Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies

Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies

The Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies has a long-standing reputation as an internationally recognised centre of excellence devoted to reconsidering the concept of the Victorian for the contemporary world. 

Well-known for its interdisciplinary focus, the work of the Centre queries and ​tests chronological boundaries by reconsidering conceptions of the long nineteenth century, as well as examining representations of the Victorians and reconfigurations of Victorianism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The interdisciplinary focus has been extended to embrace creative writing, with practice-based researchers reimaging and reinterpreting the Victorian age through poetry.

The Centre tests geographical boundaries by considering what the concept of the Victorian meant on the world stage, including the British Empire. It generates impactful research, bringing insights from rigorous scholarly study to bear on urgent questions of social justice and inclusion, climate change and the environment. 

The Centre’s activities include: 

• A programme of seminars and workshop events 
• Conferences
• Contributions to the Being Human Festival 
• PhD supervision opportunities  
• Sponsorship of the Journal of Victorian Culture 
• An annual lecture by a Visiting Professor: previous appointees have included Professor Peter Mandler (Cambridge), Professor Dinah Birch (Liverpool), Professor Miles Taylor (York), Ann Heilmann (Cardiff) and Pratik Chakrabarti (Houston). 

You can more about our research projects and outp​uts through the University's Research database . Also see some highlights from the LCVS blog and more about our Directors and members below. 

LCVS Seminars

2024-25: Schedule

All Seminars are on Microsoft Teams: please email lcvs@leedstrinity.ac.uk for a link to attend.

12th September 2024, 12.00-2.00 pm.

Book launch for paperback edition of Literature and Image in the Long Nineteenth Century: Speaking Picture and Silent Text, edited by LCVS Co-Director Amina Alyal, with chapters by LCVS members.

11th November 2024, 7.30-9.00 pm.

Karen Sayer (LCVS) - ‘Agricultural computing and the C19th interest in data.

When thinking and writing about history of agriculture, ‘technology’ has often been used as shorthand for ‘tool’ or ‘machine.’ More recently, historians have come to recognise farmed livestock and plants as technologies, and interrogated their creation, manipulation and use. But they have little to say about information technologies – the paper-based, mechanical and electronic methods that farmers, researchers and policy makers used to capture, process and analyse farming data from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, with legacies today in ‘precision farming’ and ‘digital agriculture’.

The paper will explore the relationship of nineteenth- to twentieth-century data-use, husbandry, and policy, via a focus on livestock production. The emergence of a demand for a national UK census for livestock (where statistics were an emergent agricultural technology for husbandry) for instance was initially a product of an immediate need to assess the extent of animal deaths from disease, and the collection of empirical knowledge that was supposed to be of direct practical value in animal husbandry. Yet, in political discourse the value of counting livestock lay more clearly in the demonstration at a national level that British agriculture was productive. The annual census was more useful for computing and comparing the head of British livestock with international results, that had more rhetorical utility as a form of conspicuous production, than it had value in tackling disease. Come the mid-twentieth century, the electric computer, analogue and digital, was being promoted as an increasingly powerful tool on the farm, in the lab, in R&D and government. By the 1980s, modern farming depended heavily on such technologies to record and make sense of the vast amount of data collected in association with it: censuses, prices, yields, records of pedigrees and performance, surveys, accounting etc. Moreover, in agricultural science, policy and economics, the acquisition and use of such data had come to be regarded as key to the modernisation of farming practices.

Plant Humanities and Kew’s Colonial Archive - 9th December 2024, 7.30-9.00 pm.
Heather Craddock (Kew Gardens)

This seminar will explore histories of Caribbean colonial botany in the Miscellaneous Reports, an archival collection held at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which documents economic botany across the British Empire. This research considers some of the points of contact between literary ecocriticism and the plant humanities, and how these approaches can be used to examine the cultural role of Caribbean plants in the archive. Focusing on the role of the Jamaican Botanical Department in the late nineteenth century, I will map the connections between botanical gardens, forests, plantations, and provision grounds during the peak of colonial botanical activities in the region. Led by the archive, this paper will uncover absences arising from its colonial origins and incorporate external materials including travel writing, literature, and visual representations to respond to these silences. I argue that plants and spaces of plant cultivation are central to resistance to colonial control in Jamaica, supporting the maintenance of Jamaican cultural identity both in and beyond colonial spaces.

13th January 2025, 7.30-9.00 pm.

Edwin Stockdale (LCVS), ‘‘Heaven-silvered on the underside’: The Afterlife of Edward II’s Gender and Sexuality in Life Writing from the Long Nineteenth Century to the Present’.

Even though Edward II was a medieval monarch, there are several links to Victorian Studies and the long nineteenth century. Queen Victoria held a Plantagenet Ball at Buckingham Palace on 12 May 1842, where Prince Albert came as Edward III (Edward II’s son), and she was dressed as Phillipa of Hainault (Edward III’s Queen Consort). There are prints of Victoria and Albert in their costumes available through the Mary Evans Picture Library. Sir Edwin Landseer also painted a portrait of Victoria and Albert in their costumes. Agnes Strickland published a Lives of the Queens of England in 12 volumes from 1840-48. In 1872, Marcus Stone’s painting, Edward II and his favourite, Piers Gaveston, was displayed at the Royal Academy in London. This relationship to Victorian Studies and the long nineteenth century is double edged because it is positive that the Victorians awakened an interest in medievalism. At the same time, however, the nineteenth-century negative attitudes towards gender and sexuality are still causing grief in the twenty-first century. In this seminar I argue that poetry’s ability to re-interpret the past creatively offers unique possibilities through which to explore King Edward II’s (1284-1327) bisexuality.

I begin by discussing what historians have written about Edward, both negative and positive, particularly works by Alison Weir (2005, 2022), Seymour Phillips (2010), Roy Martin Haines (2003), Kathryn Warner (2014, 2016, 2024), Stephen Spinks (2017), and Caroline Burt and Richard Partington (2024). Then, I look at theories of life writing, including Sara Neale and Derek Haslam (2009), Hermione Lee (2009), Sally Cline and Carole Angier (2013), Katerina Bryant (2021) and Karen Lamb (2021). Next, I examine creative writing more generally, particularly Hazel Smith (2005). I also quote examples from contemporary poets who have used queer history, including Seán Hewitt, John McCullough, Richard Scott and Gregory Woods. Finally, I share some examples of my own poems, to demonstrate how I used all of these facets in my life writing on Edward II.

10th February 2025, 7.30-9.00 pm.

Andrea Hetherington, ‘“Hard Cases” - Britain's First War Widows and the pension struggle.

10th March 2025, 7.30-9.00 pm.

Richard Storer (LCVS): ‘“Fellow Craftsmen”?  Thomas Hardy’s dealings with Hall Caine’.

From the LCVS blog

Directors and contact

LCVS Directors: Professor Karen Sayer, Professor Rev Jane de ​Gay, Dr Amina Alyal​.

For more information, please email lcvs@leedstrinity.ac.uk