Category Archives: Hill Valley Telegraph

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New Look for 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

We are delighted to announce that 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century at http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk has had a makeover. We hope you’ll agree that the journal is looking very good as it prepares to celebrate its first ten years this autumn.

19 publishes two themed issues per year under the auspices of invited guest editors. It is part of Birkbeck’s Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and is under the general editorship of Dr Carolyn Burdett.

The journal is now proudly housed within the Open Library of Humanities (OLH), a platform for open access publishing also based at Birkbeck. The OLH has a unique model to fund open access journals in the humanities that doesn’t rely on author charges but instead receives support from a large number of libraries. Please do see their website at https://about.openlibhums.org for more on getting your libraries involved or to learn about moving other journals to their model.

Sincerely,

Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies School of Arts Birkbeck, University of London

43 Gordon Square

London

WC1H 0PD

United Kingdom

c19@bbk.ac.uk

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Introducing the Birkbeck Institutes

Dear PhD Student,

You may already have heard about the Birkbeck Institutes and the exciting wide ranging events we present. We comprise three different Institutes (BIH, BISR, BIMI) working separately and sometimes collaboratively presenting talks, seminars, symposia and conferences reflecting the research of the academic staff at Birkbeck.

Please sign up to the mailing list to be the first to hear about the events:

You can also befriend the Institutes on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

Some events are specifically aimed at PhD students, such as the “Developing Your Research Career” series of workshops and the “Birkbeck Institute Graduate Conference” (to be held April/May 2016). All our events are open to you as well as to the public and we hope that you will come along or even take part where appropriate.

Best wishes,

Julia Eisner, Sarah Joshi and Reina Goodwin-van der Wiel, Institute Managers

The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (BIH) aims, through its events and activities, to engage with important public issues of our time as well as fostering and promoting a climate of interdisciplinary research and collaboration among academics and researchers. It promotes new ideas and forms of understanding in the humanities. It invites prominent writers, broadcasters and public figures to spend short periods at the Institute and engages the highly rated Birkbeck Humanities research departments in cross-disciplinary work.

The Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) is a response to the growing interest in film and the moving image across the College. Through public events and academic research initiatives, BIMI will address a wide variety of contemporary issues, particularly those relevant to its interdisciplinary structure.  Working closely with the Birkbeck Cinema, BIMI programmes public screenings and special seasons, making use of 35 mm film in addition to the Cinema’s high quality DVD projection.

The Birkbeck Institute for Social Research (BISR) is the focal point for social research at Birkbeck, and a hub for the dissemination and discussion of social research in London and beyond. Our distinctively critical and socially-engaged approach to social research is organised around five themes, each of which has a global/comparative dimension: social, psychosocial and feminist theory and methods; social movements, citizenship, policy and participation; subjectivity, intimacy, life-course and home; place, nation and environment; and media, culture, communication and learning.

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The Freud Reading Group Invites New Members

The Freud Reading Group invites new members to join for September and October 2015.

We are a group of researchers reading the complete works of Freud in chronological order. While the group is usually closed to foster a sense of commitment and trust, we periodically open up to new members.

Meetings take place on the last Wednesday of the month between 13:00 and 14:30. The next two meetings are as follows:

Wednesday 30th September, 13:00-14:30, Room 218, 43 Gordon Square. Reading: Volume III of the Standard Edition, pp. 1-87 (to the end of ‘Obsessions and Phobias: Their Psychical Mechanism and their Aetiology’)

Wednesday 28th October, 13:00-14:30, Room 112, 43 Gordon Square. Reading: tbc

If you would like to join us, or have any questions, please email bbkfreud@gmail.com

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Alexis Wolf – Chawton House Library Fellowship Award

We are thrilled to announce that English and Humanities student Alexis Wolf has been awarded a visiting fellowship at Chawton House Library for 2015-16.

Chawton House Library is an internationally respected research and learning centre for the study of early women’s writing from 1600 to 1830. Set in the quintessentially English manor house that once belonged to Jane Austen’s brother, Edward; Chawton House works in partnership with scholars and universities across the globe.

Dr Gillian Dow, Executive Director at Chawton House Library and Chair of the selection committee, said of the selection process: “our task was tremendously difficult this year and sadly we had to reject many excellent applications…We would like to heartily congratulate those who were accepted and thank once again the literary societies and individuals who sponsored the named fellowships.”

Alexis is supervised by Dr Emily Senior and Dr Luisa Cale. Her current working title is ‘Cosmopolitan networks of Anglophone women writers and travellers both at home and abroad in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’.

Congratulations Alexis!

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Stephen Copley Research Award Winner

It is with great pleasure that we write to inform you that a doctoral candidate at Birkbeck, Rees Arnott-Davies, is the recipient of a Stephen Copley Postgraduate Research Award this year. This is a highly competitive annual bursary scheme run by the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) in order to support postgraduate research in the UK or aboard. Information about the society, including the Copley bursary scheme, conferences, and the like, can be found on the website www.bars.ac.uk or through the Twitter page @BARS_official. Please join us in congratulating Rees.

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New issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century Online Journal

19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 20 (2015) Charting the Crimean War: Contexts, Nationhood, Afterlives

The Crimean War (1853–56) is much more culturally significant than its popular mythologies suggest. Now remembered mainly for the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Lady with the Lamp, the war is a pivotal moment in the history of modern warfare seen as both the last of the old wars and first of the new. The first total war, it inaugurated new forms of weaponry, tactics, communication, war reporting, military medicine, and new attitudes towards soldiers. The issue provides a number of new perspectives on these features of the war as it played out in the British, French, and Russian imagination. Contributors mediate the vexed issue of medical provision for the British and Russian armies; sensitivities around Britain’s military alliance with France; royal and poetic interventions into the welfare of the British soldier; the religious, commercial, and emotional investment in soldier-heroes like Captain Hedley Vicars and the Light Brigade; the memorialization of the final action of the war, the fall of Sebastopol; and, finally, the war’s continuing cultural and geopolitical relevance. Incorporating statistical analysis, journalism, photography, objects, art, film, and literature, this issue of 19 makes a case for the conflict’s wide-ranging significance.

Contents:

‘Charting the Crimean War: Contexts, Nationhood, Afterlives’

Rachel Bates, Holly Furneaux, and Alastair Massie

‘Reporting the Crimean War: Misinformation and Misinterpretation’

Mike Hinton

‘Russian Medical Service During the Crimean War: New Perspectives’

Yulia Naumova

‘The French Army and British Army Crimean War Reforms’

Anthony Dawson

‘”All Touched my Hand”: Queenly Sentiment and Royal Prerogative’

Rachel Bates

‘The Afterlife of Thomas Campbell and “The Soldier’s Dream” in the Crimean War’

Tai-Chun Ho

‘Who Blew the Balaklava Bugle?: The Charge of the Light Brigade and the Afterlife of the Crimean War’

Lara Kriegel

‘The Life and Afterlives of Captain Hedley Vicars: Evangelical Biography and the Crimean War’

Trev Broughton

‘Sebastopol: On the Fall of a City’

Trudi Tate

‘Off the Chart: The Crimean War in British Public Consciousness’

  1. L. Berridge

To download the articles, see: http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/

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Numbers Day – Edited by Becky Tomlin

‘Numbers in Early Modern Writing’, a special edition of the Journal of the Northern Renaissance is now live.

Edited by Dr Katherine Hunt and Rebecca Tomlin (English and Humanities), the articles in this issue explore the multiple ways in which numbers feature in early modern writing, from Robert Record to Civil War code manuals, with poetry and tragedy, fencing, accounting, and printing on the way. Follow this link, for your profit and delight: Journal of the Northern Renaissance Issue-6-2014

Becky is currently working on her thesis ‘Staging Exchange: Commerce, Drama and Gender in Early Modern England’ with Professor Sue Wiseman.

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Grace Halden signs first book deal

Reply

 

We are delighted to announce that Dr Grace Halden, recent graduate of the English and Humanities MPhil/PhD programme, has signed her first book deal to write Three Mile Island: The Meltdown Crisis and Nuclear Power in American Culture.

 

The book will be published by Routledge.

 

Three Mile Island: The Meltdown Crisis and Nuclear Power in American Culture builds on the research Grace conducted when working on the first two chapters of her PhD thesis at Birkbeck entitled ‘If This a Man’ Technological Development and Human Disappearance in US Sf since 1945.

Photograph: Helicopter over Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, 1979. President (1977-1981 : Carter). President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island. (04/11/1979 - 12/31/1980)

Photograph: Helicopter over Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, 1979. President (1977-1981 : Carter). President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island. (04/11/1979 – 12/31/1980)

 

Three Mile Island: The Meltdown Crisis and Nuclear Power in American Culture engages with the Three Mile Island nuclear incident of 1979 alongside the wider contextual framework of the nuclear debate in America during the twentieth century. Not only was the 1979 Three Mile Island event important for the history of nuclear development, it also exposed fundamental issues regarding how information is disseminated to the public.

 

Through exploring both sociohistorical and literary representations of Three Mile Island, Grace will examine how nuclear technology was both idealized and challenged before, during, and after this event – from the 1945 atomic strike on Japan to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

 

With special thanks to Professor Roger Luckhurst.

 

For more information on Grace’s work please visit: http://gracehalden.wix.com/gracehalden

 

 

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