Maho Sakoda is a PhD candidate 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 by George Eliot in relation to contemporary artists and thinkers such as by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Pater, Simeon Solomon and Julia Margaret Cameron. The shop floors of the world famous department store, Liberty at Regent street in London, are crowded with shoppers and tourists who are
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Alyson Hunt, Not to Be Sniffed At: The Handkerchief in Victorian Crime Fiction
Alyson Hunt is a 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. The humble handkerchief has played at best a marginal role within Victorian society. Peeping disconsolately from a gentleman’s top pocket, tucked
Read morePatricia Zakreski, Making a Black Ball Gown: Fashion and Social Change in the 1870s
Patricia Zakreski is Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Representing Female Artistic Labour, 1848–1890: Refining Work for the Middle-Class Woman (Ashgate, Farnham, 2006). She is co-editor of ‘What is a Woman to Do?’ A Reader on Women, Work and Art, c. 1830–1890 (Peter Lang, Oxford, 2011) and Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain (Ashgate, Farnham, 2013). Her current project includes articles and
Read moreDavid Craig, Strange Modernity? Review: Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern, by James Vernon
David Craig is Lecturer in History at Durham University. He is the author of Robert Southey and Romantic Apostasy (2007), and editor, with James Thompson, of Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2013). His current work focuses on the language of ‘liberalism’ in the long nineteenth century. Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern, by James Vernon, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014, xvii +166 pp., £16.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-520-28204-9 When did Britain become modern? In this bracing new book,
Read moreDIGITAL FORUM: ‘The Future of Academic Journals’ (21:1)
‘The Future of Academic Journals’ edited by Zoe Alker, Christopher Donaldson and James Mussell. This Digital Forum offers perspectives on the opportunities and challenges presented by the use of digital technologies in academic publishing, networking and communication. It features position papers from three participants in the ‘Victorian Studies Journals: Coming of Age’ roundtable that convened at BAVS 2015: Lucinda Matthews-Jones, James Mussell and Helen Rogers. Collectively, these three scholars offer incisive reflections on the ways that scholars and publishers have
Read moreAshley D. Polasek, Review: Sherlock’s ‘The Abominable Bride’: Thin on Plot, Laden with Atmosphere
Dr. Ashley D. Polasek is an Honorary Fellow of the Center for Adaptations at De Montfort University, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and an Instructor of English at Tri-County Technical College. Her PhD is on the evolution of Sherlock Holmes across screen adaptations. In the final moments of the much-anticipated holiday special of BBC’s Sherlock, ‘The Abominable Bride’, a 19th-century Sherlock Holmes, clad in his dressing gown and smoking his pipe, gazes out his window and
Read moreHolly Furneaux, Dickensian, Dickens fantasy, and hope
Holly Furneaux is Professor in English at Cardiff University and literary advisor on Dickensian. Her books include Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (Oxford University Press, 2009), and her next book, Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch and Masculinity in the Crimean War (Oxford University Press) will be out in spring 2016. Dickensian, a new BBC drama in 20 half-hour instalments, opens with a series of character silhouettes; both familiar and unfamiliar, these uncanny shadows invite viewers to project features onto the
Read moreCFP: “A Time of Judgement”: The Operation and Representation of Judgement in Nineteenth-Century Cultures
Plymouth University, UK 23 and 24 June 2016 This international, interdisciplinary conference seeks to examine the role of ‘judgement’ in the nineteenth century, in both the Anglophone and European cultures. As a theme, related to but distinct from notions of justice, judgement has not attracted much attention from humanities scholars in contrast to the interest expressed in philosophy and psychology. The nineteenth century saw judgement operating and developing in a multiplicity of ways: with national and international architectural and art competitions, and awards for design at universal
Read moreEmily Bowles, “What’s to-day, my fine fellow?”: Classifying and Dating Tony Jordan’s ‘Dickensian’
Emily Bowles is a PhD candidate at the University of York. Her research focuses on Charles Dickens’s self-representation 1857-1870, and representations by Dickens’s friends and family 1870-1939. She is also a postgraduate representative for the Northern Nineteenth Century Network and assistant administrator for the Women’s Life Writing Network. You can find her on Twitter @EmilyBowles I had been keeping an eye out for Dickensian since October 2014, when rumours of it echoed around the Dickens Day Conference in Senate
Read moreCFP: Victorians Like Us III International Conference ‘Progress. A blessing or a curse?’
Venue: School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon Date: 26-27 October 2016 Convener: University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES) Call for papers ‘Progress. A blessing or a curse?’ will be the third of a series of international conferences at the School of Arts and Humanities (University of Lisbon), promoted by the Research Group 2 (English Culture) of ULICES which have brought together Victorianist and Neovictorianist researchers, among others. The first event, (Victorians Like Us. Memories, dialogues and
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