Victorian
Victorian Studies at Glasgow is one of our liveliest concentrations, with a strong postgraduate community and a cohort of distinguished senior scholars and newly appointed early-career researchers. A distinctive feature of our provision is interdisciplinary engagement, in the encounter between west and east/north and south, literature and science, and literature and religion. Recent international conferences include the 10th Annual Conference of the British Association for Victorian Studies (2010), Literature and Mathematics in the Long Nineteenth Century (2011, with a spin-off workshop, Eighteenth-Century Geometry and the Scottish Enlightenment), and the postgraduate-led Anxious Forms conference (2014)
The interests of staff in Victorian Studies range widely across the field. Specialisms include literature and science, medical humanities, travel writing, colonial studies, nineteenth-century spiritualism, children’s fiction, eco-criticism and neo-Victorianism. Our research in these areas has been supported by major funding bodies, such as the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Carnegie Trust, the European Research Council, and the British Academy. Recent funded research includes the ‘Nineteenth-Century Euclid’ project (2009-11), supported by the European Research Council; the ‘Values of Environmental Writing’ Network (2010-11), supported by the AHRC; the ‘Second Cities in the Circuits of Empire’ project (2014-15), supported by the British Academy; and ‘Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour’, supported by the AHRC
Outreach activities are an important part of the School’s work in this area, and colleagues advised the Dr Livingstone I Presume? exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland (2012-13), and various other Livingstone bicentenary events. Other examples of outreach included a series of Poetry Podcasts focused on nineteenth-century poetry and aimed at first-year undergraduates and school-leavers. The podcasts, available from a public blog and through iTunes, have already received over 10,000 internet hits, and led to collaborations with local secondary schools.