Centre for Victorian Studies

In October 2009 Hull’s English Department launched the Centre for Victorian Studies.

The Centre aims to expand and promote research excellence at Hull and to enhance the cultural life of the region by fostering a lively and enterprising research culture at the cutting edge of international and interdisciplinary scholarship in the field of Victorian Studies and the long nineteenth century. We wish to support the development of early career and postdoctoral researchers and research students.

Hull’s Centre for Victorian Studies specialises in:

• Victorian gender relations: our work includes research on Victorian family studies (sibling relationships, fatherhood: Valerie Sanders), anti/feminism (Ann Heilmann, Valerie Sanders) and the New Woman (Ann Heilmann, Laura Rattray), masculinity (Ann Heilmann, Valerie Sanders, Jane Thomas), art and performance (Katharine Cockin, Jane Thomas, Catherine Wynne), colonialism and empire (Catherine Wynne). Our gender focus provides links with Hull’s Centre for Gender Studies; three of our Centre members (Katharine Cockin, Valerie Sanders, Sabine Vanacker) are involved in the administration of the Centre for Gender Studies and in its Journal of Gender Studies (Katharine Cockin, Sabine Vanacker). Similarly, Wynne’s work on the Victorian Gothic interconnects with the Centre for Popular Culture, of which she is a member.
• Another distinctive strength is our specialism in fin-de-siècle studies (Katharine Cockin, Ann Heilmann, Laura Rattray, Jane Thomas, Catherine Wynne).

Further research specialisms are:

• Auto/biography: various members have written biographies (Cockin), edited letters (Katharine Cockin; Valerie Sanders), written for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Katharine Cockin, Colin Tyler). Cockin has published on epistolary writing and is editing the eight-volume Collected Letters of Ellen Terry (forthcoming).
• Archival research (Katharine Cockin, Ann Heilmann, Laura Rattray, Valerie Sanders). Cockin has catalogued one of the UK’s most significant theatre archives, owned by the National Trust and now held by the British Library. The study of archival texts is integrated into our MA curricula; Cockin organised a postgraduate conference in 2006 with Roberts Funds on 'Dealing with Primary Sources'. Members of the Centre have edited primary texts (Cockin on women’s suffrage literature and the work of Gertrude Colmore; Heilmann on George Moore; Rattray on Edith Wharton; Sanders on Harriet Martineau and on Victorian and Edwardian anti-feminism; Colin Tyler on various British idealist philosophers).
• Theatre history (Katharine Cockin: British women’s suffrage movement, political theatre, Edith Craig and Ellen Terry; Catherine Wynne: Bram Stoker).
• Transatlantic perspectives (Katharine Cockin, Ann Heilmann, Laura Rattray, Catherine Wynne): members of the Centre have been invited to participate in an international network on Transatlantic Decadence.
• We are also distinctive in combining Victorian and neo-Victorian studies (Ann Heilmann, Sabine Vanacker) with two funded PhD studentships and currently three PhD students working in this sub-field.
• We have attracted postdoctoral fellowships to some of these areas (Victorian gender relations).
• We have been awarded studentships in some of these areas (Neo-Victorianism).
• We have two book series (Routledge’s Major Works History of Feminism and Pickering and Chatto’s Gender and Genre) covering Victorian gender relations.

International patrons advising on Centre activities are:

• Professor Elaine Showalter, Professor Emeritus of English and Avalon Professor of
• Professor Martha Vicinus (Eliza M. Mosher Distinguished University Professor of English, Women’s Studies and History)
• Professor Nina Auerbach, John Welsh Centennial Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania, USA
• Professor Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities, University of Delaware, USA
• Joy Dixon (Associate Professor of History, University of British Columbia)
• Professor Roger Ebbatson, Research Fellow, Lancaster University
• Sir Michael Holroyd, CBE, FRSL
• Professor Angela Leighton, FBA, Fellow, Trinity, Cambridge
• Professor Lyn Pykett (PVC, Professor of English, Aberystwyth University)
• Professor Marion Shaw, Emeritus Professor, University of Loughborough the Humanities at Princeton
• Dr Patsy Stoneman, Emeritus Reader, University of Hull

Centre members

Core membership

• Dr Katharine Cockin, Management Board (auto/biography, theatre history, lesbian history, Ellen Terry, Edith Craig and their circle)
• Professor Ann Heilmann, Director (New Woman, Victorian [anti]feminism, fin-de-siècle literature, George Moore, neo-Victorianism)
• Dr Laura Rattray (Edith Wharton, turn-of-the-century transatlantic relations)
• Professor Valerie Sanders, Management Board (Victorian family studies, Victorian anti-feminism, Victorian life-writing, especially autobiography)
• Dr Jane Thomas, Management Board (Thomas Hardy, Victorian art movements)
• Dr Sabine Vanacker (neo-Victorianism)
• Dr David Wheatley (James Clarence Mangan and other Victorian poetry)
• Dr Catherine Wynne (Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker)

Associates

• Dr Amanda Capern, History
• Dr Nicholas Evans, History, WISE
• Dr Helen Johnston, Criminology
• Dr Douglas Reid, History
• Dr Colin Tyler, Politics and International Studies
• Dr Tony Ward, Law School
• Professor Christopher Wilson, Drama and Music

Honorary Research Associates

• Dr Matthew Mitton
• Dr Susan Walton