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
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Sarah 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
Read moreVenice Advice: Four things to Remember when attending Conferences
J. Stephen Addcox 1) Go to the parties On the first day of the NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA Professionalization Workshop in Venice, I learned that I’ve been doing conferences all wrong. While I’ve always known on an intellectual level that conferences were about making connections to other scholars, my practice has tended toward driving to a conference, delivering my paper, and driving home (there is also a pitfall of only submitting to conferences near my home institution). But in reality, the guest speakers
Read moreCall for Proposals: JVC Online’s Neo-Victorian Studies & Digital Humanities Week
This fall, JVC Online will feature a week of posts devoted to the connections between Neo-Victorian studies and digital humanities. The goal of this week is to consider the ways in which we are mobilizing the tools, concepts, and methodologies of digital humanities research and pedagogy to re-contextualize, revise, and re-envision Victorian culture in terms of our age. Just as JVC Online’s digital form enables it to have broad reach, so too do the digital and technological elements of how
Read moreWho’s afraid of the big bad parasite? ‘The Crimson Horror’ and Victorian Social Angst in BBC’s Dr Who.
Emilie Taylor-Brown (University of Warwick) A couple of week’s ago Dr. Who saw a very Victorian antagonist (first aired in the UK on Saturday 4th May 2013). One might think that an alien parasite is a rather unlikely denizen of 1890s Yorkshire, but in fact, Mark Gatniss (the episode writer) has hit on a very nineteenth-century anxiety. Past JVC posts, such as Doctor Who-ing the Victorians and Scrooge in Space; Updating A Christmas Carol for the Twenty-First Century and Beyond,
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