Vicky received her PhD in 2012 from Monash University. Her PhD focused on the social and legal representations of female poisoners’ femininity during the Victorian period. Vicky has been a lecturer at ELTE (Hungary), and researcher at Monash and La Trobe Universities. She is currently an Honorary Associate at La Trobe University and about to begin a new project looking at female criminality in Australia during the colonial period. Her book, Nineteenth-Century Female Poisoners: Three English Women Who Used Arsenic
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Lauren Padgett, ‘The British Scandal’: Victorian Spouse-Selling
Lauren is currently following up this blog with further research about Victorian wife-selling in the Yorkshire region. Divorce as we know it was not permitted until the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, but there were other legal and illegal methods of ending marriages prior to this Act, each with their pros and cons. Separation mense et thoro (from bed and board) could be granted by ecclesiastical courts (but the marriage was not terminated). Annulments had a lengthy process. Private separations could
Read moreSimon Morgan, The Journals of John Deakin Heaton and the ‘Heaton Map Project’
Simon Morgan is the Principal Lecturer in History at Leeds Beckett University. He is the author of A Victorian Woman’s Place: Public Culture in the Nineteenth Century (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), and co-editor with Professor Anthony Howe of the Letters of Richard Cobden, the fourth and final volume of which will be published in August 2015 by Oxford University Press. He is currently working on a monograph entitled Personality and Popular Politics, 1815-1867: Heroes, Champions and Celebrities in the Age
Read moreLara Rutherford-Morrison, Mrs. Beeton Toasts Bread: The Next Big Food Trend Is Here, and It’s Victorian
Lara Rutherford-Morrison has a PhD in Victorian literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is currently an Affiliated Scholar at Concordia University in Montreal and blogs daily for Bustle. Her research considers the ways that contemporary culture reimagines and plays with Victorian literature and history, in contexts ranging from adaptations of Victorian novels in film and fiction to heritage tourism in the U.K. She can be found at her website and on Twitter @LaraRMorrison. Mrs. Beeton’s Book of
Read moreAnn Gagné, Making Sense of Senses in Victorian Studies: The MVSA 2015 Conference
Ann Gagné is College Instructor at Seneca College in Toronto, Canada. Her current research explores how touch and ethics relate to education as well as the spatial framing of learning in the nineteenth century which is an extension of themes found in her doctoral dissertation. She is very active on Twitter @AnnGagne and also writes a blog that relates to teaching and pedagogical strategies at www.allthingspedagogical.blogspot.ca Sensory studies has really expanded in the past few years which is great
Read moreAlyson Hunt, An Unrecognised Memento of the Past
The link between geography and genius is a moot point. Every country, county, city, town and village lauds their links with celebrated artistes from history no matter how dubious or remote the connection, marking their traces with plaques asserting that they lived here, stayed there, performed nearby, were born in the vicinity and created their best work inspired by this place. In recent years this slightly eccentric British tradition has become of interest not just to local history groups and
Read moreAshley Cook, Germany and the British fin de siècle
As well as researching and teaching the fin de siècle, I have been finding time to wander around the German university town I am currently living in. Looking at all the beautiful historic architecture – which includes many nineteenth-century buildings and statues – has made me aware of how relatively alien it all is. As a scholar born and raised in the UK, I am used to looking up at the Victoria and Albert Museum to see the fin de
Read moreKaren Laird, Film Review: Far From the Madding Crowd
Karen Laird’s book The Art of Adapting Victorian Literature, 1849–1920 will be published in August 2015 by Ashgate Press. Follow her latest updates on Twitter @drkarenlaird. Far from the Madding Crowd was first adapted for film in 1915 by the British studio Turner Pictures. Reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic saw it as a lukewarm effort save for the lead performance by Florence Turner (known early in her phenomenal career as simply “The Vitagraph Girl”). One critic praised Turner’s
Read moreJessica Cox, The Madwoman in the Third Storey
Jessica Cox read Wuthering Heights at the age of sixteen, resulting in a developing obsession with all things Victorian. This eventually led to her completing a PhD (on sensation writer Wilkie Collins) at Swansea University in 2007. She is currently a lecturer in English at Brunel University, London. Jessica has research interests in Victorian popular fiction (particularly sensation fiction), the Brontёs, first-wave feminism, and neo-Victorianism. She is the author of a short biography of Charlotte Brontё, editor of a collection
Read moreSophie Cooper, ‘Outlander’ and the Victorian resurgence of Highland romanticism
Sophie Cooper is a second year PhD student and William McFarlane Scholar at the University of Edinburgh. She is studying Irish communities in Melbourne and Chicago between 1850 and 1890, specifically in relation to situational influences on identity formation and nationalist thought. Sophie tweets using the handle @SophcoCooper and more information can be found on her academia page. The growing popularity of Amazon Prime’s recent Starz acquisition ‘Outlander’, an adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s 1991 book, will undoubtedly lead to a surge
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