Conferencing, Crisis, and the Profession

This introduction frames the goal of the special issue: to rethink conferencing as a means of navigating challenges in Victorian studies and the profession more broadly. The precipitating event was EVENT 2024, a multisite, reduced-flight, and digitally interconnected conference involving five scholarly associations over the 2024 calendar year. Here, we, the three lead organisers, open by describing the conference and the two halves of this special issue, which feature leaders of five of the seventeen in-person sites from the conference's global regions, followed by outstanding papers that discuss the nature of the profession in conversation with the conference format. We then each reflect in turn on crises that compelled EVENT 2024, the successes and difficulties entailed, and the possibilities glimpsed. Ultimately, we suggest, the animating vision of EVENT 2024 – conferencing that creatively nurtures convivial society amidst crises – might have been most effectively advanced through its partial effectiveness, its imperfect but generative results.