15 October 2025 - 15 October 2025
4:00PM - 6:00PM
Lindisfarne Centre, St Aidan's College, Durham
Free but registration essential
Join the Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies (CNCS) at Durham for the annual welcome event featuring Professor Gail Marshall (University of Reading).
Omnibus Life in London, 1859 by William Maw Egley, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies are hosting their annual launch event at the Lindisfarne Centre, St Aidan's College. Join us to hear from Professor Gail Marshall (University of Reading) with her fascinating paper '1859', and from respondents Professor Annie Tindley (Newcastle University) and Dr Fraser Riddell (Durham University).
Abstract
1859 was an extraordinarily creative year, which David Cannadine has described as ‘something of an annus mirabilis in British publishing and intellectual life’. It produced some of the most influential, innovative, and enduring books of the Victorian period. Yet, it was also a year that was deeply conflicted about how to accommodate and acknowledge change within contemporary thought and practice. My paper will suggest ways in which 1859 negotiated with the past as it faced the future, doing so in large part through the historical medium of custom.
Professor Gail Marshall FEA Head of the School of Humanities, and Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture
Areas of interest Victorian literature and culture, specifically fiction, theatre, women’s writing and history, actresses, historiography, and Shakespeare’s Victorian after-life. I am currently completing a book on 1859, with particular attention to George Eliot’s life and work in that year, and am one of the General Editors for a new Cambridge University Press series on Re-Reading the Nineteenth Century.
Professor of British and Irish Rural History
Annie's research interests lie in the history and contemporary legacies of land and environmental issues, including landownership, land reform, land use and management. She has worked on the aristocratic classes, landed estates and their management from the mid-eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries in the Scottish, Irish, British and imperial contexts.
Associate Professor in Literary Medical Humanities
Fraser Riddell (he/him) is Associate Professor in English and Medical Humanities in the Department of English Studies and the Institute for Medical Humanities. He teaches literature in English from Shakespeare to the present day. His research is broadly focussed on questions of gender, sexuality and embodied experience in Victorian and early-twentieth century literature. At the Institute for Medical Humanities, he co-leads the Affective Experience Lab.
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