Launch of the Centre for Victorian Studies

The Centre for Victorian Studies in the English Department at the University of Hull was launched in October 2009.

With a record of success in international and interdisciplinary research, members of the new Centre for Victorian Studies aim to expand and promote research excellence at Hull, to enhance the cultural life of the region and to disseminate insights from their research findings to the wider public. 

The Centre for Victorian Studies fosters a lively and enterprising research culture engaging with the complexities of lives and relations in the long nineteenth century, from the early nineteenth century to 1914. Research has embraced Victorian gender relations, fin-de-siècle studies, archival research, auto/biography, theatre history, transatlantic perspectives, and neo-Victorian studies.

The Centre for Victorian Studies supports the development of early career researchers and postdoctoral researchers as well as research students.

The Centre is based in the English Department and also includes colleagues from Criminology, History, Law, Politics and International Studies.

A successful MA programme in Nineteenth-Century Studies has been delivered in the English Department since 200*. A new Nineteenth-Century Studies research seminar series was inaugurated in 2009-10. International interdisciplinary conferences have been organised in the English Department by members of the Centre recently on George Moore (keynote speakers Adrian Frazier and Elizabeth Grubgeld), Conan Doyle (keynote speakers Clive Bloom and Andrew Lycett), the literary north (keynote speaker Prof Cora Kaplan) and Ellen Terry and Edith Craig (keynote speakers Prof Nina Auerbach and Sir Michael Holroyd CBE).

The Inaugural Annual Victorian Studies Lecture will be delivered by Professor Elaine Showalter at the Centre for Victorian Studies, University of Hull on 21 April 2010.

The advisory board has a distinguished membership of international patrons:

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

One recent example of research by a member of the Centre for Victorian Studies is the AHRC Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Database project (2006-08). This project won an AHRC Resource Enhancement Grant of over £85,000 in 2006. This online catalogue of one of the UK’s most significant theatre archives, the papers of Ellen Terry (1847-1928) and Edith Craig (1869-1947) owned by the National Trust, has made more accessible information about over 20,000 documents. These are now available at the British Library and at the National Trust property, Smallhythe Place, Kent. The Principal Investigator of the project, Dr Katharine Cockin, is now editing ‘The Collected Letters of Ellen Terry’ (forthcoming Pickering & Chatto, 8 vols; March 2010 annually). This project was supported by grants from the British Academy.

For further details, see the Centre website