Research Blogs

  Sam Saunders is a current PhD candidate at Liverpool John Moores University, where he is researching the role of the periodical press on the construction and evolution of Victorian detective fiction. His research explores non-fiction periodical discussions on the police and crime, as well as early examples of serialised crime fiction. Sam has previously written for the British Association for Victorian Studies and is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post UK. He is also completing articles for the Journal of the Police History Society and the Law Crime and History Journal, due to be published later this year. […]

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  Amelia Joulain-Jay is a PhD candidate in History/Linguistics at Lancaster University. For her PhD project, she has been exploring the promises and challenges involved in using corpus linguistics to derive historical insights from large amounts of digitised historical texts. She was awarded the 2016 Gale Dissertation Research Fellowship in Nineteenth-Century Media for this work. She will be delighted to answer (to the best of her abilities) any queries you may have about using corpus linguistics for your research on c19th newspapers. You can contact her on Twitter via @joulain_jay or email her at a.t.joulain@lancaster.ac.uk.   Corpus Linguistics, and why you […]

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  Megan Peiser is a PhD candidate in the department of English at the University of Missouri where she is currently working on her dissertation, ‘British Women Novelists and the Review Periodical, 1790-1820’. Her project uses her Novels Reviewed Database, 1790-1820 (NRD) to track the contemporary critical response to the only period in literary history when women published more novels than men. She is particularly interested in how the fields of book history, literature, digital humanities, and material culture intersect in the field of periodicals studies. You can contact her on Twitter via @MeganPeiser or email her at megan.l.peiser@mail.missouri.edu. Review Periodicals […]

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  Emily Eiben is a PhD candidate in the department of Religious Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Her project focuses on the popularisation of Buddhism through the British periodical and newspaper press in the years 1875 to 1895 – between when the Prince of Wales visited the Buddha’s tooth in Ceylon in 1875 and when Sarah Bernhardt starred in a Buddhist-themed stage play in London in 1895. She is particularly fascinated by the way that pop culture and the media joined forces to create an enthusiastic new audience for a once little-known ‘heathen’ religion and the ways that this enthusiasm was […]

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  Emma Burris-Janssen is a third-year PhD student at the University of Connecticut. Her research interests centre on gendered violence and trauma, which is how she became acquainted with the work of Mona Caird and the Great Marriage Debate of 1888, and she is currently working on a larger project connecting Mona Caird’s work on marriage with that of Thomas Hardy. Her dissertation will bring these research interests into tighter focus by examining figurations of criminalised abortion in the British periodical press (particularly medical journals) and the British novel from 1861-1967. As this project is in its early stages, reading […]

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  Lucy Warwick is a PhD candidate at the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies at Oxford Brookes University. Her thesis focuses on the representation of the British Empire in the works of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 1832-1845. She can be contacted via Twitter @LxWarwick and at lwarwick@brookes.ac.uk   Piecing the Story Together   They are probably the most dreaded and feared words for any researcher: ‘not in place’, or even worse, ‘missing’, ‘lost’. These words strike fear into my heart as a library invigilator as well as a researcher. Sometimes the archives just don’t exist, they’ve […]

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