The department boasts much research activity in this area, being central to (and the founder of) the Midlands Victorian Studies Seminar, which establishes the region as a centre for study in this area. MIVSS hosts three half day events a year, plus a postgraduate conference which is run by students within the department who form the postgraduate wing of MIVSS.
As well as producing books and journal articles in this area, the department has also been involved with an innovative new Victorian on-line journal project from Blackwell publishers: Marion Thain is the Victorian section editor for Literature Compass, together with Nicholas Dames (Columbia University, NY). Jim Mussell was part of the team that produced the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition, a major, free online edition of six nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers.
Work within the department spans the whole of the nineteenth century and includes many different topics, but the department is particularly strong in the area of Victorian periodisation and contextualising the Victorian, particularly in relation to modernism and the twentieth century. Jim Mussell’s interest in science spans the century and he has published on both early nineteenth-century working class scientific magazines as well as a host of late nineteenth century publications. Marion Thain’s work within the nineteenth century concerns many aspects of Victorian literature and culture, but particularly poetry and poetics.
Much of the department’s expertise is located in the later part of the Victorian period (an area in which we have a very strong and thriving postgraduate community), which fits with the department’s long established strengths in literature of the turn of the century.