The Nineteenth-Century Research Group

Promoting an interdisciplinary approach to the nineteenth century at the University of Lincoln

Category: Events (page 3 of 20)

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Prof. Jason Hall (Exeter), ‘Stephen’s Telescopic Imagination’ (23rd March 2022)

March 17, 2022 / / Comments Off on Prof. Jason Hall (Exeter), ‘Stephen’s Telescopic Imagination’ (23rd March 2022)
You are warmly invited to attend the next event in the University of Lincoln Nineteenth Century Research Seminar Series on Wednesday 23rd March. Prof. Jason Hall (Exeter) will be presenting on ‘Stephen’s Telescopic Imagination: Empiricism and Imagination in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man‘.

The event will begin at 4.30pm, but the Teams room will open at 4.15pm. The talk will be followed by a Q&A (the talk will be recorded but the Q&A will not).

Register at Eventbrite via this page to access the meeting link. Please email Laura Gill if you have any issues registering or accessing the meeting link.

Paper Abstract

How does Stephen Dedalus process his place in the scheme of things, and what happens as he matures? The answer is, in part, found in the early pages of the novel, where the young artist-in-the-making conceives of his geo-cosmological orientation in relation to a popular nineteenth-century exercise.

Speaker Bio

Jason Hall is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter. His books include Seamus Heaney’s Rhythmic Contract (2009), Meter Matters (2011), Decadent Poetics (2013) and Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology (2017). His present research explores astronomy in Victorian and Modernist fiction and culture.

Please do join us, and email the organisers if you wish to be added to the C19th Research Group mailing list to hear about future events.

C19 Research Roundtable (12pm, 13th Dec 2021)

December 3, 2021 / / Comments Off on C19 Research Roundtable (12pm, 13th Dec 2021)

You are warmly invited to attend a lunchtime seminar organised by the Nineteenth-Century Research Group on Monday 13th December, starting at 12pm (ending before 2pm). The meeting will be held on Microsoft Teams and the meeting room will be open from 11.50am. Please email Laura Gill (lgill@lincoln.ac.uk) to register and receive the meeting link.

This event brings together scholars from the College of Arts working in different disciplines to share focused aspects of their current writing and research. Researchers working in English and History will each give a short paper of c. 10 minutes, covering a range of topics related to the nineteenth century:

  • Dr Jim Cheshire (History): Remembering ‘Hodson’s Horse’: Commemoration and the Indian Uprising of 1857–8.

This paper will analyse a memorial to William Hodson in Lichfield Cathedral designed by George Edmund Street in 1859 and question the way that it commemorates Hodson’s controversial military career. I will argue that the aesthetic agenda of the Gothic Revival and the moral agenda of muscular Christianity combined with Anglo-Catholicism to generate an ideologically partisan and inaccurate representation of events surrounding the Indian Uprising of 1857-8 and that the monument has subsequently functioned as a focus of conservative military historians.

  • Dr Rebecca Styler (English): George Macdonald and Human-Animal Fellowship.

The Scottish author George Macdonald (1824-1905) is best known for his fairy tales which embody some of his most cherished theological and moral ideals. In the context of Macdonald’s beliefs about animals’ spiritual consciousness and afterlife, stated in his Unspoken Sermons, I consider the depiction of inter-species sympathy in ‘The History of Photogen and Nycteris’ (1879) as a poetic form of ecotheology, and ecofeminism. Macdonald can be placed among other Victorian ecotheological poets, and a longer Christian tradition of reverencing animals as spiritual fellows and co-tenants of the earth.

[The story can be found at http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/26/69.pdf.]

  • Dr Pietro Di Paola (History): A Furious Champion of Goodness: Anarchist Women and Emotions.

Focusing on the contrasting representations of the revolutionary Louise Michel, a furious champion of goodness, the paper investigates emotions as an analytical tool to reassess the political significance of militant women in the anarchist and radical movements.

Talks will be followed by a Q&A. Please note that the research papers will be recorded, but the Q&A section of the seminar will not be recorded. The event is open to all and you are welcome to join us just for the talks if you are not able to stay for the whole session.

Dr Claire Wood, ‘Charles Dickens and Decadence’ (20th Oct 2021)

December 3, 2021 / / Comments Off on Dr Claire Wood, ‘Charles Dickens and Decadence’ (20th Oct 2021)

Our first research seminar of the 2021–22 academic year took place on Wednesday 20th October. Dr Claire Wood joined us from the University of Leicester, to talk about her new research on Charles Dickens and Decadence.

Dr Wood’s research centres on Victorian fiction and death culture, with a particular focus upon the contradictions and complexities inherent in the Victorian ‘celebration of death’. Her book on this subject, Dickens and the Business of Death, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. This explored Dickens’s fascination with the many different ways that you could make money from a corpse in Victorian England, from anatomy to authorship. She is currently working on ‘Dead Funny’, a project that examines death comedy in the work of Dickens and a range of other nineteenth-century writers. She is also co-editing the Edinburgh Companion to Dickens and the Arts for Edinburgh University Press.

nineteenth century rendering of dinosaurs roaming the landscape

Dr Richard Fallon, ‘Literature and Borderline Geoscience’, 28th April 2021

April 23, 2021 / / Comments Off on Dr Richard Fallon, ‘Literature and Borderline Geoscience’, 28th April 2021
The next Nineteenth-Century Research Seminar will be ,online at 4.15pm (for a 4.30pm start) on Wednesday 28th April 2021
We will be joined by Dr Richard Fallon(University of Birmingham), who will be talking to us about ‘Literature and Borderline Geoscience: The Case of Paranormal Paleontology in the Late Nineteenth Century’
You can register for the event using the EventBrite link below, by the end of the day on 27th April

  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/university-of-lincoln-c19-seminar-literature-and-borderline-geoscience-registration-151107543731

Abstract

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, researchers in Britain and North America locked horns over fundamental aspects of planetary prehistory, from evolution to continental drift. Figures both within and beyond the elite scientific community addressed these controversies, frequently relating them to religious belief or exploring their implications in fiction. The story of deep history was far from unified in a climate characterised not only by disputing experts but also by occultists’ claims to see through time and the re-emergence of young-earth creationism. Novelists, meanwhile, took advantage of the most sensational geo-theories, turning lost worlds like Atlantis into literary mainstays – sometimes making more serious truth claims than their fictional garbs implied.

Focusing on print, my current project seeks to map this little-understood culture of ‘borderlinegeoscience’ and to determine how researchers and the general public navigated its amorphous terrain. This paper introduces the project before turning to a case study of clairvoyant visionaries, including the freethinking Anglo-American family of William and Elizabeth Denton. I show how literary techniques formerly developed to encourage imaginative ‘seeing’ through time were literalised in the Dentons’ writings of the 1860s and 1870s. These writings claimed to recount genuine visions of the prehistoric past made through the power of ‘psychometry’.

 

Bio

Richard Fallon is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Birmingham. His collection of nineteenth-century palaeontological literature,Creatures of Another Age: Classic Visions of Prehistoric Monsters, is published this month by Valancourt Books. His monographReimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard’ Became a Transatlantic Cultural Iconwill be published in November by Cambridge University Press.

4.15pm (4.30 start) Tuesday 12th January 2021, Matthew Bayly on ’Rabbits, Wheat and Laudanum: Agricultural and social change on the Lincoln Heath, c.1815-1850’

January 5, 2021 / / Comments Off on 4.15pm (4.30 start) Tuesday 12th January 2021, Matthew Bayly on ’Rabbits, Wheat and Laudanum: Agricultural and social change on the Lincoln Heath, c.1815-1850’

Apologies that the C19 Research Group did not hold a session last Semester. Despite our name, this was not because we were busy researching a COVID-19 vaccine.

 

However, we do have two sessions lined up for Semester B, both of which will take place online for obvious reasons. The first will take place at 4.15pm (4.30pm start) on Tuesday 12th January 2021, when Matthew Bayly will talk to us on ‘Rabbits, Wheat and Laudanum: Agricultural and social change on the Lincoln Heath, c.1815-1850’. If you would like to attend, please email oclayton@lincoln.ac.uk and ask for the meeting link. All are welcome.

 

Please find an abstract and biography below. We hope to see lots of you there!

 

All best,

 

Owen, Alice, Pietro and Annise.

 

 

‘Rabbits, Wheat and Laudanum: Agricultural and social change on the Lincoln Heath, c.1815-1850’

 

A visitor to the Lincoln Heath in 1800 would have been presented with an agricultural landscape dominated by sheep and rabbit warrens; in contrast, by the mid-nineteenth century, the area typified Victorian ‘high farming’, characterised by mixed-agrarian wheat production. Such a change was at its most intense in the decades after 1815 and went far beyond agricultural practice, influencing such things as demography; the built environment; employment structures; social interactions; and the political-cultural landscape of the Lincoln Heath. Indeed, it can be argued that the period 1815 to 1850 was instrumental in defining the socio-economic expression of many areas of rural Lincolnshire until the mid-twentieth century. This paper will explore the development and impact of such changes within ten parishes in the Lincoln Heath, utilising three lenses to do so: rabbits, wheat and laudanum.

Biography

 

Matthew Bayly is a Senior English for Academic Purposes Tutor at the University of Lincoln and currently completing a PhD in History at Nottingham Trent University with a thesis titled ‘The Human Ecology of Need on the Lincoln Heath, c.1790-1850.’ His current research pivots around nineteenth century social history, with a specific interest in the English Poor Laws, the history of welfare and the politics of the parish.

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