19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Clara Zarza, 'Wonder and Desire in the Museum: Immersive Devices from Akeley’s Early Habitat Dioramas to Eliasson’s Contemporary Art Installations'

Rachel Ozerkevich, Cameras, Handwork, and Bodily Traces: Overpainted Photomechanical Images of Athletes and their Terrains

Megan Nash,'"No photons to capture": Electric Lighting and Visual Culture at Binoomea (Jenolan Caves)'

Kelly Presutti, '"Brutal magic": Staging Human-Environmental Relations in the Anthropocene'

Robert Thomas Kilroy,'Tailoring Authenticity: A Media Post-Mortem of the Daguerreotype through the NFT'

Alaz Okudan, 'Camera Archaeologia: A Media Archaeological Investigation into the Contemporary Use of Nineteenth-Century Photographic Processes'

Amrita Biswas and Johanna Laub, 'Reconstructing Nineteenth-Century Frankfurt: Time Travel in TimeRide and the Neue Altstadt'

Rachel Lee Hutcheson, 'On Screen and in Living Colours: Vision and Early Colour Photography'

Heidi Aronson Kolk, 'Picturing Hart Island: Negative Heritage Reclaimed'

Tina Wasserman, 'Cinema Redivivus: Bill Morrison and Early Cinema’s Spectral Return'

TOC
Patricia Smyth &Gülru Çakmak, 'Nineteenth-Century Technologies, Contemporary Stakes'

Kris Belden-Adams,'Plaster Peaks, Photography, and the Spread of Scientific Knowledge: The Tale of Tenerife'

Melody Davis, 'Behind the Scenes with Franklin George Weller: The Creation of Stereoscopic Tableaux'

New issue alert!

‘Nineteenth-Century Visual Technologies in Contemporary Practices’, guest edited by Gülru Çakmak and Patricia Smyth is now freely available online at 19.bbk.ac.uk. @openlibhums.org

🚨 Last call! 🚨
We're HIRING an Editorial Officer — deadline is this 📅 Sunday, 8 June 2025! If you're an academic passionate about open access publishing, we encourage you to apply.

Fully remote position!

Apply now: cis7.bbk.ac.uk/vacancy/edit...

Thanks to all who attended last week’s screening of ‘The Man Who Painted His House’, which played to a packed Birkbeck cinema. @bbkhistorical.bsky.social @britishacademy.bsky.social @19birkbeck.bsky.social

More on this project soon!

The research we share here participates in ongoing efforts to redefine the parameters of nineteenth-century studies — in the context of the four nations and across the globe — and seeks to encourage further comparative research into the intertwined histories of literature and language.

Contributors present close analyses of texts that work to codify and disrupt linguistic hierarchies; that interrogate evolutionary narratives of linguistic development (and decline); and that shed light on the creative possibilities of engagement with linguistic plurality in its richly varied forms.

It also considers literature’s role in campaigns to preserve and revive linguistic diversity.

11 new essays explore how literature across the long C19th imagined and presented relations between the languages of Britain and Ireland, and how it questioned, reflected, and contributed to the sociolinguistic developments that marginalized (and continue to marginalize) languages other than English

19.bbk.ac.uk

The new issue of our open access journal (ed. by @drkarinkoehler.bsky.social and Gregory Tate) asks how our understanding of nineteenth-century literature and culture changes when we attend more closely to the four nations’ multilingual past and present

@drkarinkoehler.bsky.social @bavs-uk.bsky.social @navsa.bsky.social @openlibhums.bsky.social @luisacale.bsky.social @drvickymills.bsky.social @cncsi.bsky.social

New issue now available!

'Issue 37: Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages' asks how our understanding of C19th literature and culture changes when we attend more closely to the multilingual past and present of the 4 nations in the UK.

Ed. by Karin Koehler and Gregory Tate

19.bbk.ac.uk

Preview screening of my short film ‘The Man Who Painted His House’ on the life and extraordinary work of Victorian art-workman David Parr. 7th May 6 pm Birkbeck Cinema 43 Gordon Square. @bbkhistorical.bsky.social @19birkbeck.bsky.social

Book your tickets here!

www.bbk.ac.uk/events/event....

To close our latest issue, Professor Jacqueline Rose asks what nineteenth-century literary writing, and especially Mary Shelley’s relatively unknown novel 'Valperga', can teach us about the crisis facing the humanities today.

Read at: 19.bbk.ac.uk/article/id/1...

What did The Strand look like in 1823, through the eyes of William Blake at Fountain Court, or Mary Shelley at the church of St Clement's?

@afoggyplace.bsky.social walks us through the buskers, crowds, and pub meetings for radicals in her fascinating article: 19.bbk.ac.uk/article/id/1...

In our latest issue, Emi Del Bene examines a rousing poem on Polish independence by Stanisław Egbert Koźmian, an entry in Anna Birkbeck's album which offers insights into the networks of European political exiles and insurrectionists in 1820-30s London.

19.bbk.ac.uk

In our latest issue, Zoe Baron and Beatrice Mossman examine ‘M.S. Lines on Lady Caroline Lamb’, a poem by salon hostess and travel writer Elizabeth Spence which illuminates the provocative friendships, class dynamics, and fraught gender expectations of the early 19th century.

19.bbk.ac.uk

Continuing this issue's examination of contributions to Anna Birkbeck’s album, Professor Isobel Armstrong analyses the poetry of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, who advocated ‘the public circulation of affect and the necessity of dreaming as a social need’.

Read at: 19.bbk.ac.uk

In our latest issue, Dr. David McAllister unearths a little-known poem of geologist Gideon Mantell, featured in Anna Birkbeck's 1825 album, and offers a fascinating example of the imbrication of scientific and literary writing in the Romantic era.

Read this article and more at 19.bbk.ac.uk

How did developments in adult education from 1823 shape Birkbeck, and how has the college adapted to survive over time?

Read Laurel Brake's fantastic article, followed by Robyn Jakeman's timeline, at 19.bbk.ac.uk

Was the London Mechanics' Institute (now @BirkbeckUoL) a pioneer of the visual lecture? Read @Prof_JPlunkett on the university's fascinating attempts to illustrate knowledge: from diagrams & transparencies to magic lantern shows to live experiments. 19.bbk.ac.uk

It is! I don't know when it happened as I've not been down that way in a while. It looked vaguely permanent though....

Celebrating Birkbeck English and a new edition of @19birkbeck.bsky.social on the anniversary of the college foundation day last night. A fantastic issue put together by @luisacale.bsky.social

A picture of the Midland Grand hotel in London decorated with neon signage advertising a gothic bar

"I believe, then, that the characteristics of Gothic are the following, placed in the order of their
importance:
1. Savageness
2. Changefulness
3. Naturalism
4. Grotesqueness
5. Rigidity
6. Redundance
6. Big neon signs bearing the word 'Gothic' in a sort of spooky typeface."

John Ruskin

Research Associate in Victorian Cultural and Material History at Lancaster University Looking for a new job opportunity in academia? Check out this job opening for a Research Associate in Victorian Cultural and Material History on jobs.ac.uk!

The advert for our Research Associate post in Victorian Cultural and Material History is now up on jobs.ac.uk - www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DKS158/r...
Please spread the word!!!!

Here's the link: 19.bbk.ac.uk/article/id/1... And here's the Westminster Review: catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/00050...

The Westminster Review and the London Mechanics’ Institution were established within months of each other in 1823–24.

In our latest issue, Hilary Fraser unearths the early history of these two initiatives and the radical London milieu that produced them.

Read at: 19.bbk.ac.uk