WikiVictorian

Helena DiGiusti talks about @WikiVictorian, the Twitter account that she runs. More than a traditional wiki, it embodies the randomness and miscellaneous nature of so much of Victorian cultures. She talks about the origins of the account in her interest in Victorian fashion, art, and history, and how the account has been embraced by enthusiasts across the professional spectrum and around the world.

Like William Morris, she favors the simple criteria of interest and beauty. Per Morris, “If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” Perhaps more Twitter accounts ought to be like Kelmscott Manor.

Behind WikiVictorian hides someone deeply fascinated by art, history, photography, old things… and specially, everything about the Victorian era and the 19th century. Her name is Helena, and she is a 23 year old anthropologist from Granada, in the south of Spain.

Image: Fall and Winter Catalogue, H. O’Neill and Co.

Music used in promotional material: ‘winter smoke’ by The Owl

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Archives

Matt Poland talks about the meaning of archives, the nature of their construction, the physical environments that archives engender, and their emancipatory possibilities. Besides his own work on the archives of George Eliot, he talks about The Baltimore Uprising Archive Project, The Teaching Archive by Rachel Buurma and Laura Hefferman, Stirrings in the Archives by Wolfgang Ernst, No Archive Will Restore You by Julietta Singh, and Ann Laura Stoler’s Along the Archival Grain.

Matt is finishing his PhD in English at the University of Washington. His dissertation is titled “The Global Remediation of George Eliot and Charles Dickens: Books, Newspapers, Archives.” Matt’s recent publications include “Uncovering the Contingencies of Archives” in the Journal of Victorian Culture Online. His article “Middlemarch in Melbourne” is forthcoming in the Middlemarch 150th anniversaryissue of George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies. 

Image: Hilma af Klint, Grupp III, nr 5. De storafigurmålningarna, Nyckeln tillhittillsvarande arbete, 1907Olja på duk150 × 118 cmHAK042© Stiftelsen hilma af Klints Verk

Music used in promotional material: ‘Lighthouse’ by King Capisce

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Racial Affect

Oishani Sengupta talks about the felt experiences of racism, especially as they are represented in Victorian literature and its contemporary readership, which is the subject of her research. The conversation ranges from the novels of H. Rider Haggard and Charles Dickens to the felt experience of caste, as analyzed in the work of scholars like Junaid Shaikh.

Oishani Sengupta (@oishani on Twitter) is a PhD candidate at the University of Rochester exploring histories of racial affect and visual print culture in the nineteenth century British empire. Also the project coordinator of the William Blake Archive, she looks closely at racist illustration practices and their central role in colonial politics.

Image: Cover of the first French edition of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines

Music used in promotional material: ‘Last Sigh’ by Holy Pain


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Undisciplining

Kim talks to Amy Wong, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, and Alicia Christoff about ‘Undisciplining’, a term they borrowed from Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake and have used in an article and a journal issue to signify a heuristic that would help bring modes of knowledge and methodologies to Victorian Studies that are unfamiliar or would be considered unnatural, given the regulations of that discipline. References are made to Elaine Freedgood’s Worlds Enough, Zadie Smith’s concept of the ‘neutral universal’, and the work of Brigitte Fielder.

Amy R. Wong lives in Oakland and is assistant professor of English at Dominican University of California, where she teaches courses on literature, film, media theory, and critical race studies. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Narrative, Literature Compass, ASAP Journal, Modern Philology, Studies in the Novel, SEL: Studies in English Literature, Public Books, and Avidly.

Ronjaunee Chatterjee lives in Montreal and teaches feminist, queer, and critical race theory, as well as courses on the 19th century, at Concordia University. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, ASAP Journal, The New Inquiry, French Studies,Victorian Literature and Culture, and other venues.

Alicia Mireles Christoff is associate professor of English at Amherst College. She is the author of Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis (Princeton University Press, 2019). Her essays have appeared in PMLA, Novel, Victorian Literature and Culture, Public Books, and other venues, and her poems in The Yale Review and Peach Mag.

Image: Fire at the Crystal Palace

Music used in promotional material: ‘Fall Apart’ by Livio Amato

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