New Blog!

Looking Glasses at Odd Corners has moved! This site will remain live, but posts and information, old and new, have now been moved and updated.

Please visit: http://amberregis.com for the continuing adventures of this life-writing researcher...

Publication: Early Career Victorianists and Social Media (JVC 17.3 -- iFirst release)

Just a quick post to announce the publication of my article on academic blogging and tweeting:

‘Early career Victorianists and social media: impact, audience and online identities’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 17:3 (2012)

It will appear in the autumn issue of the journal, but has been released early via iFirst alongside Rohan Maitzen’s article on ‘Scholarship 2.0: Blogging and/as Academic Practice’.

My article was written with the help of fellow bloggers Charlotte Mathieson, Bob Nicholson and Paul Dobraszczyk. It also owes a heavy debt to the various online communities fostered by social media and brought together via Twitter hastags: #phdchat #phdadvice #acwri #academia #highered #loveHE #twitterstorians #twitcrit #twitterature to name but a few!

JVC Bloggers Fair

The Journal of Victorian Culture Online website is staging a Bloggers Fair this month. Each day a new blog is featured; the author reflects on its content and discusses their motive(s) for writing.  So far, Rohan Maitzen’s Novel Readings and Mark Blacklock’s The Fairyland of Geometry have enjoyed the spotlight, as has Looking Glasses At Odd Corners.

Looking Glasses At Odd Corners as featured in the JVC Online Bloggers Fair,
2 May 2012

A feature on this blog was used to ‘launch’ the Bloggers Fair and very soon my article on early career Victorianists and social media will be published (and made open access). This article will, I hope, help to contextualise JVC's Bloggers Fair by exploring the processes, purposes and motives at work in the Victorian (and neo-Victorian) blogosphere.


I will update the following list as the Bloggers Fair progresses:

1. Looking Glasses At Odd Corners by Amber Regis

Life-writing and life narrative across media and genres.


2. The Fairyland of Geometry by Mark Blacklock

Nineteenth-century engagements with ‘higher dimensional’ space.


3. Novel Readings by Rohan Maitzen

Reflections on reading, research and teaching.


4. Art and Perfume by Christina Bradstreet
Smell in nineteenth-century art and culture.


5. A Special Mention by Gaby Malcolm
Reflections on research, with particular reference to Mary Braddon.


6. The Old Curiosity Shop by Jolette Roodt
Links to Victorian-related websites and posts that focus on new books about the period.


7. Research Blog and Teaching Blog by Charlotte Mathieson
Reflections, reviews and discussions of nineteenth-century literature and contemporary resonances.


8. Neo-Victorian Thoughts by Louisa Yates
Reflections on how the Victorians and Victoriana reveal themselves in contemporary culture.


9. Girls' Literature and Culture by Michelle Smith
Reflections on how girls are situated in nineteenth-century and contemporary popular culture.


10. Scotland's History Uncovered by Lynne Wilson
Scottish social history, with particular reference to the Victorian period.


11. North East Nineteenth Century by the North East Postgraduate Research Group for the Long Nineteenth Century
Community blog run by postgraduates at the Universities of Newcastle, Northumbria and Durham. Events, calls for papers, discussion and information about group members.

Blog in the News: On Self-Promotion and Networking

Waiting by Dave Walker
Source: We Blog Cartoons

While a busy teaching schedule and writing projects have been keeping me away from the blog over the last few weeks, the blog has been active in my absence. Others have been taking notice, and the blog has been featured on the Journal of Victorian Culture Online website, in the Times Higher Education, and has even received a special mention at a Victorian Studies conference.

Last year I wrote a post inspired by the different life narratives emerging from two very similar objects: Victorian decoupage screens. In turn, this was quoted by Charlotte Mathieson in a short essay exploring literary tourism and readers’ responses to place. Mathieson has now revised this post for the Journal of Victorian Culture Online, providing a timely contribution to Dickens 2012 bicentenary debates. As a result, my blog has enjoyed increased traffic with readers clicking through…

Posts exploring the phenomenon of celebrity memoir have also been revived. Responding to a tweet from @TimesHigherArts asking followers to confess their guilty reading pleasures, I got in touch and admitted to reading Dawn French’s Dear Fatty, and what is more, declared I was willing to defend it in print! The result was a short snippet in the Times Higher Education’s ‘What Are You Reading?’ column -- a few words in defence of celebrity memoir and a link to my blog post reviewing the work.

And then, yesterday, I was sitting in the audience of a keynote lecture at a conference on Nineteenth-Century Memory: Approaches and Appropriations (held at Leeds Trinity University College) when my blog was mentioned in the Q&A session. Trev Broughton had delivered a fascinating talk on memory and forgetting in Victorian biography, part of which compared the urge to produce biography to the desire for souvenirs (i.e. biography as an aide-mémoire, sustaining the presence of something -- or someone -- past). I put up my hand and asked about the emergence of biographical series (such as Morley’s ‘English Men of Letters’) and how these might relate to the act of collecting souvenirs. In her response, Broughton referenced my post on souvenirs and self-fashioning (and the picture of me with a Bronte tea towel!) as a spur to her reading of souvenirs, biography and memory. In addition to being terribly flattering, this mention prompted several delegates to approach me and ask about the blog. The post in question has since received several hits and Google searches...

So what’s the value of all this shameless self-promotion? The three instances listed above provide a useful demonstration of the benefits of engaging with social media as an academic, particularly an early career academic: attention has been drawn to my work, I have engaged directly with other researchers on the social web, and I have forged new connections with new readers. Social media has thus helped me to ‘network’ – an oft-dreaded activity that used to be confined to the in-between times at conferences, involving awkward conversations over coffee cups. But networking can now extend beyond the temporal and physical space of a conference; conversations can start before an event and continue long after, with connections being made online. In fact, networking is no longer the preserve of conferences and other research events; plugged-in academics are networked and networking all the time.

Communities on the social web were a recurrent theme in my recent research into early career Victorianists’ use of blogging and Twitter. I have just completed a short article on this topic, the writing of which was a collegial affair: commissioned as a result of my blogging activity, and drawing on case studies and contributions from #phdchat and #phdpostdoc Twitter communities. So yes, all this blogging and tweeting is a form of shameless self-promotion, but it’s also something more. The clue is in the name: social media and the social web. It’s about making connections, forming communities, offering support. In getting your name ‘out there’, you are not a voice crying out in the wilderness. A blog ‘in the news’ is a blog in conversation.


Update: A revised version of this post has been published on the PhD2Published website.

On Academic Blogging

Become a Famous Blogger by Dave Walker
Source: We Blog Cartoons

I’ve been thinking a lot about blogging recently, and about academic blogging in particular. Why do academics turn to the blogosphere? What motives lurk behind this practice, and how do academics perceive their online identity? Do they view their online presence as part of, or separate from, the multiple performances that comprise their professional identity, e.g. conference participation, print publication and teaching?

Over the last few days I’ve put together a rather crude questionnaire intended to probe academic bloggers, to get an insight into their motives, uses and the benefits of their blogging activities. Since the result of my ponderings will be distilled into an article for a Victorianist journal, I have sent this questionnaire to three bloggers working in the broad field of Victorian Studies:

• Paul Dobraszczyk, a Leverhulme Early-Career Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, an historian with interests in art, architecture and material culture. Paul blogs at ‘Rag Picking History’ and he provides a strikingly visual account of his travels and research into Victorian ironworks and unusual spaces (such as a recent post on the Williamson Tunnels in Liverpool).

• Charlotte Mathieson, a literary scholar and Associate Fellow at the University of Warwick. Charlotte blogs on two institution-hosted sites: her own research blog dedicated to her work on mobility and travel in the nineteenth century, and she contributes to 'Researcher Life', a communal blog designed to support early-career researchers.

• Bob Nicholson, an historian and doctoral student at the University of Manchester who has recently taken up a Lectureship at Swansea University. Bob­—or his online alter-ego—blogs at ‘The Digital Victorianist’ site, complete with his own logo. As the name suggests, one of Bob's many interests is the impact of digital and online technologies on humanities research.

If you are not familiar with these blogs, I urge you to visit and explore!

You may have noticed a further link between these three 'case study' bloggers, something other than their shared interest in all things Victorian. All are early-career researchers, much like myself (all this means is that the PhD is being worked towards, or has been awarded in recent years—eight years, for the purposes of the AHRC). I’m particularly interested in why these young, up-and-coming researchers have turned to social media, and I’m looking forward to receiving their responses to the questionnaire!

All this questioning of others, however, has made me consider more closely my own motives for starting a blog. In the first instance, I wanted to write something that people might actually read (doctoral theses tend to collect dust on University library shelves) and to do this in a style, a language that was more conversational, more open and less exclusive than the ‘academic voice’ I had used elsewhere. I also wanted to get beyond the Victorian and the early-modernist period, much as I love them. I wanted to extend my interest in life narratives beyond the boundaries I had previously set in my research, broadening my view to include contemporary events, new media, film and television. Though, if you scan through my posts, you will find a lot of Victorian-inspired delights, you’ll also find posts on biopic, documentary, Monty Python and souvenir tea-towels (yes, seriously). I wanted to make the process of research visible (in posts such as this) as well as the polished final product. And yes, I wanted to raise my profile, to engage in shameless self-promotion -- the nebulous concept of 'impact' is something I will have to tackle as I write the article.

I’ll be examining these motives more closely as I write my article over the next few weeks, and it will be an interesting challenge to adopt this reflective writing position.

But dear reader, do you blog? And why? What are the reasons and what are the benefits? Pray, do tell…

On Blogging and Being Busy

Little Crackers
Source: Sky 1

Regular visitors to the blog will no doubt have realised this is not the long awaited third instalment of my series on celebrity memoir. Be assured this post is on its way and will feature a discussion of Little Crackers, a series of mini celebrity biopics aired on Sky 1 over Christmas.

But in my first post, I described this blog as ‘a life narrative of my very own’. And so, it only seems appropriate that I interject a brief, autobiographical account of what I’ve been up to, the projects I have on the go, and how these relate not only to life narrative, but also to the act of blogging.

What’s the phrase? We apologise for the disruption, normal blogging services will be resumed as soon as possible. But why the disruption? In brief, I’ve been busy. January has brought with it the beginning of a new semester and an increased teaching load. But there is much to look forward to, and two of the modules I am teaching will involve the study of life narratives. (Life writing continues to be under-represented on university syllabi, most often limited to specialist modules, read in isolation, and only rarely alongside other texts and genres.)

An Account of the Trial Execution and
Dying Behaviour of Henry Fauntleroy (1824)
Source: Criminal Broadsides Project
Harvard Law School Library

In Prison Voices at LJMU I will be making use of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century criminal broadsides (many courtesy of the Old Bailey Online). Published and sold to accompany public executions, these pamphlets contain the fictive, “ventriloquised” confessions and laments of criminals -- a macabre souvenir of the day.

I will also be teaching a survey course for the Open University on The Arts Past and Present (AA100). The module ranges across disciplines, from philosophy to music, religion to architecture, literature to film. The course is arranged into four thematic books, the first of which is titled Reputations. This book investigates the concept of fame (and infamy) and how the biographical/historical record shifts and changes, how lives are constructed and reconstructed, how reputations wax and wane, ebb and flow.

This has been a topic of interest in my own work, and last year I published an article exploring competing accounts of Vita Sackville-West’s life and how her sexuality has been subject to successive concealments and revelations. It will be a treat to return to these issues, to investigate new and different case studies (and these will include Cleopatra, Stalin and the Dalai Lama).

I’ve also had a few exciting commissions in recent weeks. I’ve been invited to become a guest blogger at JVC Online (the virtual counterpart to the academic journal, Journal of Victorian Culture). So keep a look out for link ups and re-posts between this blog and JVC Online!

I’ve also been invited to write a short article on blogging and Twitter in the field of Victorian Studies. Now this may raise a few eyebrows. Academics have a reputation for resembling their research and many terrible stereotypes result: historians are as dusty as archives; artists are bohemian; mathematicians are bespectacled and methodical. From the outside looking in, therefore, Victorian Studies might not seem particularly fertile ground – surely we’d all be happier communicating via the telegraph and through letters with a penny black stamp? Well, you might be surprised. There are so many interesting Victorian bloggers and tweeters, and the field of Victorian Studies has produced a vast and diverse array of digital projects, such as the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition, the Database of Mid-Victorian Wood-Engraved Illustration, and Charles Darwin Online (to name but a very few).

As I set out on my adventures through the Victorian Studies blogosphere, look out for posts and tweets asking for your opinions and input. To what uses are blogs and Twitter put in the field of Victorian Studies? Do users represent a distinct demographic? Are they PhD students and early career academics? Are they on the receiving end of bemused looks and skepticism from more senior (and older) colleagues? Or, is this an unfair distinction? What identities are adopted and performed by Victorian Studies academic and enthusiasts in the blogosphere and on Twitter? I’ll be considering all of these questions in the coming weeks, so get your thinking caps on!

Thank you for your patience; normal blogging services will now resume…

Top of the Blog: 2011

And so 2011 is drawing to a close, and so too is my first year in the blogosphere. What has surprised me most is the breadth of readership and the distance a blog post can travel. Though one can see changes in academe, particularly with the rise of open-access publishing, the audience I can reach here far outstrips that enjoyed by work I’ve published more 'formally'.

Here I am able to explore tentative new ideas, those musings and wonderings that will form the basis of future research topics and projects. I am also able to explore new themes, new genres and new historical periods. In particular, I have enjoyed writing about popular culture and the contemporary moment, the worlds of film and television. And it is these posts that top my 2011 ‘hit parade’, my top three (well, top four, since I have a joint-third) ‘most read’ posts of the year:

1          Holy Flying Circus

2          Celebrity Memoirs I: A Tale of Literary Snobbishness?

=3        Objects and Material Things II: Souvenirs and Collecting

=3        Life in a Day, Britain in a Day

Thanks for reading and thanks for commenting -- for turning the experience of blogging into a dialogue, a conversation. I look forward to writing more posts in 2012 (and look out for my next on celebrity mini-biopic, the third in a series on celebrity memoir at Christmas). I’ll also be writing a short article on blogging, Twitter and their impact/uses in the field of Victorian Studies, so please look out for posts and tweets asking for your thoughts and experiences!

Wishing you a very prosperous 2012.

Looking Glasses At Odd Corners

Source: Wikipedia

The title of this, my new blog, is taken from Virginia Woolf's essay, 'The Art of Biography'. She argues that modern day biographers, living in a world of fast communications and new media, must be prepared to experiment -- must be prepared to hang 'looking glasses at odd corners', to 'admit contradictory versions of the same face.'

Woolf was writing in 1939 -- a time when photography, telephones, radio and cinema were changing the way we perceived our selves, our lives and our relations with others (not to mention the epoch-making war that loomed around the corner). But how contemporary these words sound? How relevant to us today? New technologies, such as social media and immersive online environments, have revolutionised the way we present and represent our lives, our selves. Can the voice and identity I adopt on Twitter (@AmberRegis) be called authentic? What about the voice and identity I adopt here as I blog? If the medium is the message (to repeat Marshall McLuhan's well-worn phrase), how do such forums shape the way I turn my life into a story? 

Questions such as these intrigue me, but they cannot be limited to our 20th and 21st-century modernity. As such, my eyes as a researcher are often cast backwards. I spend my days with Victorian life writing -- with biographies and autobiographies from the long 19th century. Such works have a bad reputation. In the same essay quoted above, Woolf compares Victorian biography to the wax figures carried in funeral processions, baring only 'a smooth superficial likeness to the body in the coffin.' Victorian autobiographies and biographies alike share in this tainted view: they are seen to be long, prosaic, preachy, censored, dull. Much is the fault of the modernists. The critical views of Woolf and her contemporaries -- particularly those of Lytton Strachey in his Preface to Eminent Victorians (1918) -- have stuck, have been oft-repeated, and have become a truism. But surely Victorian life writing was just as concerned with questions of how we craft a life in language? Just as concerned to try out new ideas and explore new forms? Just as concerned to hang looking glasses at odd corners? As 21st-century readers, we might not warm to the answers they give, but we must not dismiss them.

For my part, I am intrigued by the Victorian/modern divide, and I enjoy looking for continuities as well as breaks. What form(s) do life narratives take? How do genres and media blend and borrow from each other? To what use(s) are life narratives put? My blog will explore these issues. I will try out new ideas. I will discuss things that interest me (and hopefully you, dear reader). It will be a life narrative of my very own, filled with the books I read, the events I attend, and the musings I have.