Kristina Hochwender, ‘Tourism as Pedagogy: Part 2’

Part 2: ‘Postcard project: Pilgrimage and Pedagogy’ Kristina L. Hochwender is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Evansville, where she also serves as the Director of General Education. Alongside her interest in literature for children, her research centers on the Victorian clerical novel, and particularly the ways in which the clergyman–in the words of Samuel Butler, “a kind of human Sunday”–mediates national and religious identities and crises in novels that captured the Victorian imagination. Some of her

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Amber Pouliot, ‘Tourism as Pedagogy: Part 1′

Part 1: ‘The Postcard Project’ Amber Pouliot is a teaching fellow at Harlaxton College, the UK study abroad centre of the University of Evansville, Indiana. She was awarded her MA and PhD from the University of Leeds. She is currently writing a book on the development of Bronte fictional biography from the mid-nineteenth century to the interwar period. Her essay on nineteenth-century proto-fictional biographies of the Brontes will appear in Charlotte Bronte: Legacies and Afterlives (forthcoming from MUP), and she

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Fan Discourse and Teaching Charles Dickens

By Lindsay Lawrence In Fall 2012, I proposed and taught a 4000-level major authors class on Charles Dickens at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. Using the wealth of online materials that have become available in the last five years, particularly the Dickens Journals Online in this class, we explored Dickens’s legacy as a serial novelist, journalist, and literary magazine editor. The class also focused on Dickens’s cultural impact and his shrewd reading of the publication industry, including serialization. Inherently, this

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Teaching Cultural History Through National Song

By Karen E. McAulay, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland This post suggests a collaboration between teaching faculty and specialist subject librarians by teaching book and cultural history in the context of national song and fiddle tune-books.  I’ve noticed, when giving undergraduate lectures on Scottish music history, that students are more engaged when encouraged to perform the music being talked about; to participate in discussion; or examine historic sources at first hand.  I decided to experiment with the idea of a template

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Call 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

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Interpreting the Victorian courtroom

Sean McConnell, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University Given that the module I study is ‘Prison Voices’, it is perhaps surprising that the wide variety of literary and historical sources we have engaged with are as interested with what goes on outside the prison walls as they are with what happens within.  We have examined various literary tropes about the courtroom, such as Dickens’ critique of the Victorian legal system through his characterization of Jaggers in

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‘Caught at Last’: The criminalization of men in nineteenth-century Liverpool

Megan Ainsworth, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University On a recent field trip to one of Liverpool’s most prominent buildings, St. George’s Hall, our ‘Prison Voices’ module was taken beyond the university. The building, regarded as a monument to the city, opened in 1854 and was to serve a multitude of purposes for the people of Liverpool, being both a concert hall and courtroom. The building is renowned for its judicial history. Initially, the Assizes (the

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Argyle Street Bridewell: Walking the beat with Liverpool’s nineteenth–century police force

Beth McConnell, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University When we visited the welcoming pub, L1 Bridewell, it was difficult to believe we were sitting in what were once the holding cells for Victorian prisoners. Known in the nineteenth century as Argyle Street Bridewell, it was one of ten police stations in the Liverpool district as each station could not be more than 1.5 miles apart. In one of the original cells, we did a close reading

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Researching ‘the terrors of their neighbourhood’: Street robbery in Chisenhale Street

Keiran Southern, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University In our sessions on Victorian street robbery, we examined a case involving a ‘garotter’, 19 year old Martin Corrigan. In 1869 Corrigan was tried at Liverpool Assizes, held in St George’s Hall, for robbing Patrick Spelman, a porter in the city’s St John’s market, on Chisenhale Street bridge. This bridge had a fearsome reputation for violent street crime in the mid-nineteenth century, so I decided to do more

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A Brief History of St George’s Hall

Riain Egan, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University The factual information in this blog has been drawn from Steve Binns’s informative tour of St George’s Hall and his series of podcasts which are available online here Liverpool has always been, and continues to be, synonymous with great feats of architecture from ‘The Three Graces’ that line the Pier Head to the neo-classical St George’s Hall. Opened in 1842, and built on the site of the old

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