Billie-Gina Thomason is currently undertaking an MRes in Modern History in Liverpool John Moores University and is beginning the historicisation of trans* identity. Billie-Gina’s research focusses on nineteenth century female husbands. By using newspapers her interests lie in how female cross-dressers lived in their communities despite living in a time of such gender and sexual rigidity. Mister Stokes: The Man-Woman of Manchester was written by Abi Hynes. The play was directed by Helen Parry and produced by Pagelight Productions and
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JVC
Mike Huggins, ‘Exploring the Backstage of Victorian Civilized Respectability: A Reply to Andersson”
Mike Huggins is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at the University of Cumbria and has published widely on the histories of sport, leisure and education. He is currently writing a cultural history of horse racing and society in Britain 1664-1815. His website can be found here. This post responds to Peter K. Andersson’s Journal of Victorian Culture article ‘How Civilised were the Victorians’. This article can be downloaded here. Andersson’s argument that scholars have devoted disproportionate attention to the disciplining
Read moreSusie Steinbach, Who owns the Victorians?: A Response to Peter K. Andersson’s ‘How Civilised Were the Victorians?’
Susie Steinbach is a professor of history at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota currently living in York, England. Her work focuses on gender, performance, and the law during the Victorian period. The second edition of her textbook, Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture, and Society in Nineteenth-century Britain will be published by Routledge later this year. In his essay “How Civilized Were the Victorians?” Peter K. Andersson challenges scholars of the Victorian period to work differently and better. Specifically, he
Read moreMaho Sakoda, Liberty and Japonism
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
Read moreAlyson 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 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
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