Shannon Draucker is a PhD Candidate in English at Boston University. Her dissertation project, Sounding Bodies: Music and Physiology in Victorian Narrative, explores literary responses to emerging scientific understandings of the physics and physiology of sound during the Victorian period. Her project shows how new discoveries of the embodied nature of music and sound inform scenes in which authors grant their characters desires, pleasures, identities, and relationships otherwise unavailable to them. At Boston University, she teaches English and Writing courses
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Ann Kennedy Smith, ‘Tennyson the European’
Ann Kennedy Smith is a panel tutor at Cambridge University’s Institute of Continuing Education. Her monograph Painted Poetry: Colour in Baudelaire’s Art Criticism was published by Peter Lang in 2011, and since then she has researched and written on Tennyson’s French reception. She is currently researching Cambridge’s university wives 1870-1914, and is a contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Her Twitter handle is @akennedysmith. Figure 1 Alfred Tennyson, 1869, portrait by Julia Cameron Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
Read moreRoisín Laing, ‘Victorian Childhood Beyond the Canon’
Roisín Laing recently completed her PhD with the English Studies department at Durham University. She will be a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Sydney during 2017. This post accompanies Roisín Laing’s article ‘Candid Lying and Precocious Storytelling in Victorian Literature and Psychology’. Published here. In my recently published Journal of Victorian Culture article, I argue that Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (1905) responds to Victorian fears about the child liar. Burnett’s precocious protagonist, Sara Crewe, suggests that
Read moreMartin Willis, ‘Are we sure we want evolutionary psychologists telling us what Victorian novels mean?’
Martin Willis is Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University, Chair of the British Society for Literature and Science, Editor of the Journal of Literature and Science and head of the Cardiff University ScienceHumanities research team. I noted with interest, and some dismay that the Journal of Victorian Culture was drawing attention, via Twitter, to the Guardian’s old article on evolutionary psychology and the Victorian novel that described, without criticism, the work of Joseph Carroll and his fellow literary Darwinists.[1] Heartened
Read moreKristina Hochwender, ‘Tourism as Pedagogy: Part 2’
Part 2: ‘Postcard project: Pilgrimage and Pedagogy’ Kristina L. Hochwender is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Evansville, where she also serves as the Director of General Education. Alongside her interest in literature for children, her research centers on the Victorian clerical novel, and particularly the ways in which the clergyman–in the words of Samuel Butler, “a kind of human Sunday”–mediates national and religious identities and crises in novels that captured the Victorian imagination. Some of her
Read moreAmber Pouliot, ‘Tourism as Pedagogy: Part 1′
Part 1: ‘The Postcard Project’ Amber Pouliot is a teaching fellow at Harlaxton College, the UK study abroad centre of the University of Evansville, Indiana. She was awarded her MA and PhD from the University of Leeds. She is currently writing a book on the development of Bronte fictional biography from the mid-nineteenth century to the interwar period. Her essay on nineteenth-century proto-fictional biographies of the Brontes will appear in Charlotte Bronte: Legacies and Afterlives (forthcoming from MUP), and she
Read moreVerity Burke, ‘Narrative on screen: BBC’s The Moonstone (2016)’
Verity Burke is a doctoral student at the University of Reading, working on the Cole Library of Early Medicine and Zoology. Her project is an interdisciplinary study of anatomies in nineteenth-century science, medicine and literature, and their effect on both epistemology and the popular imagination. Her wider research interests include Charles Dickens, surgery, forensics and the body. She loves a good taxidermy squirrel. Come say hi on Twitter @VerityBurke or on https://reading.academia.edu/VerityBurke Revamped for the BBC’s Love to Read season,
Read moreCharlotte Mathieson, ‘Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy’
Dr Charlotte Mathieson is a Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Surrey. She works on travel and mobility in Victorian literature and culture, with publications including Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-present (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). “Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy” at Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London until 22nd January 2017 Celebrating the 150th anniversary of the laying of the trans-Atlantic telegraph
Read moreValerie Sanders, ‘Victoria: as seen on TV’
Valerie Sanders is Professor of English and Director of the Graduate School at the University of Hull. Her research interests include Victorian fatherhood and sibling groups, as well as individual author studies. With Gaby Weiner she has recently edited a collection of essays, Harriet Martineau and the Birth of Disciplines (Routledge 2016). So, Victoria has ended in the U.K., and so has its arch-rival Poldark, briefly leaving Tutankhamun in sole possession of the prime historical drama spot on Sunday evenings. By all accounts
Read moreHila Shachar, ‘Walking New Myths: Sally Wainwright’s Brontë Biopic’
Hila Shachar is a Lecturer in English Literature at De Montfort University, Leicester, and a member of the Centre for Adaptations who specialises in the adaptation of literary works and authors in various media including film, television, and ballet. Her book, Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), was featured in The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, as well as nominated for the 2012 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. She also works as
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