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 Sensory studies has really expanded in the past few years which is great
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JVC
Alyson Hunt, An Unrecognised Memento of the Past
The link between geography and genius is a moot point. Every country, county, city, town and village lauds their links with celebrated artistes from history no matter how dubious or remote the connection, marking their traces with plaques asserting that they lived here, stayed there, performed nearby, were born in the vicinity and created their best work inspired by this place. In recent years this slightly eccentric British tradition has become of interest not just to local history groups and
Read moreAshley Cook, Germany and the British fin de siècle
As well as researching and teaching the fin de siècle, I have been finding time to wander around the German university town I am currently living in. Looking at all the beautiful historic architecture – which includes many nineteenth-century buildings and statues – has made me aware of how relatively alien it all is. As a scholar born and raised in the UK, I am used to looking up at the Victoria and Albert Museum to see the fin de
Read moreKaren Laird, Film Review: Far From the Madding Crowd
Karen Laird’s book The Art of Adapting Victorian Literature, 1849–1920 will be published in August 2015 by Ashgate Press. Follow her latest updates on Twitter @drkarenlaird. Far from the Madding Crowd was first adapted for film in 1915 by the British studio Turner Pictures. Reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic saw it as a lukewarm effort save for the lead performance by Florence Turner (known early in her phenomenal career as simply “The Vitagraph Girl”). One critic praised Turner’s
Read moreJessica Cox, The Madwoman in the Third Storey
Jessica Cox read Wuthering Heights at the age of sixteen, resulting in a developing obsession with all things Victorian. This eventually led to her completing a PhD (on sensation writer Wilkie Collins) at Swansea University in 2007. She is currently a lecturer in English at Brunel University, London. Jessica 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, editor of a collection
Read moreSophie Cooper, ‘Outlander’ and the Victorian resurgence of Highland romanticism
Sophie Cooper is a second 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. The growing popularity of Amazon Prime’s recent Starz acquisition ‘Outlander’, an adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s 1991 book, will undoubtedly lead to a surge
Read moreAnn Gagné, “Race, Place, and Perspective in the Victorian Period”: VSAO Conference
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 The end of the term at Ontario colleges and universities usually means instructors spending quality time with essays
Read moreEmily Bowles, A Brief History of Dickens Bashing
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 you can find her on Twitter @EmilyBowles_. She will be speaking about Charles Dickens and the Dickens family writings at ‘Writing Lives’ at the University of Leicester. The recent publication of Death and Mr. Pickwick by Stephen Jarvis has sparked
Read moreJohn Marriott, Streets Paved with Gold
John Marriott is a professor and senior associate at Pembroke College, Oxford. Among recent publications is Beyond the Tower: a History of East London, published by Yale University Press in 2012. Dirty Old London. The Victorian Fight Against Filth, by Lee Jackson, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014, 293 pages, illustrated (hardback), £20, ISBN: 978-0-300-19205-6. That London streets are paved with gold is surely one of the most enduring of myths. It was, of course, never to be
Read moreRosemary Mitchell, The Stories of My Life: Disraeli in Politics and Prose
Rosemary Mitchell is Associate Principal Lecturer in History and Reader in Victorian Studies at Leeds Trinity University, where she is also Director of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies. She is currently working on a monograph on gender roles and domesticity in Victorian historical cultures. Disraeli: The Romance of Politics, by Robert O’Kell, Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2013. x + 595 pages, illustrated, £66.99 (hardback), ISBN 978-4426-4459-5. This literary life of Benjamin Disraeli is the most
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