This Thursday (1st Dec), Alyson Wharton-Durgaryan (Lincoln, History and Heritage) will be speaking to us on municipality and government in the Ottoman Empire. The seminar begins at 5pm (paper to start at 5.15pm) with refreshments. We are in MC3202 as usual.

Please find details of Alison’s talk below.

The ‘House of Government’ (Hükümet Konağı), the Municipality (Belediye) and the struggle for public space in Erzurum, Bitlis and Van in the Hamidian Era (1876-1909).

The mid-nineteenth-century reforms led to the spread of municipalities (belediye) across Ottoman Empire, purporting to grant inhabitants participation in local governance and to implement the centralizing policies of the reforms. In reality, these new structures were dominated by local notables, as a reinforcement of the old regime. In cities of the east on the frontier with Russia- Bitlis, Van and Erzurum- where there were sizeable Armenian and Kurdish populations, dissatisfaction was voiced. The response was a securitization of urban space under Abdülhamid II (r.1876-1909), reflected in the construction of a network of police stations, telegraph lines, detention and correctional facilities, barracks, and houses of government (hükümet konağı). This seminar will discuss the implementation of the municipality and the house of government in Bitlis, Van and Erzurum to show how architecture intersected with socio-political dynamics on a local level, and the changing direction of governance in the empire.

This Thursday (3rd Nov) we have Anna Barton from the University of Sheffield talking to us about Charlotte Brontë’.

Refreshments will be served from 5pm, and the paper will begin at 5.15pm. We are in room MB3202 (top floor, Minerva Building) See you there!

This talk explores the apparently limited afterlife of Charlotte Brontë’s poetry. Addressing the critical fortunes of the Aylott and Jones collection of 1846 and considering Charlotte’s discussion of poetry in her letters, it argues that the author incorporates traces of the early poetry into her novels in different guises. Focusing on Jane Eyre and Shirley, it proposes Brontë’s fiction as a sequence of experiments in the poetics of the Victorian novel that retrieve and reform the Romantic lyric, granting it a marketable posthumousness and securing the feminine lyric voice for the printed page.

 

Anna Barton is a Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of Tennyson’s Name (Ashgate 2008) and a guide to In Memoriam (EUP 2012) and has published work on a variety of  Romantic and Victorian poets, including Alfred Tennyson, Edward Fitzgerald, Edward Lear, EBB, Blake and Swinburne. Her latest monograph, Nineteenth Century Poetry and Liberal Thought: Forms of Freedom is due to be published by Palgrave in 2017.

Professor Jane Chapman on 19th century periodicals, 5pm 13th Oct, MB3202.

‘Double the Work, but Double the Scope? Comparative International Research in 19th Century Periodicals’

In periodical studies the field of comparative study beyond the English-speaking world and the British Empire is still relatively unexplored, despite the fact that connections between Britain and non-Anglophone countries have always been strong. The question is how can the researcher identify and study them? This paper argues that the most obvious way is by using periodicals to research trans-national themes such as modernism, “orientalist” trade, cultural and scientific exchange, design, or fashion. Focusing on Germany, France and Japan, some areas for further research are identified: science periodicals in Europe, women’s uses of periodicals in the late nineteenth century, periodicals for ex-patriot communities and satirical publications.

Biography

Jane Chapman is Professor of Communications, a grant research team leader and a comparative media historian, specializing in late 19^th and early 20^th century newspaper history – both illustrative and textual.

Her first degree is in history from UCL, her masters and PGCE are in history from Cambridge, where she remains a Research Associate, and her doctorate was under James Joll in the department of International History, LSE.

Jane had 14 years as a television documentary producer and on-screen news reporter and has since written 10 books and almost 40 articles and book chapters.

In this current academic year she is running 3 AHRC grants on the First World War, and since 2007 has been a serial grant holder for British Academy, ESRC and AHRC, with a total of 6 grants for the latter.  She is a member of both AHRC and ESRC Peer Review Colleges, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a former visiting fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge, and an Associate Professor at Macquarie University, Sydney.

We have a really exciting programme coming up this Semester. Please see the details below:

Events Programme, 2016-17 – Semester A

• 13^th Oct (Week 3) – Jane Chapman (Lincoln, Department of Journalism): ‘Double the Work, but Double the Scope? Comparative International Research in 19th Century Periodicals’

• 3^rd Nov (Week 6) – Anna Barton (Sheffield): ‘Poetry as I comprehend the word’: Charlotte Brontë’s lyric afterlife’

• 1^st December (Week 10) – Alyson Wharton-Durgaryan, (Lincoln, Department of History): ‘The “House of Government” (Hükümet Konağı), the Municipality (Belediye) and the struggle for public space in Erzurum, Bitlis and Van in the Hamidian Era (1876-1909)’

All meetings take place in MB3202. Refreshments will be served at 5pm, and the session will begin at 5.15pm. Please follow us on Twitter (@19thCLincoln) if you are social media-friendly.

We hope to see many of you during the term.

There is an extra C19 event taking place on Wednesday 18th May at 4.15pm in MB3202 (refreshments served from 4pm). Dr Julian North from the University of Leicester will talk to us on ‘Portraits for the People: Dickens’s Public Image’.

All are welcome.

Please find Dr. North’s abstract and biography below:

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Dr Julian North, University of Leicester

‘Portraits for the People: Dickens’s Public Image’

This talk will explore visual images of Dickens’s in print media in the 1830s and 40s. I will be looking at portraits of Dickens by Daniel Maclise, Margaret Gillies, Alfred D’Orsay and others, in  frontis pieces, prints and the periodical press, as well as more eccentric forms such as the ‘Bijou English Almanac’ of 1842. I’ll be situating these images in the context of challenges to aristocratic portraiture at the period (including Dickens’s own scathing remarks on the subject), and asking how these images positioned him in relation to his public.  To what extent was Dickens made, visually, into a man of the people?

Julian North is a senior lecturer in nineteenth-century literature in the School of English, University of Leicester. She specialises in biography and authorial afterlives and has published on the work of Thomas De Quincey, Carlyle, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley, and Charlotte Bronte, amongst others. She is the author of The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet (Oxford University Press, 2009) and one of the editors of The Works of Thomas De Quincey (Pickering and Chatto, 2000-2003), gen. ed. Grevel Lindop. She is currently working on Victorian author portraits.