Anne-Marie Beller

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

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 👇

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…

🚨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 a.m.beller@lboro.ac.uk for more information

Contents page of a book

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.

Such a great keynote. #VPFAExtremes

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

Lovely #VPFA peeps ♥️

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

Victorian Popular Fictions 7.1 8 Butler-Way 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…

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...

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

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

#VPFAExtremes #VPFA #bmi1854 #birmingham #victorian

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

‘Even grammatical’! 😂

My favourite fact of the first day! #VPFAExtremes

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sappho panel today was excellent. #VPFAExtremes

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

Event poster. Headshot to author Fern Riddell (left) and her new book cover (right), Victoria’s Secret: The Private Passion of a Queen.

📣 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...

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...

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 ❤️

Her Majesty the Queen unveils Aphra Behn statue following campaign involving Loughborough English professor Her Majesty the Queen has officially unveiled a historic statue of Aphra Behn in Canterbury today, marking a momentous occasion in the recognition of the first full-time professional woman writer in t...

Loughborough English professor Elaine Hobby has been with Her Majesty the Queen today at the unveiling of a statue of Aphra Behn - the first professional woman writer.

The event took place in Behn's home city of Canterbury.

Read more: 👇

bit.ly/4bdmmaD

Periodisation, Generations, and the Gaps Between Hybrid - International House & Zoom Webinar, 7 May 2025, 1:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Event alert! Periodisation, Generations, and the Gaps Between Symposium, 7 May 2025, 1-5pm BST, feat. @amigonidavid.bsky.social @helenkingstone.bsky.social Fatima Borrman and Helen Small, organised by me and @jadefrench.bsky.social hybrid and FREE, register here: www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias...

👋Hello Bluesky! We are now officially "live" and will regularly post announcements, tidbits, and other exciting news that will interest our members and friends across the sky! Follow us, tag us, invite your friends to join us and we will endeavor to do the same!

My favourite Dickens character, the Goblin of Avignon, points gleefully to a pit during her enthusiastic tour of a former inquisition chamber

Madame Defarge (on the right) squares up against Miss Pross (on the left). Who will win? There's only one way to find out: FIIIIIIIIIGHT!!!!

Two Dickens talks for the price of one today: first stop is Eastbourne to deliver the Birthday talk (on Madame Defarge and the Goblin of Avignon) to their Dickens Fellowship branch, then straight to London to talk about editing Pictures from Italy to my Dickens postgraduates.

The deep cultural cost of British university job cuts | Letters Letters: Arts and humanities are being hit hardest by cuts in higher education, write Prof Thea Pitman and Prof Emma Cayley, and Dr Ronan McLaverty-Head and another letter writer comment on cuts at Ca...

The deep cultural cost of British university job cuts

Arts and humanities are being hit hardest by cuts in higher education, write Prof Thea Pitman and Prof Emma Cayley

www.theguardian.com/education/20...