We run two series of internal groups, with the aim of developing and strengthening our interdisciplinary conversations. These relaxed and informal sessions are open to all Queen Mary students and staff. We particularly encourage our PGR and ECR members to get involved.

We meet during term-time, alternating lunchtime and evening slots: details and texts are circulated by email (eating lunch/supper welcome/encouraged).

Please contact us to be added to the mailing list for details of meeting times and rooms if you're not already receiving these and would like to join in!

'Curiosities': a miscellany of work-in-progress lightning talks. 

'Curiosities' is an informal, supportive opportunity for researchers across HSS and beyond to share and discuss both new research directions and difficulties relating to 19th-century topics.

No matter what stage you're at, join us to share initial ideas, exciting discoveries, editing frustrations, archival confusions, and teaching quandaries at this informal and supportive show-and-tell session. It could be something you’ve been grappling with for a while, or that popped up just yesterday.

All are welcome to attend and speak for up to 10 minutes on any aspect of the nineteenth century and its legacies (no need to prepare a formal presentation). If you'd like to introduce a session, please do get in touch! – or just come along if you’re curious about what your colleagues are currently thinking about!

Reading group

These sessions are led by different members who select and pre-circulate fiction and non-fiction texts from across the long nineteenth-century for discussion. We  choose a spooky Hallowe'en-appropriate short story for 31st October!

If you have an idea for a item for discussion at a future session (it could be a visual, material, or textual artefact from the nineteenth century, or recent critical intervention), please do get in touch!

Examples from our previous sessions include:

• Robert Louis Stevenson's spooky story 'Thrawn Janet', his first story in Scots, which was published in Cornhill Magazine in 1881. Brilliantly, there’s an open-access audiobook of this ghost story produced by our own Matt Ingelby with Lucille Brown. You can access the recording here. 
• extracts from Walter Pater's The Renaissance (1873), led by visiting fellow Sercan Oztekin
• Vernon Lee’s Proteus – which took us into the twentieth century but prompted some interesting discussions about legacies of the nineteenth. (Protetus was published in 1925 as part of Kegan Paul’s “To-day and To-morrow” series, which was commissioned after geneticist J. B. S. Haldane’s sensational, future-imagining book Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1924). In Proteus, Vernon Lee took up the issue of “intelligence” and responded to a sense of intellectual paradigm shift driven by science and technology – a shift that we are still grappling with in our own historical moment.