: Divine Carelessness and Fairytale Levity (Baylor UP; Mythopoeic Award Finalist) and the academic representative of the George MacDonald Society. He is currently co-editing two volumes of essays on MacDonald: one will be available for the first time at the Wheaton conference (Unsaying the Commonplace: George MacDonald and the Critique of Convention, co-edited with Amanda Vernon, Winged Lion Press) while the other (The Cambridge Companion to George MacDonald, co-edited with John Patrick Pazdziora) will help bring MacDonald into the mainstream of academic teaching and discourse. As a defender of light and playful things, he is also co-editing a new series with Cambridge UP on 'Doodles and Doodling' and has a forthcoming book in this series entitled Literary Doodling (2024).

Trevor Hart

Trevor Hart

The Revd Canon Professor Trevor Hart is Rector of Saint Andrew's Episcopal Church, St Andrews and Canon Theologian of St Ninian's Cathedral, Perth. He was formerly Professor of Divinity and founding Director of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts in the University of St Andrews. Trevor's interest in George MacDonald dates back to an accidental discovery in the mid-1980s (story forthcoming!). In the years since he has supervised many dissertations on and relating to MacDonald -- beginning at his alma mater of Aberdeen in the early 1990’s -- in addition to contributing his own lectures and publications. Trevor continues to lecture internationally and publishes widely on the importance of imagination for Christian faith, ministry, and theology. His most recent publication is Confessing and Believing: The Apostles' Creed as Script for the Christian Life (Fortress, 2022).

John Patrick Padziora

John Patrick Padziora

John Patrick Pazdziora (Ph.D., St Andrews) is project assistant professor at the Center for Global Education at The University of Tokyo. He researches Scottish literature in the long nineteenth century and children’s cultures, with emphasis on the interplay between literature and theology. His recent projects include a JSPS KAKENHI grant to examine how portrayals of disability in Victorian children’s literature function as a form of subversive theological discourse. John is the author of Haunted Childhoods in George MacDonald (Brill, 2020) and editor of Christianity in Scottish Literature (Scottish Literature International, 2023). Together with Joshua Richards, he is currently preparing a new critical edition of George MacDonald’s fairy tales for Oxford World’s Classics. He is also co-editing The Cambridge Companion to George MacDonald with Daniel Gabelman.

and... among others!

MollyZ (Chicago), Robert Trexler (Connecticut), Chelle Stearns (Seattle; PhD St Andrews) and Julie Canlis (Washington State; PhD St Andrews).

Barbora Šmejdová (Prague): is an assistant professor at the Department of Ecclesiastical History and Literary History, Catholic Theological Faculty, Charles University in Prague. Her academic interests include the mutual relationship between theology and literature, the language of apologetics, and Imagination as a Theological Term. Šmejdová has organised two local symposia on C. S. Lewis and coordinates the efforts of Czech and Slovak scholars in related fields. She teaches courses in English Literature and Literature and Theology, and is a member of an international, ecumenical research team on “Theological Anthropology in Intercultural Perspective”. She is also an editor of two academic journals: AUC Theologica and MKR Communio.

Michael Pucci (Rwanda; PhD Nottingham): holds a PhD in Classics from the University of Nottingham (1998). He has taught 26 unique university level courses across the humanities, from Gladiators to Globalization, from African Cultural Arts to the Ancient Greeks, from Intro to Justice and Advocacy to Intermediate Latin Language & Literature, from Historiography for History Teachers to History of Christian Spirituality. He has academic publications in the fields of Greco-Roman context of the New Testament, reception and interpretation of Roman imperial history, theology of poverty, and Christian spiritual formation. In addition to his current fiction and poetry project, his research interests are in the theology of making. With his wife Adele he co-designs and delivers educational programs as well as trains and coaches internationally among marginalized groups.

Amanda Vernon (Tübingen; PhD Lancaster) – Teach@Tübingen Fellow at The University of Tübingen and Honorary Junior Fellow of the University of Buckingham, Vernon has also taught at Lancaster and Anglia Ruskin Universities. In 2019 she held a short-term fellowship at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music, where she undertook work on the George MacDonald Collection at the Beinecke Library. Vernon’s work has appeared/is forthcoming in Victorian Review, Among Winter Cranes, and Victorians. She is co-editor (with Daniel Gabelman) of Unsaying the Commonplace: George MacDonald and the Critique of Victorian Convention (2024) and is a contributor to the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to George MacDonald (edited by Gabelman and Pazdziora). She is currently writing a monograph, Reading with the Trinity: Theology and Literary Form in George MacDonald (Manchester UP, 2026).

Carey Gibbons is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of North Texas. She specializes in Victorian art and the histories of illustration and graphic design, and has published on Arthur Hughes, Evelyn De Morgan, and Jessie Marion King. In addition to teaching, she has experience working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Morgan Library & Museum and in curatorial roles at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; the Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library; and other institutions. She is also the Digital Art History Editor for the journal Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide.

Joyce McPherson (Chattanooga; PhD Tennessee) -- is Professor of English at Covenant College, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and Belhaven University, and a free-lance author and columnist. Her publications include nine spiritual biographies written for young readers, including C.S. Lewis and, in 2023, George MacDonald. She has also written online programmes for home-schooling and is the founding director of a Shakespeare troupe for youth in Tennessee.

Josephine Gabelman -- (Ely; PhD St Andrews) is an independent scholar whose first monograph, A Theology of Nonsense, with a foreword by John Milbank (Lutterworth Press, 2017), explores the connection between Lewis Carroll's literary nonsense and the Christian imagination. Her current research investigates the fecundity of filth—both literal and spiritual—in a forthcoming volume on compostable theology, tentatively titled Holy Shit.


Conference Registration

Friday 8th - Sunday 10th November 2024


Registration is for the conference only and does NOT include any accommodation or meals apart from lunch on Friday/ Saturday. There are however, many options for you to arrange accommodation for yourself in St Andrews (see the links below).

You can pay by Electronic Bank Transfer (preferable if you have a UK or European bank account) or by PayPal.

Our bank details are:

George MacDonald Society
Sort Code: 16-00-58
Account Number: 10044375
IBAN: GB45RBOS16005810044375

Please reference using GM2024+Surname

All payments are in UK Sterling.


Early Bird Pricing until 31st September, 2024. (£150/ £125 thereafter)

Early Bird Pricing extended to 7th October!


Full Delegate (Excluding Accommodation) Friday/ Saturday - £125
(+£6.25 if via PayPal to cover fees)

Bank transfer or


Student Delegate (Excluding Accommodation) Friday/ Saturday - £100
(+£5.00 if via PayPal to cover fees)

Bank transfer or

Students and Faculty of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts at St Andrews can attend the programme of the conference on the Friday and Saturday in full, or part, with needing to register (however , if they want to come on the trip to Huntly on Sunday they will need to book that)

More information to follow


Optional full day excursion for Conference delegates on Sunday 10th November to Huntly - £45
(+£2.25 if via PayPal to cover fees)

There are only 2 places now left after which we will set up a waiting list in case people drop out.

Bank transfer or

The Last Day for Conference Registration is 31st October 2024

However for the optional tour it is 20th October 2024.


Complete Online Pre-Registration Form

When you have booked we will also need you to complete this Google Form for each delegate, which gives us essential pre-registration information.

Optional Tour for Conference Delegates (Sunday, 10th November)

Travel time from St Andrews to Huntly is approximately 3 hours with a brief stop on the way, so it will be a full day leaving at 8am and arriving back around 7pm. Please factor this into your onward travel arrangements, which should be on the Monday.

Accomodation

Because it is term-time, Accomodation is NOT included in the conference price and you are responsible for arranging this yourself. There are many options in St. Andrews (especially if you have transport) including Hotels, AirBNB, and Bed & Breakfast to suit your budget and needs. Here are some links to help you get started:


Expedia
Booking.com
Kingask St Andrews
Fife Cottages

When looking online for the University location search for St. Mary’s College in the centre of town.

We have also created a private Facebook group where you can link up with other delates to share the cost of travel and/ or accommodation and get to know one another beforehand. This will also be one of the key places where we share additional information as the conference draws near. The link is:

GMD2024 St Andrews Chat

Volunteering to help

As you can imagine there is a lot to do in making any conference a success, and the old adage that "many hands make light work" is never more true. Some of folk have already indicated they would like to help out and we would encourage you to think about it. It is a great way to get to know other delegates quickly!

Volunteer needs include (but not limited to):

• Helping with Registration

• Guidance to Conference Locations for participants

• Help with the music evening and arts evening

• Helping with coffee/lunch breaks

• Hanging Posters

To facilitate this we have create a Google Form for Volunteer Sign-up. Please fill in your name, contact info, and any preferences you have regarding role or timing for volunteering.

Other Notes

The conference on Friday and Saturday will both be full days (with an early start on Friday, including registration!), so please factor this into your travel arrangements. We are still working on the detailed programme so any timings should be treated as provisional, but we know that as much detail as possible is helpful with your planning.

Conference: Assume a 9am start - 9pm finish (with some breaks) both days.

Trip: 8am prompt, leave St Andrews, returning there by 7pm.

Because of the early start you may want to arrive in St Andrews on the Wednesday.

The excursion on Sunday is optional but we hope you will join us to visit George MacDonald's birthplace Huntly. Note: Because of the distances invloved this is another full day arriving back early evening. It will involve some walking, but nothing too strenuous.

Friday evening will include further conversation on MacDonald's legacy, interwoven with Scottish music. Saturday evening will be a full formal concert, celebrating MacDonald's musical legacy - “Might not a song awake...: George MacDonald and the Liminality of Music" - with pieces by Holst, Rutter, Roy, McCunn, and Kampen.

Call for Papers

For almost two centuries, George MacDonald has delighted and challenged his readers through his short stories, novels, essays, fairy tales, poetry, and sermons. MacDonald plays with and transgresses boundaries between the quotidian and the fantastical, theology and literature, home and abroad, secular and sacred, life and death. His identity as a Scotsman in England positioned his relationships and writings between the worlds of English literature and Scottish literature.

As a champion of the arts, the musicality and visuality of his texts merged mediums and inspired new vistas. His liminality plays out through his literary interpreters and successors, in the past and in the present, within the narrow world of MacDonald studies and in the broader ways his ideas and stories shape thinking in literature and theology as well as science, theater, fine arts, history, social justice, and education.

You are invited to submit proposals for papers and panels on the theme of Borderlands for this conference marking the bicentennial of George MacDonald’s birth. Special consideration will be given to papers that explore liminality in George MacDonald’s writings and/or in his identity as a writer, theologian, father, friend. Please submit proposals of no more than 250 words using this form by 15th July 2024

Proposals should be submitted in MS Word or PDF as a one-page, double-spaced abstract prepared for blind review. Panel proposals should indicate the theme of the panel and include all of the proposed panel abstracts together. Accepted papers will be considered for a special edition of The Scottish Literary Review (https://asls.org.uk/).


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