Ann Gagné, A Very Morris Birthday

Dr. 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 On March 21st, 2015 the William Morris Society of Canada celebrated what would have

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Lara Rutherford-Morrison, Jack the Ripper Was A Murderous Medieval Monk; Or, I Read The Curse Upon Mitre Square So You Don’t Have To

Lara Rutherford-Morrison earned her PhD in Victorian literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in December of 2013. 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.

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Rohan McWilliam, The Victorians Are Still With Us

Rohan McWilliam is Professor of Modern British History at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.  He is the author of The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation (London: Continuum, 2007) and is currently writing a history of the West End of London. Contact: rohan.mcwilliam@anglia.ac.uk We seldom lack heirs to G.M.Young.  When it comes to the Victorians, every age throws up its portrait of an age.[1]  But producing a wide-ranging account of Victorian Britain these days is becoming increasingly difficult.  The historical literature is

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Anna Maria Barry, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic – Celebrating 175 Years of the Original Liverpool Sound

This year marks the 175th anniversary of the Liverpool Philharmonic: the UK’s oldest surviving professional symphony orchestra. The occasion has been marked with a major new exhibition in Liverpool, which I was recently able to visit during a research trip to the city. The exhibition traces the story of the Liverpool Philharmonic from its Victorian roots through to the present day. Documents on display give a fascinating insight into the world of nineteenth-century entertainment and celebrity culture. The exhibition is

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Alyson Hunt, The Great Academic Taboo

Alyson Hunt is a first year part-time PhD candidate in the English Department at Canterbury Christ Church University, Kent.  Her current research explores the concept of Victorian crime short fiction as a vehicle for social anxieties and considers how dress and clothing illuminates and encrypts these anxieties. She also works as a Research Associate for the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers and is currently working on a series of enterprises as part of a project entitled: From Brontë to

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Georgina Grant, Smoking and Respectable Femininity

Georgina is a Curatorial Officer for the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, based at Blists Hill Victorian Town. She has the responsibility of maintaining, developing and delivering the interpretation of the 52 acre site. Her role is varied, ranging from researching the history of canal vessels to installing Quaker costume displays and giving talks on a traditional Victorian Christmas. Follow Georgina @GeorgyGrant.  ‘I never saw a woman – not a basket woman or a gipsy – smoke before!’ Charles Dickens 1846

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Clare Walker Gore, Adventures in Marble and Monochrome: Victorian Sculpture and Photography at Tate Britain

Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860 25 February – 7 June Sculpture Victorious 25 February – 25 May With its fabulous permanent collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Tate Britain always has an embarrassment of riches to offer the Victorian enthusiast, but its latest exhibitions are a further inducement to make the trip to Millbank if you can. Salt and Silver provides a fascinating glimpse into the world of early Victorian photography, bringing together ninety rare salted paper photographs from the mid-nineteenth

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Ashley Cook, The Curious Case of the New Woman Chutney

Ashley Cook completed her PhD at the University of Otago, New Zealand on late-Victorian fairy tales. She is now guest lecturer and post-doctoral researcher in English at the University of Tuebingen, Germany. Her research interests include women’s writing, experiences and understandings of time and temporality, gender and genre fiction. In her increasingly elusive spare time, she enjoys extolling the virtues of children’s fiction, running, and attempting to reproduce (with varying amounts of success) cakes from the Great British Bake Off.

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Jessica Cox, The Queen of Sensation

Jessica Cox is a lecturer in English at Brunel University, London.  She 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 and editor of a collection of essays on Mary Elizabeth Braddon.  She is currently writing a book on the neo-sensation novel.  You can follow her on Twitter @jessjcox and email her at Jessica.cox@brunel.ac.uk.  1861 was a busy year for Isabella Beeton, with the publication of

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Maho Sakoda, The Exhibition Report: ‘Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends’

Maho Sakoda is a fourth year PhD student at the University of Sussex in Brighton. Her thesis explores the relationship between literature and art in the nineteenth century. It especially focuses on works of George Eliot in relation to her contemporaries in the world of art such as by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Simeon Solomon and Julia Margaret Cameron. It aims to reveal the ways in which the different genres of art collaborated and addressed similar topics relating to

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