It’s been a busy couple of days here at JVC online with Lisa and I attending the British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS) annual conference. It was also the first time that we had met in person. Accompanying this post is pictorial proof of our encounter (taken after 3 days of heavy conferencing!). Thanks to Jim Mussell and Amber Regis, we’re fortunate enough to have the conference Twitter feed for anyone interested in looking at what was about ‘Victorian Values’.
Read moreAuthor: lucinda matthews-jones
The Tweets of BAVS2012
#BAVS2012 has come to a close and soon the hash tag will be no more. For those of us who are on twitter we will no longer be scrolling through the tweets wondering what people are hearing or have heard. For those of you who might not have attended the BAVS conference but use twitter their might be feeling of relief that all mention of BAVS2012 will shortly be over and that threads will return to normal. Of course, you
Read morePutting Undergraduates on Trial: Using the Old Bailey Online as a teaching tool
Walking the Corridors of the Past: A tour of Singleton Abbey
Lucinda Matthews-Jones (Liverpool John Moores University) In a recent blog for History Workshop Online, Toby Butler suggests that field trips should become ‘an essential part of the…university curriculum’, noting that ‘[s]urely no history degree taught in a city could not find a place for a visit to a museum or a historic site, and perhaps a talk from a curator?’ I agree with Toby. As university teachers, I believe we should be thinking of imaginative ways to teach our modules
Read moreEncountering the Fin-de-Siècle: Utilising Archives for Undergraduate Teaching
Dr Sarah Parker (University of Birmingham) Never judge a book by its cover. Clearly the late-Victorians didn’t hold much by this adage, or we would not have inherited so many stunning examples of book design from the fin-de-siècle period. As critics such as Nicholas Frankel and Joseph Bristow have emphasised, one of the central goals of the aesthetic and decadent movements was to produce the ‘beautiful book’ as an objet d’art in its own right. John Gray’s Silverpoints (1893), for
Read moreTeaching the Victorian City
by Matthew McCormack, University of Northampton matthew.mccormack@northampton.ac.uk How do you teach urban history? Moreover, how do you inject life into the midterm slump of a 25-week, second-year survey module? These were questions that I sought to address three years ago as I prepared to teach HIS2006 ‘Victorian Britain’ at Northampton University. I had taught the module since 2004 and – as every ‘action researcher’ should – had altered it slightly every year in the light of my experience of teaching
Read moreTeaching with Blogs: “The English 19th century Novel”
Dr Charlotte Mathieson (University of Warwick) Context The English Nineteenth-Century Novel is an honours-level undergraduate module in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, on which I teach 3 classes of 15 students in weekly 1.5 hour lecture-seminars. I set up a teaching blog for this module at the start of the 2011-12 academic year, having previously experimented with using a teaching blog for a first-year literary theory module. There are many ways in
Read moreBlogging about Hacking the Book
Jim Mussell (University of Birmingham) Hacking the Book’ is a third-year undergraduate module run in the English Department at the University of Birmingham. The module came about after a discussion on Twitter between myself and a colleague, Oliver Mason in the summer of 2010. I was at a conference in Edinburgh and had just tweeted that I thought lecturers needed to ‘integrate digital humanities research and teaching in undergrad classes.’ Oliver’s response was to suggest that we put on a
Read moreThis week at JVC Online
Today’s blog is written by the author T. D Grigg who considers the importance and perils of historical research when writing his novels. To coincide with this piece we will be offering his latest novel ‘Distant Thunder’ to anyone interested in reviewing it for JVC Online. Email Lucie if you are interested and the lucky person’s name will be drawn from a hat. You can email her at l.m.matthew-jones@ljmu.ac.uk. Tomorrow will see Matthew McCormack (University of Northampton) kick start our
Read moreT. D. Griggs: Historical Fiction and Story Telling
T. D. Griggs Research. It’s the first thing readers ask me about. How much did I do? How long did it take? Am I an expert on the period? I’m always flattered by such questions. They mean I’ve got away with it. Because I am not an historian. History is not my business. Storytelling is. My latest novel, DISTANT THUNDER (T.D.Griggs Orion Books), is set in the 1890s. I’m attracted by the huge confidence of Victorian Britain, in contrast to
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