Sophie Cooper is a third 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 If E___ be really a living thing of a warm heart – all elevated sentiments & deep womanly passions – not a
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JVC
Lauren Padgett, ‘Salt’s Mill, Saltaire: Brief History and Review’
Lauren Padgett is a PhD student at Leeds Trinity University, investigating representations of Victorian women in contemporary museums. She worked in local museums for four years; her first museum job, assisting with the redevelopment of textile galleries, fuelled her interest of the textile industry and Bradford’s textile heritage. Saltaire, a model Victorian village (a few miles from Bradford’s city centre), has been a UNESCO world heritage site since 2001. [1] Saltaire was commissioned by Sir Titus Salt (1803 – 1876),
Read morePetra Clark, Illustration as Play: Charles Ricketts and the “Woman’s World”
Petra Clark is a PhD candidate at the University of Delaware whose research interests lie in late-Victorian print culture, particularly women’s periodicals, Aestheticism, illustration, and art criticism. The working title of her dissertation is Reading Aestheticism: Visual Literacy in Late-Victorian Women’s and Girls’ Periodicals. This post accompanies her article, “‘Cleverly Drawn’: Oscar Wilde, Charles Ricketts, and the Art of the Woman’s World,” which appears in the September 2015 print issue of the Journal of Victorian Culture and can be downloaded
Read moreKristina McClendon, Curating Feeling: Emotions and the Exhibition Space in Displays of Nineteenth-Century Art and Culture
Kristina McClendon is a graduate student pursuing an MA in Victorian Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her current areas of academic study and research interests include: fiction in nineteenth-century periodicals with a particular emphasis on feminist publications and women’s magazines, theatrical adaptations of Victorian novels, American women in Victorian London, and Queen Victoria’s connection to various Victorian artistic and literary works. Originally from Southern California, Kristina is thrilled to be studying in London and using every available opportunity
Read moreUshashi Dasgupta, The Roaring Streets: Voices From Below in Literary Studies
Ushashi Dasgupta is a DPhil student at St John’s College, Oxford. She is researching the significance of tenancy and rented spaces – lodgings, boarding-houses, hotels, taverns – in the literary imagination, with a particular focus on Dickens and his circle. Ushashi Dasgupta can be contacted via email at ushashi.dasgupta@sjc.ox.ac.uk The inaugural BAVS Talks were held in May, at the Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities. During these talks, Helen Rogers spoke about the manner in which interest is turning, once
Read moreEmma Butcher, ‘Strong, Active and Hardy as Bears’: The Mountain Men of the ‘Wild West’
This man, known through the Territories and beyond them as ‘Rocky Mountain Jim’, or, more briefly, as ‘Mountain Jim’, is one of the famous scouts of the Plains, and is the original of some daring portraits in fiction concerning Indian Frontier warfare. So far as I have at present heard, he is a man for whom there is now no room, for the time for blows and blood in the part of Colorado is past, and the fame of many
Read moreVicky Nagy, The Essex Poisoning Cases 1846-1851
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
Read moreLauren 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
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