Dr Franziska Kohlt

From the week beginning 28th of April and throughout May 2014, Oxford University Natural History Museum will be hosting a small exhibition on the history of natural mimicry and camouflage, curated by Dr Will Abberley.

‘Faking It: Victorian Natural History and the Science of Disguise’ will display books and papers from the museum archives relating to the Victorian naturalists Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates. There will also be eye-catching insect specimens from the museum’s Hope Collection which demonstrate natural mimicry and camouflage across the world.

Dr Abberley will be giving a table-top talk at the museum on all of the objects and the historical background to theories of natural mimicry on Sunday 11th May at 11.30AM. See page 5 of the museum spring/summer programme for more details.

The display will be found in the ‘Presenting’ case near the front entrance.

I bring you breaking news from the Museum of Natural History. As you all know, the Museum has been closed for over a year and, during that time, a number of our specimens have been popping up in unlikely places around Oxford city centre.

The Goes to Town project has seen a penguin in the fish mongers, a bank vole in the bank and a book worm in a book shop. All was going swimmingly until today.

We’ve been receiving reports from several of our Goes to Town venues that there’s been a breakout. The snowy owl has vanished from the University Church, the edible insects have escaped from the Turl St Kitchen and a white rabbit is on the loose from the Central Library. There’s trouble afoot.

We’ve put together a special bulletin of Oxford University Museum of Natural History News.

Reporters Bethany Palumbo, Jess Suess and Scott Billings…

Saturday 1 March 2014, 11am–5.30 pm 

This one-day symposium at Wolfson College, Cambridge will consider Dickens’s letter writing in the context of his life and novels, with papers from leading Dickensian scholars including Michael Slater, Jenny Hartley and Paul Schlicke. Presented and hosted by the Dickens Fellowship, with generous support from Wolfson College, the symposium will pay tribute to Margaret Brown and her lifetime work editing Dickens’s letters.
Speakers 
ANGUS EASSON: ‘“A Dickens Letter! – Is It or Ain’t It?”: Some Forgeries and Some Questions’
JENNY HARTLEY: ‘Letters in Dickens’s Novels’
LEON LITVACK: ‘Dickens’s Irish Friends and Family Ties in the Letters’
PAUL SCHLICKE: ‘Reading between the Lines: Dickens and his Second-Best Scottish Friend’
MICHAEL SLATER: ‘Dangerous Quarrying: Dickens’s Letters and the Biographer’
Fee: £21.00 (includes a sandwich lunch, morning and afternoon tea and coffee, and a wine reception)
Contact: Dr Christine Corton, Wolfson College, Cambridge CB3 9BB (clc67@cam.ac.uk

Free symposium: Damaging the Body
Thursday 17th October 2013, 6-9 pm
Damaging the Body
Body and Mind: Mesmerism in Nineteenth Century Culture and Literature
Barts Pathology Museum

This symposium will seek to explore the relationship between the sciences and Victorian mesmerism, psychical research and parapsychology.

This event has been kindly sponsored by the British Society for Literature and Science.

Speakers:

Prof. William Hughes (Bath Spa University) ‘The Theatre of His Beastly Exhibitions’: The Erotic Nature of Early Victorian Magnetism’

Andreas Sommer (UCL Centre for the History of Psychological Disciplines) ‘Mesmerism, hypnotism and the formation of modern psychology in Germany’

This event is free but tickets will need to be booked in advance.

Book online here.

The event will take place at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Pathology Museum and Gallery, 3rd Floor, Robin Brook Centre, West Smithfield, London, EC1A 7BE 

Nearest tube: St Paul’s

Doors open at 6pm, when there…

IBBY UK/NCRCL MA CONFERENCE, 9 NOVEMBER 2013
University of Roehampton, London.
Call for Papers on the theme of ‘Feast orFamine: Food and Children’s Literature’

As a focus for imaginative gratification, food has a long-standing relationship with children’s literature. Sinclair’s jam-filled ‘coach-wheel’ in The Holiday House (1839) revolutionised Evangelist writing, as culinary reward overshadows recrimination; marmalade sandwiches and honeypots are as iconic as the Paddington and Pooh bears who favour them; and the delights of feasting reach from the comic visualization of The Beano to the excessive wizardry of Hogwarts banqueting. Darker shadows also trouble this relationship though; Brenda’s philanthropy in Froggy’s Little Brother (1875) witnesses the starvation of mice and children, while Andy Mulligan’s Trash (2010) condemns capitalist greed. Moving beyond the immediate concerns of children’s literature, the rise of cup-cake culture in the early 21^st century and the recent success of the BBC’s TheGreat British Bake…

CFP – Lesser Victorians: Beyond the Canon in Victorian Fiction

Trinity College Dublin, Ireland – 12-13 September 2013

Deadline for proposals: 31 May 2013

“sun destroys/ The interest of what’s happening in the shade” (Philip Larkin)

Scholarly research into the iconic fictions of canonical Victorian writers like Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot and Hardy continues to grow and ramify in rich and often unexpected ways. Thanks however to unprecedented and ever-expanding digital access to works long out of print, as well as ongoing excavations by scholars such as John Sutherland, the issue of non-canonical, ‘minor’ and outright forgotten fictions is now on the agenda of Victorian studies as never before.

This two-day conference will be dedicated very particularly to just such marginalised fictions and their writers. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers whose focus might include but would not be restricted to:

·      close readings of individual texts;

·      critical appreciations of…