rT ,he NAVSA Conference both provides a showcase for the work that is currently being done in studies and offers a sustained opportunity for self-scrutiny, even at the most fundamental level. Why do we keep the name 'Victorian studies'? asks Amanda Anderson at the opening of her paper, delivered in a session that provoked a number of questions about the state, and the labeling, and indeed the identification of our disciplinary field. I will put my cards face up on the table. Victorian is an academic epithet with which I feel profoundly uneasy for a number of reasons. At a visceral level, I'm suspicious of the period fetishism it can connote, whether this be flaunted in the bric-a-brac of a Masterpiece Theater interior, or in sing-along performances of music-hall songs, or in the retro-marketing of sepia street scenes: none of these exercise any nostalgic tug on me. Indeed, I am profoundly glad not to have been Victorian. But there are two more compelling intellectual reasons for my discomfort with the term. First, I share with Sharon Marcus the view that it poses significant limitations when it comes to discussing the dynamics of transnational cultures, whether we are thinking about transatlantic relations, about the operations of empire, or about the increasingly global exchange in ideas as well as in economic capital. The very term Victorian carries with it an unmistakable national, and nationalist, overtone. Writing about the Victorian Loyalty Islands-as Talia Schaffer shows Charlotte Yonge to have been doing over a couple of decades-is (to offer an obvious example) only one possible perspective on colonial projects in Melanesia during the nineteenth century. And second, and this is reflected in both Anderson's and Lauren Goodlad's essays, the length of a reign-even the years of a centuryprovides at best only the most tenuous of containers for intellectual and social movements that spill beyond it, let alone for the disciplinary problems to which such unreflective periodization gives rise.