Emily Bowles, ‘Writing Lives Together: A Conference on Romantic and Victorian Biography’

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 in life writing 1870-1939. She is also a postgraduate representative for the Northern Nineteenth Century Network, and you can find her on Twitter @EmilyBowles_. She has co-edited a special issue of ‘Peer English’ on Victorian biography. Writing Lives Together was a one-day conference that took place on 18 September 2015, put together with the

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Ann Gagné, Making Sense of Senses in Victorian Studies: The MVSA 2015 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   Sensory studies has really expanded in the past few years which is great

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Ann 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

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Review: The London Victorian Studies Colloquium 2015, Royal Holloway (University of London), by Lauren Padgett

 By Lauren Padgett, Leeds Trinity University Post-graduate students, early career researchers and scholars gathered at the Royal Holloway, University of London, for a three day colloquium (Friday 10 – Sunday 12 April). The London Victorian Studies Colloquium promised to be an informal, lively weekend of papers, panels and discussions, and it did not disappoint! Friday Proceedings started with a reading group session on extracts from John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University. Newman’s series of lectures, which conceptualised (and

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Barbara Franchi Report on Dickens Universe, 2-9 August 2014, University of California, Santa Cruz

Barbara Franchi is a PhD candidate and Assistant Lecturer at the School of English, University of Kent. Her doctoral project examines the tension between the material and the ideal in A. S. Byatt’s fiction, through the lens of intertextuality. Her research interests include Victorian and Neo-Victorian fiction, fairy tales and children’s literature, gender and queer studies, and contemporary British fiction. You can contact her via email at B.Franchi@kent.ac.uk. She tweets from @barbara_franchi and her blog can be found at bloggingbooksforlife.wordpress.com.

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Conference Report: Cosmopolitanism, Aestheticism, and Decadence, 1860-1920

Cosmopolitanism, Aestheticism, and Decadence, 1860-1920,  University of Oxford, 17-18 June 2014 Report by Katharina Herold (University of Oxford) and Eleanor Reeds (University of Connecticut) Speakers from an international range of institutions came together for a lively intellectual investigation into the agents of these movements, the means by which they achieved cultural significance, and their current relevance in times of globalized literary exchange. In his opening keynote address, Jonathan Freedman (University of Michigan) outlined the vital influence of Jewish intellectual and

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The Global and the Local: NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA Conference Report

By Barbara Franchi,  University of Kent The city of Venice is a labyrinth where the most different cultures and civilizations have met for centuries. So, no location could be better for the first NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA supernumerary conference. During June 3-6, 2013, Victorianists from every corner of the globe gathered on the Island of San Servolo for this unique opportunity to exchange and discuss ideas around the Global and the Local in the 19th century and beyond. With over one hundred participants

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‘Rethinking the Nineteenth Century’ Conference Report

By Kirsten Harris, University of Nottingham The University of Sheffield’s one day conference ‘Rethinking the Nineteenth Century’, held on 24th August, centred on the timely question ‘what constitutes nineteenth century studies today?’.  This stimulated a thought-provoking and broad set of responses, with some papers offering rethinkings of specific texts, ideas or historical assumptions while others focused on considerations of the changing field itself. The day began with Mark Llewellyn’s interrogation of contemporary engagement with Victorian culture in his keynote paper,

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‘Neo-Victorian Villainy: Adaptation and Reinvention on Page, Stage and Screen’ Conference Report

By Benjamin Poore, University of York Eckart Voigts (Braunschweig) then presented the second keynote, on Nell Leyshon and her first-person tale of murder The Colour of Milk, which has been widely compared with Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Via a live Skype link with the author in the department’s Holbeck Cinema, Professor Voigts was able to interview Leyshon, and she was able to take questions from the floor. One of the questions that arose from this session, and from the

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The 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

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