Blog Apologies and General Life Update

Hello!  I realised with some shame that it has been two months (ish) since I've updated this blog!  Partly it's because I've been busy, and then because I wasn't sure I had anything to say.  So, I've decided to break the ice with a quick update on the Easter vacation and Trinity Term have been like for me.

In the last two months, I've...

• Gone to Paris, the Loire Valley, and Avignon on vacation (see obligatory Eiffel Tower photo above - with more pictures to come!)
• Finished another section of my thesis, this time discussing domestic violence and other forms of male dominance in the Bronte novels.  Next up is a short section on male relationships (primarily on how they can be damaging when they impinge on domestic/family life).
• Read many books for fun, including some that I plan to review on the blog in the near future.
• Given the Michael Mahoney Graduate Seminar at my college - a one-hour lecture on my research, which was actually really fun, especially as it was followed by a fancy dinner in the chapel (which is currently serving as our dining hall).
• Completely rewrote the end of my novel for the first time.  The ending is different from what I originally intended, but it fits better with my expectations for and conception of the book now.  I hope to start submitting it really, really soon - after one more proofread and a couple small changes.
• Helped to organise this year's Oxford English graduate conference, "Object", which went really, really well.  I chaired a fantastic panel on Victorian material culture; there was an fabulous panel discussion on the Book as Object, featuring Nick Cross, Digital Products Manager at the Oxford University Press and fellow SCWBI member, Paul Nash, the University's printing tutor, and Stephen Walter, text/map artist.  The day was capped off by a fantastic keynote address on the construction of the author as "object" by acclaimed children's author Frances Hardinge.  (Her most recent novel, A Face Like Glass is amazing and Frances is absolutely lovely in person to boot!)
• Went up to London to see The Book of Mormon (amazing, with brilliant music, and much blasphemy - not for the easily offended) and finally visit the Tate Modern (loved the first floor Surrealists, then became increasingly bored by the abstract art and installations - I am a bit of a traditionalist, I suppose)
• More recently, went up to London to see Neil Gaiman talk about his most recent novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.  Amazing.  Also snagged a signed first edition, which is very good so far.
• Plus, I attended the seminars for the Developing Teaching and Learning course run by the Humanities Division and am working on a teaching portfolio to submit in hopes it will gain me Associate Fellow status with the Higher Education Academy.  As part of my teaching training, I ran revision classes and tutorials to prepare first-year Mansfielders for their exam on Victorian literature, which was a rewarding experience.  It was great to really dig into the Victorians with friendly, enthusiastic, and hard-working students.

Okay, I think that's it.  I will try to update more frequently, and will definitely post pictures from our France trip.  The next big thing is that we're going home for two weeks on Saturday, which is shockingly only two sleeps away!  Yikes.

Going to Liverpool!, or Neo-Victorian Cultures: The Victorians Today

Hello, sad, neglected blog.  Today I have a revivifying post full of good news.

I found out a few days ago that I'll be giving a conference paper at the Neo-Victorian Culture: The Victorians Today conference running from 24-26 July at Liverpool John Moores University.  This is exciting because 1) I've never been to Liverpool and 2) I'll get to talk all about Alison Croggon's novel Black Spring, Wuthering Heights, adaptation, fantasy, and feminism!

I reviewed Black Spring here - well worth a read for Bronte fans and fantasy lovers.

In the draft programme, I see I've been placed on a panel called "Fantasizing the Victorians"; one of the other panelists is going to be talking about Terry Pratchett's Discworld.  Clearly this is going to be a great experience.

In other news, I had a really productive Hilary Term after a de-motivated and quite stressful Michaelmas and I think I'll write about some of the strategies I used that I found helpful in the next bit.  Now that the vacation has hit, I'm struggling to get some of my research and writerly get-up-and-go back, but I hope to blog soon on academic matters.  (PS - I also decided to completely restructure my thesis last term - very exciting!)

And in other, other news, Tim and I are heading off to France for a bit over a week in April.  I'm deep in the midst of booking places to stay and figuring out transport, but we're hoping to stay in Paris, Amboise (in the Loire Valley), and Avignon.

Late Summer Adventures, Part 2: BAVS 2012

In my previous post on my late summer adventures, I wrote about our Peak District vacation.  The actual reason for being in the Peak District at all was so I could attend the first two days of BAVS 2012, the annual conference of the British Association of Victorian Studies, hosted this year by the University of Sheffield.

Day One
After some trepidation relating to transport (I had to drive myself there without getting lost and park without injury to people or property), I arrived at The Edge conference centre, which feels brand new and was purpose built for event just like these.  A number of student housing buildings surrounded the conference centre itself, providing perfect accomodation for out of town delegates.

The conference kicked off with a keynote from Francis O'Gorman in which he discussed the idea of IMPACT, so crucial to all those funding applications (sigh), and also the concept of the present-day relevance and influence of particular writers or thinkers.  Do relevance and influence make someone worth studying?

Then it was off to the panels, a veritable smorgasbord of Victorian options, with six panels for each session.  I took in "Ethical Sexualities" first and learned about parallels in the language used to describe vivisection and pornography, about early obscenity law in England (which made a special point of excluding works of art, even those racy French novels), and about Weeds, Jerome K. Jerome's sexually fraught (and pseudonymously published) follow-up to Three Men and a Boat.  Definitely a side of Jerome K. Jerome I knew nothing about!

After, there was a panel on "Value at the Turn of the Century."  My favourite paper here was Sonny Kandola's reading of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey as a vampire novel in everything but name, using aesthetic, imperial, and class lenses.

The postgraduate forum followed next, on the subject of publishing one's first article, with much useful advice given.  I also had the opportunity to meet a representative from Maney Publishing, who happens to be the managing editor of several journals, including Bronte Studies.

Then, dinner, where I happily met several other graduate students working in Victorian studies, mostly in English and History.

Day Two
I should perhaps mention that, like much of the rest of the summer, it was chilly, cloudy, and then downright rainy in Sheffield during the conference.  Coats were very much the order of the day, especially as some of the conference rooms could be rather cool.

I began my day with a panel on "The Ethics of Emotion", which was fascinating.  Katherine Inglis did an in-depth analysis of the much-discussed death of Little Nell, comparing her to "Florentine Venuses," anatomical waxworks produced in Florence from the 1770s on.  Creepy, but very neat.  Arlene Young had another take on Dickens and emotion, and the panel was finished off by Nadine Muller, who gave a talk on the economics, ethics, and aesthetics tied up in the figure of the mid-Victorian widow.  (This was also the first presentation I had seen supported by a Prezi, which I'm now dying to try out).  This talk got me thinking about the role of the widower in Victorian literature, which I suspect isn't a figure loaded with as much cultural anxiety as the anamolous widow, but perhaps it merits investigation.  For my own work, I will be considering Hindley and Edgar Linton in Wuthering Heights, both widowers.

Then I attended the packed session on the digital humanities, which was great fun as the presentations mostly consisted of the speakers telling us about their pet projects, including: Dino Felluga on Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net and NINES, Ian Gregory on GIS and the Lake District, Lisa Hager on The Journal of Victorian Culture Online (which included discussion of a Mrs. Beeton cooking contest), and Adrian Wisnicki on deciphering and then digitizing one of Dr. Livingstone's field journals using multispectral imaging.  All very cool.

Some more serious digital humanities issues came up as well, including the eternal question of how all this work will be evaluated by Tenure and Promotion committees who are used to the academic journal article and monograph style of academic work.  Also, how do you make sure your project stays accessible as technologies change?  Or, do you embrace the ephemerality of the web?  I was intrigued by Lisa Hager's suggestion that the blog post is its own particular genre of academic writing and one that students should be taught.  This is something I've thought about a bit when writing for Great Writers Inspire.

Then I took in my last panel, "Masculine Economies", before heading back to my Rivelin Valley cottage for the last time to pack.  This panel included discussion of Crimean War trench art and the domestication of the battlefield souvenir, as well as the issue of male beauty in Jane Eyre and The Picture of Dorian Grey and mutiny and the mutineer in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South.

The next morning, I successfully drove myself through four roundabouts (happily mostly empty as it was early Saturday morning) on Sheffield's ring road and returned my rental car.  Then I headed home to my next adventure: showing my best friend from Canada around England.

Final BAVS-related thoughts:  I really enjoyed my first BAVS conference and I plan to go again.  I might even see if I can get out to next year's combined BAVS/NAVSA/AVSA conference in Venice...  I also appreciated that there was a large postgraduate presence and the postgraduate panel, which made me feel rather at home.  Also, it was lovely to finally meet a few academics I had been following on Twitter over the summer, including Nadine Muller and Jessica Cox.  Also, the facilities and the organization were top notch.

Tricking Myself Into Writing: 5 Strategies

This post is brought to you by ... Procrastination!

Well, here I am.  Tomorrow, I have to turn in a conference paper to my supervisor, which is great, because that means I'll have the rest of the week to tweak and improve.  However, this also means I have to finish the darn thing in the next 24 hours.  (I'm sitting at 3 pages at the moment.  I have at least 7 to go).

In the old days, by which I mean, undergrad, I would think and plan and collect primary source quotations and usually write papers in the last day, maybe two before they were due.  They were always done on time, but they were also usually completed at a bit of a sprint, over the course of a few very painful days.

Toward the end of my Master's thesis, a much longer and more involved process, I began to come up with some strategies to help myself approach writing, an activity that I love and hate, that is easy and brain-achingly hard, and that I will apparently avoid at all costs.

1. I figured out that if I could convince myself to refine and enlarge my outline enough times, I would end up accidentally starting a draft.  That draft would also be relatively easy, because I would have laid out all my points and page references and quotations ahead of time.

2.  A bit later, I discovered that writing longhand, especially at the beginning of the paper worked well.  I couldn't obsess over word count; the white page seemed less foreboding that the flickering white screen.

3.  A bit later, I learned the trick of "messiness".  This works especially well if I'm writing to a constrictive word count for a proposal or abstract.  I tell myself, well, I'll just get my ideas down first, and then I can shape the proposal later, even if my sentences don't make sense or are hugely wordy.  If I start on paper, I can easily refine as I type everything up.

4.  Cannibalize from other documents.  Starting an a paper is hard.  If I can steal an opening paragraph from a related essay (even if I have to change it around a fair bit later), I can skip the difficulty of opening and play around with tweaking and shaping raw material instead.  Afterwards, continuing is much less difficult.

5.  Rewriting.  I discovered today, yet again, how hard transitioning from one part of a paper to another can be.  Answer?  Rewrite the previous paragraph or section and then write what comes next.  I know that once I get back into the flow of writing, words/ideas will probably show up in my head without too much more effort.  Rereading previous material can also serve the same purpose, and is something that has worked well in the past for novel-writing too.

I'm actually feeling pretty good about this paper (on male homosocial bonds and sibling rivalry in Charlotte and Branwell Bronte's early writing).  It feels like the ideas are snapping and sparking against each other.  I've got primary and secondary sources ready to be referred to; I'm surrounded by my books and papers; I actually have a firm argument (hurrah!).  So... now I guess I really just need to get back to it.

Three Newsy Things

Today's post comes to you in three parts: 1) Great Writers Inspire, an Open Educational Resource Project; 2) the 2012 Oxford University English Graduate Conference; and 3) University College London's English Graduate Conference, which I'll be speaking at!

1)  Great Writers Inspire

I've recently had the good fortune to become a student ambassador for the Great Writers Inspire project, which is based out of the University of Oxford and funded by JISC.  This is an open educational resource highlighting great writers and overall literary themes.  The website (when live) will put together introductory essays, podcasts by Oxford faculty, e-texts, and other resources that can be reused in educational settings.  I think this is a great way to share a love of literature.  At the moment, new content is being released on the blog, where you can find my very first post on why poor, overlooked Anne Bronte is a great writer.


2)  2012 Oxford University English Graduate Conference: Return to the Political: Literary Aesthetics and the Influence of Political Thought

As some of you may know, I'm on the organizing committee for the English Faculty's graduate conference, taking place on June 1st.  The deadline for submission of abstracts is speedily approaching (March 1st), so if you happen to be an English graduate student, please do send along a proposal.  I need to write mine up too...  More information on the lovely website.  If you aren't interested in giving a paper, consider registering to attend the conference: our keynote speaker is Booker-winner Ben Okri and there will be a lively panel discussion around the question of "What is a Classic?".  Plus, graduate student papers, of course.

3)  2012 University College London English Graduate Conference: Intersections

I'm going to be giving another paper at this conference, on March 9th as part of a student panel on Collaboration and Allusion (which begins at 4:30 pm if you are interested in attending).  My paper is called "Homosocial Bonds and Sibling Rivalry in the Collaborative Early Writing of Charlotte and Branwell Bronte."  Thankfully, this material will end up in the first chapter of my thesis as well, so that relieves some of the stress of working up a conference paper.  Also, this means I will get to speak at Senate House, which is a gorgeous and huge early 20th century building, quite close to the British Museum.