Barbara Franchi Report on Dickens Universe, 2-9 August 2014, University of California, Santa Cruz

Barbara Franchi is a PhD candidate and Assistant Lecturer at the School of English, University of Kent. Her doctoral project examines the tension between the material and the ideal in A. S. Byatt’s fiction, through the lens of intertextuality. Her research interests include Victorian and Neo-Victorian fiction, fairy tales and children’s literature, gender and queer studies, and contemporary British fiction. You can contact her via email at B.Franchi@kent.ac.uk. She tweets from @barbara_franchi and her blog can be found at bloggingbooksforlife.wordpress.com.

Read more

Odd Objects from Victorian Britain: The Ceramic Lovefeast Mug

by Ruth Mason (University College London) Ruth is a PhD student in the Geography Department at University College London. Her research focuses on the designed spaces and material culture of Wesleyan Methodism in London between 1851 and 1932 and what they can reveal about contemporary congregational experiences of Methodism. Alongside other graduates from the Royal College of Art and Victoria & Albert Museum’s History of Design MA, Ruth is a founding member of the Fig.9 experimental History of Design Collective.

Read more

‘In Harkness’ London’: a symposium on the life and work of Margaret Harkness

Birkbeck College (University of London), 22 November 2014  Report by Rosalyn Buckland (King’s College London) and Kate Taylor (Birkbeck College, University of London) Rosalyn Buckland is a PhD student at Kings College London where she is researching mining in 19th-century literature. She tweets @rosalynbuckland. Kate Taylor has recently completed a Master’s Degree in Victorian Studies at Birkbeck College and will begin a PhD on the inebriate Women of the late nineteenth-century later this year. She tweets @katetaylorfc. This one-day symposium

Read more

The Palace of Art

Serena Trowbridge, Birmingham City University Serena Trowbridge is Lecturer in English Literature at Birmingham City University. Research interests include Victorian poetry and novels; nineteenth century cultures of faith; Pre-Raphaelitism and Gothic. She blogs at Culture and Anarchy and tweets @serena_t. I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house, Wherein at ease for aye to dwell. (Tennyson, The Palace of Art) Lord Leighton’s art has, like the work of many of the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers, had a mixed reception in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Both

Read more

Alison C Kay: The Victorian Professions project

Victorian Professions is a three-year research project (began in January 2014) investigating whether the professions formed a distinct self-sustaining social group with its own mores and values. A multi-institution project, team members are drawn from the Universities of Oxford, Northumbria and Leicester. Supported by an Economic and Social Research Council large grant award, the Victorian Professions team are combining crowdsourcing of family histories with their own extensive archival research. The project website contains an interface to the substantial research data already

Read more

Gareth Atkins, ‘CRASSH The Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture’

by Gareth Atkins is Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is a member of the CRASSH Bible and Antiquity Project, and is currently working on the reception of saints, religious heroes, and biblical characters in nineteenth-century Britain. The Holmes stereoscope is a Victorian icon. Designed by the American poet and polymath Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94) and deliberately left unpatented, this cheap wooden frame with its two prismatic lenses allowed viewers in the comfort of

Read more

Margery Masterson, ‘The green, green grass of home: Victorian landscapes and the remains of war’

Margery Masterson is a Teaching Fellow in Modern History at the University of Bristol. She specializes in the history of the Victorian army, civil-military relationships, and in the role of scandal in politics. Her current research is on middle-class masculine Victorian violence, including the persistence of duelling in nineteenth-century Britain. This post accompanies her recent Journal of Victorian Culture ‘Bombay Graveyards and British Beaches: The Tale of a Victorian Imperial Scandal’. You can download her article here. In an absorbing

Read more

Whigs and their Hunters

Michael Ledger-Lomas is Lecturer in the History of Christianity in Britain at King’s College, London. He is the editor, with David Gange, of Cities of God: the Bible and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and is currently working on the British reception of St Paul from the eighteenth century onwards. Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain, by Catherine Hall, New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 2012, xxviii + 389 pp. illustrated, £35 (hardback),

Read more

Corrina Connor ‘Die Fledermaus lands in Victorian London’

Corrina Connor is in the first year of her PhD research, which focusses on the performance of masculinities and nationality in Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. She is a student at OBERTO, the opera research unit at Oxford Brookes University, where she is supervised by Dr Alexandra Wilson.  Originally from New Zealand, Corrina studied performance and music history and Victoria University of Wellington, before completing an MPhil in Musicology and Performance at Oxford University where she researched the sacred music of Pelham

Read more

Helen Kingstone: Women are aliens! Radical feminism and contemporary-history-writing in the work of Alice Stopford Green

This post accompanies Helen Kingstone’s Journal of Victorian Culture article: ‘Feminism, Nationalism, Separatism? The Case of Alice Stopford Green’. This article can be downloaded here. For several years now, I’ve been tussling with a troublesome question: how do you write contemporary history? Luckily, perhaps, I haven’t had to do it myself, but instead have been looking at how Victorian writers approached the challenge. Because it is a challenge. How do you write a history (conventionally a generalising, singular, even grand

Read more