Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Anne-Marie Beller

culturalcurrents.bsky.social @culturalcurrents.bsky.social · 6d

On Wed 29 Oct, 16.15, join us for our first event of 2025-26, feat. two @lboroenglish.bsky.social legends:

1/1 Dr Anne-Marie Beller @braddonite.bsky.social
"We regret to learn that Miss Braddon is out of her mind": Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Life and Fiction

1 2 3

Reposted by Anne-Marie Beller

Health Humanities Research Group @healthhumslboro.bsky.social · 10d

CFP 📣 Join us in Loughborough 📍 for a day of Sensation fiction and health humanities organised by our very own @braddonite.bsky.social. ✨ See post below for details 👇

Victorian Popular Fiction Association @vpfa.bsky.social · 10d

🚨Call for Papers!
❓Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities: A VPFA Study Day
🗺️Loughborough University
📅27 March 2026
💷 FREE
For full CfP: victorianpopularfiction.org/studyday/for...
Contact the organiser Anne-Marie Beller (@braddonite.bsky.social) at [email protected] for more information

Mentally ill patients dancing at a ball at Somerset County Asylum. Process
print after a lithograph by K. Drake, ca. 1850/1855.
https://wellcomecollection.org/works/xswz3swa

CFP: Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities
A VPFA Study Day
Loughborough University, 27 March 2026

The Health Humanities and Victorian popular fiction intersect in revealing ways, offering insights into how 19th-century literature shaped and reflected contemporary understandings of health, illness, and the body. Popular narratives not only mirrored anxieties surrounding public health and medical progress but also contributed to shaping public perceptions of health and healing. Health Humanities approaches re-examine these texts to uncover how cultural narratives and literary representations influenced attitudes toward physical and mental well-being, gendered experiences of illness, and the ethics of care in an age of rapid scientific change.

Health Humanities is a particularly useful approach to sensation fiction because it illuminates the ways in which these emotionally charged, often morally ambiguous narratives explore and interrogate concepts of the body, illness, and mental health. Sensation fiction, with its focus on secrets, trauma, nervous disorders, and abnormal psychological states, frequently dramatizes the anxieties of Victorian society surrounding health, gender, and identity. By applying the lens of Health Humanities, scholars can uncover how these texts reflect and shape contemporary medical discourse. Interdisciplinary approaches also highlight how sensation fiction critiques institutional medicine, domestic care practices, and the pathologization of women’s experiences. Ultimately, Health Humanities allows us to see sensation fiction not just as entertainment, but as a culturally significant form that negotiates the meanings of illness, morality, and human vulnerability in a rapidly changing world.

20-minute papers are invited on any aspect of the health humanities and sensation fiction. Topics may include, but are not limited to the following:

• Madness, Hysteria, and the Sensation Heroine
• The Role of Doctors and Medical Authority in Se…

10 15

Reposted by Anne-Marie Beller

Victorian Popular Fiction Association @vpfa.bsky.social · 10d

🚨Call for Papers!
❓Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities: A VPFA Study Day
🗺️Loughborough University
📅27 March 2026
💷 FREE
For full CfP: victorianpopularfiction.org/studyday/for...
Contact the organiser Anne-Marie Beller (@braddonite.bsky.social) at [email protected] for more information

1 18 21

Anne-Marie Beller @braddonite.bsky.social · Sep 7

Proofs arrived! @kerryfeatherstone.bsky.social and I translated and edited #MaryElizabethBraddon’s only serial written for the French press 🇫🇷 and her only published fiction written in French.

4

Anne-Marie Beller @braddonite.bsky.social · Jul 16

Such a great keynote. #VPFAExtremes

Becca @beccalham.bsky.social · Jul 16

Now for our final keynote of the conference, Corinne Fowler with her talk 'The Impact of Empire on the Countryside, 1837-1901' #VPFAExtremes

1 4

Anne-Marie Beller @braddonite.bsky.social · Jul 15

First panel of the day is Mental Illness in Braddon, which couldn’t be more up my street! #VPFAExtremes

1 1 5

Anne-Marie Beller @braddonite.bsky.social · Jul 14

Lovely #VPFA peeps ♥️

Helena Ifill @helenaifill.bsky.social · Jul 14

It's been a lovely 1st day at VPFA 2025! @vpfa.bsky.social #VPFAextremes

2 10

Reposted by Anne-Marie Beller

Tara MacDonald @tara-macdonald.bsky.social · Jul 11

THRILLED to share that my book has won the VPFA Second Book Prize! 🎉

Victorian Popular Fiction Association @vpfa.bsky.social · Jul 11

We are delighted to announce the winner of the 2024 VPFA Second Book Prize:
Tara MacDonald, Narrative, Affect, and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Prof. MacDonald will receive a £200 cash prize and be honoured at the Annual Conference AGM.

1 5 16

Reposted by Anne-Marie Beller

Emma Butler-Way @ebutler-way.bsky.social · Jul 11

Exciting new issue of VPFJ is now out in the world, featuring my review for Helena Esser's fantastic Steampunk London: Neo-Victorian Urban Space and Popular Transmedia Memory. I'm a big fan. Get your libraries on it.
@vpfa.bsky.social @helenaesser.bsky.social
doi.org/10.46911/TWO...

Helena Esser, Steampunk London: Neo-Victorian Urban Space and Popular Transmedia Memory. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, 248 pp. HB £85.00. ISBN: 9781350433908 Reviewed by Emma Butler-Way Downlo…

doi.org

7 11

Reposted by Anne-Marie Beller

Dr Helena Esser @helenaesser.bsky.social · Jul 14

Just chaired an excellent first panel of #VPFAExtremes with fellow #Birkbeck Victorianists @janetteleaf.bsky.social, Jeremy Newton, & Gordon Bates on Hypnotic Gothic Fictions!

6 12

Reposted by Anne-Marie Beller

Birmingham & Midland Institute @bmi1854.bsky.social · Jul 14

We are delighted to welcome the @VPFA1 for day 1 of their 3 day conference "Heights, Depths and Extremes."

#VPFAExtremes #VPFA #bmi1854 #birmingham #victorian

5 9

Reposted by Anne-Marie Beller

Anna Shane @annas1891.bsky.social · Jul 14

Starting the Intertextuality and Adaptation panel, we've got Julia Kuehn joining us online to talk about Marie Carelli's novel The Sorrows of Satan and its stage adaptations #VPFAExtremes

2 5

Anne-Marie Beller @braddonite.bsky.social · Jul 14

‘Even grammatical’! 😂

Anna Shane @annas1891.bsky.social · Jul 14

The Sorrows of Satan was a massive success, but not all critics approved. Here’s Arnold Bennett being snide about it: ‘I found it amusing, even grammatical. Perhaps I found it more amusing than its author intended, but that is another matter.’ #VPFAExtremes

1 2

Anne-Marie Beller @braddonite.bsky.social · Jul 14

My favourite fact of the first day! #VPFAExtremes

Anna @annaulrika75.bsky.social · Jul 14

The 1911 Prison Library Committee report names Ellen Wood as the most popular author read in prisons, especially with female inmates.
#VPFAExtremes

1 2 6

Anne-Marie Beller @braddonite.bsky.social · Jul 14

Great paper on vivisection and dehumanisation by Brandi Burns. Some quite horrible details though 😢

Becca @beccalham.bsky.social · Jul 14

Brandi Burns is talking about medical school and vivisection. Throughout the 19th century, many became concerned about the dehumanisation and desensitisation process of experimentation #VPFAExtremes

3

Reposted by Anne-Marie Beller

Anna Shane @annas1891.bsky.social · Jul 14

Now we have Crescent Rainwater talking about Netta Syrett’s novel The Victorians and its debt to a wide spectrum of Victorian fiction in its representation of sexual liberated modern women, as well as lesbian desire #VPFAExtremes

2 3

Reposted by Anne-Marie Beller

Emma Butler-Way @ebutler-way.bsky.social · Jul 14

I had the best time presenting this paper! It was such a great panel to be on - by a *wild* coincidence, we had two separate papers, featuring two separate books that both just so happened to have a character with the last name of Tempest, and someone accidentally selling their soul...
#VPFAExtremes

Anna Shane @annas1891.bsky.social · Jul 14

Next we’ve got @ebutler-way.bsky.social talking about the legacies of Jane Eyre in A Long Fatal Love Chase by Louisa May Alcott, particularly the role of fate #VPFAExtremes

4 8

Reposted by Anne-Marie Beller

Anna Shane @annas1891.bsky.social · Jul 14

On the Sappho and Swinburne panel, first we’ve got V J Rene joining us online to discuss extremity in Swinburne’s work, including masochism, erotic transgression and political radicalism #VPFAExtremes

2 3

Reposted by Anne-Marie Beller

Anna Shane @annas1891.bsky.social · Jul 14

Next we have Professor Andrew King very appositely discussing the ‘Brummagem popularity’ of Granville Bantock’s song cycle Sappho #VPFAExtremes

3 6

Reposted by Anne-Marie Beller

Anna @annaulrika75.bsky.social · Jul 14

Cecilia Fabaro is now speaking about George Egerton's last short story collection 'Fantasias' and the "extreme experiments will allegory" in these stories.
#VPFAExtremes

2 2

Anne-Marie Beller @braddonite.bsky.social · Jul 14

The Sappho panel today was excellent. #VPFAExtremes

Anna Shane @annas1891.bsky.social · Jul 14

Bantock was a champion of the popular and the new in music, and his (and his wife’s) Sappho was a composite of popular and elite cultures, a middlebrow, aspirational piece. This reflects Bantock’s own complex relationship to cultural authority #VPFAExtremes

2 2

Reposted by Anne-Marie Beller

Anna Shane @annas1891.bsky.social · Jul 14

We now have Casey Reeves discussing Renee Vivien and Natalie Burney’s poetry and their use of Sappho to signal to the queer community #VPFAExtremes

5 6

Reposted by Anne-Marie Beller

HistFest @histfest.bsky.social · Jun 11

📣 EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT

To mark the release of her eagerly anticipated new book, VICTORIA’S SECRET: THE PRIVATE PASSION OF A QUEEN, we’re thrilled to announce an exciting new event with historian and author Dr Fern Riddell

7pm, Thurs 24 July | British Library
Book now: histfest.org/victorias-se...

13 30

Reposted by Anne-Marie Beller

culturalcurrents.bsky.social @culturalcurrents.bsky.social · Mar 19

Here's the programme for our free hybrid Symposium on
Periodisation, Generations, and the Gaps Between, Wed 7 May, 1-5pm - register here: www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias...

3 2

Anne-Marie Beller @braddonite.bsky.social · Mar 28

Enjoyed the chance to listen to two of my brilliant colleagues speak about their research on Wednesday, in the midst of a busy busy teaching week. Thank you @jadefrench.bsky.social and Emily ❤️

Loughborough English @lboroenglish.bsky.social · Mar 26

Emily Bell and @jadefrench.bsky.social presented their research this afternoon to doctoral researchers and colleagues, and spoke about the support they’d received, challenges they’d faced, and shared tips about moving from PhD to postdocs to lectureships. 👏🎉🥳

3