Tag: Victorian Studies

A toast to Professor Laurel Brake on the occasion of her eightieth birthday

Editors' Blog, Other

When Marysa Demoor, a longstanding member of Journal of Victorian Culture’s editorial board, suggested a celebration of eminent Victorianist Laurel Brake’s birthday, she was deluged with contributions from some of the most prominent scholars in the field: Margaret Beetham, Anne Humpherys, John Stokes, Helen Small, Lene Østermark, Marianne van Remoortel, James Mussell, Fionnuala Dillane, Andrew King, Mark Turner and Gowan Dawson. Each offered a personal take on the impact Professor Brake has had on their area of research activity, whether

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Asa Briggs (1921-2016)

Editors' Blog, Victorians Beyond the Academy

Asa Briggs was an extraordinary force of nature. The range and the significance of his contributions to twentieth-century British history and to British historiography defy summary. He played a part in Bletchley Park code-breaking unit during the Second World War, before an academic career which saw him serve as Professor of History at Leeds, Vice-Chancellor of the new University of Sussex, and Provost of Worcester College Oxford, as well as Chancellor of the Open University. Along the way he was a member of the University Grants Committee,

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Susie Steinbach, Who owns the Victorians?: A Response to Peter K. Andersson’s ‘How Civilised Were the Victorians?’

Published in JVC

Susie Steinbach is a professor of history at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota currently living in York, England. Her work focuses on gender, performance, and the law during the Victorian period. The second edition of her textbook, Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture, and Society in Nineteenth-century Britain will be published by Routledge later this year. In his essay “How Civilized Were the Victorians?” Peter K. Andersson challenges scholars of the Victorian period to work differently and better. Specifically, he

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DIGITAL FORUM: ‘The Future of Academic Journals’ (21:1)

Digital Forum, Digitizing the Victorians, Published in JVC

‘The Future of Academic Journals’ edited by Zoe Alker, Christopher Donaldson and James Mussell. This Digital Forum offers perspectives on the opportunities and challenges presented by the use of digital technologies in academic publishing, networking and communication. It features position papers from three participants in the ‘Victorian Studies Journals: Coming of Age’ roundtable that convened at BAVS 2015: Lucinda Matthews-Jones, James Mussell and Helen Rogers. Collectively, these three scholars offer incisive reflections on the ways that scholars and publishers have

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Katrina Navickas ‘Of Cultural History and Class: A Reply to Andersson’

Published in JVC

Dr Katrina Navickas is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Hertfordshire. Her latest monograph is Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789-1848 (Manchester University Press, 2015), which has an accompanying website of data and maps of protest sites in northern England, http://protesthistory.org.uk. She tweets at @katrinanavickas This post responds to Peter K. Andersson’s Journal of Victorian Culture article ‘How Civilised were the Victorians’. This article can be downloaded here. Peter K. Andersson’s article deliberately challenges complacency

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Lucinda Matthews-Jones, What is Victorian Studies for?: A Reply to Andersson’s article.

Published in JVC

Lucinda Matthews-Jones is a Senior Lecturer in History at Liverpool John Moores University. Her research explores the roles of domesticity, gender and class in the British university settlement movement. As part of this, she is currently completing her first monograph ‘Settling: Domesticity, Class and Urban Philanthropy in the British University Settlement Movement’. Recent publications include Material Religion in Modern Britain: The Spirit of Things. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) with Timothy W. Jones. Articles in ‘Journal of Victorian Culture’, and forthcoming

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Sophie Franklin, Beyond the Civilising Process: A Response to Peter K. Andersson’s ‘How Civilised Were the Victorians?’

Published in JVC

Sophie Franklin is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate in the English Department at Durham University. Her research focuses on the various violences in Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s respective writings, and the ways in which the three authors worked within and outside of nineteenth-century perceptions of violence. She also has an interest in print culture, material culture, and windows in Victorian fiction. You can find her on Twitter @_sophiefranklin and contact her on sophie.r.franklin@durham.ac.uk.  This post responds to Peter K. Andersson’s Journal

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Oliver Betts, How Civilized Were the Victorians?: A Reply

Published in JVC

Oliver Betts is Research Fellow at the National Railway Museum in York. Having completed his PhD on the working-class idea of home 1870-1914 at the University of York, he is now writing a history of the interplay between railways, society, and human geography in South London 1850-1940. He tweets at @DrOliBetts This post responds to Peter K. Andersson’s Journal of Victorian Culture article ‘How Civilised were the Victorians’. This article can be downloaded here. Working in a National Museum with

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Peter K. Andersson, Real Victorians and False Margins

Published in JVC

This post accompanies Peter K. Andersson’s Journal of Victorian Culture 2015 ‘How Civilised were the Victorians’. This article can be downloaded here. An increasing interest in  “history from below” among Victorian scholars can be detected when looking at the contents of periodicals and books. The Journal of Victorian Culture is at the forefront of this evolution with articles on blood-sports, rat-catchers and the material culture of everyday city life. But although an ambition to encompass the “voiceless masses” has never

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

Published in JVC

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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