Flip. Picture. Flip. Picture. Yeah, no, just zoom to that column there please, thanks – If a recording and transcript exist, these lines would be representative of my recent ‘visit’ to University of Leicester Special Collections, my first since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers are likely familiar with the twinge of awkwardness on entering a hushed rare books or manuscripts room. Imagine, then, the feeling as a librarian pages through a Victorian periodical for you, on camera, via
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The JVC Graduate Student Essay Prize
We are pleased to announce the next JVC Essay Prize competition. The aim of the prize is to promote scholarship among postgraduate research students working on the Victorian period in any discipline in the UK and abroad. The Journal inaugurated the prize in 2007, and our past winners include Louise Lee, Tiffany Watt-Smith, Bob Nicholson, Tom Scriven, Roisín Laing and Lucy Whitehead, whose essays appear in issues 13.1 (2008), 15.1 (2010), 17.3 (2012), 19.1 (2014), 21 4 (2016) and 24.
Read moreTimothy Alborn, ‘A Digital Window onto Writing History Research Notes’
Timothy Alborn is Professor of History at Lehman College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He has published widely on British history in such journals as Victorian Studies, Journal of Victorian Culture, and Journal of Modern History; as well as two books: Conceiving Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England (Routledge, 1998) and Regulated Lives: Life Insurance and British Society, 1800-1914 (Toronto, 2009). His current research focuses on the cultural and financial history of gold in Great Britain
Read moreAlyson Hunt, The Great Academic Taboo
Alyson Hunt is a first year part-time 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 and is currently working on a series of enterprises as part of a project entitled: From Brontë to
Read moreThe Archive and Ornament
Simon Reader (University if Toronto) This post accompanies Simon Reader’s Journal of Victorian Culture article published (2013). It can be read in full here. “But I fall into the lace of the text, the vellum; caught there, I contemplate my masters.” Lisa Robertson, Nillings Manuscript collections may be usefully regarded as ornaments adorning the literary canon. They strike me as a kind of lace bordering otherwise functional clothing. For one thing, getting to the artifacts can be costly. Sitting with Oscar Wilde’s notebooks
Read moreThe Public Value of Victorian Studies
This September the British Association of Victorian Studies gathered for its annual conference at the University of Birmingham to explore the theme ‘Composition and Decomposition’. In the final plenary, delegates met to debate ‘The Value of Victorian Studies’. Here, we present Shearer West’s paper on ‘The Public Value of Victorian Studies’ which opened discussion and in related posts we publish the plenary responses to Shearer’s paper by Linda Bree, Sarah Parker and Regenia Gagnier. With the rise of university tuition fees
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