In honor of the June 30th deadline for this year’s JVC Graduate Prize Essay, we are offering free access to the published articles of several previous winners. Take a look at the exciting and innovative work done by these up and coming scholars! 2011 (17.3) Bob Nicholson “You Kick the Bucket; We Do the Rest!’: Jokes and the Culture of Reprinting in the Transatlantic Press’ 2009 (15.1) Tiffany Watt-Smith ‘Darwin’s Flinch: Sensation Theatre and Scientific Looking in 1872 2007 (13.1)
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The Reading Project
By Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) In the fall of 2012, I taught a version of my department’s Major Author Studies course on Charles Dickens. As this was my second time teaching a course dedicated to Dickens (and my fourth time teaching Bleak House), I knew I had to pull out all the stops to convince my students—many of whom were non-majors or students who otherwise had no familiarity with Victorian literature—to care about three tomes of
Read moreVenice: the sacred and the profane
Rachel Webster (University of Leeds) Walking through Venice, late Sunday afternoon (2nd June, 2013), in search of gelato, I found myself in St. Mark’s Square, and was absorbed into a crowd of people. Crowds in Venice, particularly in tourist hotspots, are not unusual, but it was apparent straight away that this crowd had spontaneously formed with a common intention: to observe a religious service. Before I could take in the details of what exactly was going on, I was overwhelmed
Read moreWild Woman to New Woman: Sex and Suffrage on the Victorian Stage
Gabrielle Malcolm, Visiting Research Fellow in English Canterbury Christ Church University ‘A Pageant of Great Women’ and some remarkable men (with apologies to Cicely Hamilton) were in attendance for the opening of : WILD WOMAN TO NEW WOMAN: SEX AND SUFFRAGE ON THE VICTORIAN STAGE a collaborative exhibition (14th-31st May, 2013) by: The International Centre for Victorian Women Writers, Canterbury Christ Church University The Centre for Gender, Sexuality & Writing, University of Kent Alyson Hunt, post-graduate researcher at Canterbury Christ
Read moreSarah Parker, ‘Dressed to Impress: Fashioning the Woman Poet’
By Sarah Parker The idea for my recent article ‘Fashioning Michael Field: Michael Field and Late-Victorian Dress Culture’ originated with a trip to ‘The Cult of Beauty’ exhibition at the V&A in Spring 2011. Among the walls crowded with Pre-Raphaelite paintings and cabinets filled with intricate, hand-bound volumes, visitors were also able to view numerous examples of male and female aesthetic dress, including a sunflower-print robe and puffed-sleeve artistic tea gowns, many of which originated from Liberty & Co. Viewing
Read moreArt Revolutions in the Nineteenth Century
Serena Trowbridge, Birmingham City University This post relates to some research to which I return regularly, wondering where it will lead me. I’m interested in the ways in which ideas move, between people, across continents, and manifest themselves in art and literature as well as political ideology. Related to this, I am organising a conference on ‘Cultural Cross-Currents between Russia and Britain in the nineteenth century’, co-hosted by Birmingham City University and the State University of Tomsk. The cultural situation
Read moreLocal/Global Dickens: seminar at “The Global and the Local” June 2013
Charlotte Mathieson, University of Warwick As part of The Global and the Local, the NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA conference held in Venice from 3rd-6th June 2013, I took part in one of the seminars that provided the opportunity for participants to put forward a short position paper on a chosen topic. The seminar on “Dickens: Local and Global” was led by Eileen Gillooly (Columbia University) and featured the following papers: Sharmaine Browne, “The Railroad as Architect in Dombey and Son” Beth Drumm, “Consigned
Read moreThe Historian’s Toolkit: Social Media and Social Networking
Naomi Lloyd-Jones In January, I wrote a piece for this journal on how to be a #socialmediahistorian. Reflecting on an event organised by the Institute of Historical Research and the Social Media Knowledge Exchange, I concluded that the academic community is now less an ‘old boy’s network’, and is instead fast becoming a social network. So when it came to brainstorming potential keynote speakers for the then upcoming University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and King’s College London Workshop on
Read moreVenice Advice: Humanities PhDs and Writing on Glass
By Jo Taylor (Keele University) There’s one, crucial thing that I’ve learned from this week’s Glocal Victorians Professionalization Workshop: don’t sell yourself short. You’re an academic, and that opens doors. These doors lead to various opportunities: publications; transnational collaborations; jobs. But they can also lead to more outlandish places, ones you would never think you were able or qualified to access. For me, this has essentially been the most uplifting message from this week’s workshop: that your PhD is something
Read moreDaniel Grey, “Liable to Very Gross Abuse’: Murder, Moral Panic and Cultural Fears over Infant Life Insurance, 1875-1914′
By Daniel Grey My article, “Liable to Very Gross Abuse’: Murder, Moral Panic and Cultural Fears over Infant Life Insurance, 1875–1914′, examines the late nineteenth century belief that working-class parents were liable to neglect and ultimately kill their children in hopes of receiving a life insurance payout from a friendly society. This idea was not only widely and repeatedly debated in the Victorian press and in Parliament, but the desire to eradicate this supposedly widespread practice became a cornerstone of
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