Thank you for your fantastic paper Emma!

artistic poster of a wolf and a hand and garlands of wildflowers; the text reads "March rent financial mutual aid needed. Supporting 11 families. Current goal: $7,000.00. Venmo: @Emma-Torzs"

Twin Cities' horrors continue though media has moved on. Families are still in hiding (schools w/virtual options till April), ICE still abducting people w/disregard for law, ongoing need for rent relief. Here's one hyper-local effort from my trusted colleague. Please RT even if you can't donate.

One of my brilliant doctoral researchers passed her viva yesterday! So pleased for her, but will miss the regular meetings with her and @drclaireocall.bsky.social very much.

So proud of you Hannah! An original and important thesis and an impressive viva performance. Congratulations! 🥂

Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities: 27th March 2026 A VPFA Study DayHosted by Loughborough University Registration now open! Click here to register Scroll down for the Study Day Programme The Health Humanities and Victorian popular fiction intersect…

Registration is now live for my VPFA Study Day on 'Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities'. It's free to attend, thanks to funding from the VPFA and the Health Humanities Hub at Loughborough University. The programme and the link to register here: victorianpopularfiction.org/sensation-fi...

Merry Christmas Jo! xx

Still time to send me an abstract for Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities. It’s shaping up to be a fascinating day!

Please give Emma's wonderful blog post about Guillermo del Torro's Frankenstein a read. Let us know your thoughts, did you enjoy the film? What did you like and dislike? Even if it deviated from the book, did it, as Emma says, still keep its 'soul'?

If you like #Victorian popular fiction, #Egyptomania or #19thCentury Art, I hope you'll like my article! I loved my editors! @vpfa.bsky.social @bavs-uk.bsky.social @19birkbeck.bsky.social @ncsascholars.bsky.social @issegyptomania.bsky.social @mariecorelli.bsky.social @edinburghup.bsky.social

So proud of Dr Jo Turner and her many achievements ❤️

Send me your abstracts for Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities #VPFA #HealthHumsLboro

On Wed 29 Oct, 16.15, join us for our first event of 2025-26, feat. two @lboroenglish.bsky.social legends:

1/1 Dr Anne-Marie Beller @braddonite.bsky.social
"We regret to learn that Miss Braddon is out of her mind": Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Life and Fiction

CFP 📣 Join us in Loughborough 📍 for a day of Sensation fiction and health humanities organised by our very own @braddonite.bsky.social. ✨ See post below for details 👇

Mentally ill patients dancing at a ball at Somerset County Asylum. Process print after a lithograph by K. Drake, ca. 1850/1855. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/xswz3swa

CFP: Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities A VPFA Study Day Loughborough University, 27 March 2026 The Health Humanities and Victorian popular fiction intersect in revealing ways, offering insights into how 19th-century literature shaped and reflected contemporary understandings of health, illness, and the body. Popular narratives not only mirrored anxieties surrounding public health and medical progress but also contributed to shaping public perceptions of health and healing. Health Humanities approaches re-examine these texts to uncover how cultural narratives and literary representations influenced attitudes toward physical and mental well-being, gendered experiences of illness, and the ethics of care in an age of rapid scientific change. Health Humanities is a particularly useful approach to sensation fiction because it illuminates the ways in which these emotionally charged, often morally ambiguous narratives explore and interrogate concepts of the body, illness, and mental health. Sensation fiction, with its focus on secrets, trauma, nervous disorders, and abnormal psychological states, frequently dramatizes the anxieties of Victorian society surrounding health, gender, and identity. By applying the lens of Health Humanities, scholars can uncover how these texts reflect and shape contemporary medical discourse. Interdisciplinary approaches also highlight how sensation fiction critiques institutional medicine, domestic care practices, and the pathologization of women’s experiences. Ultimately, Health Humanities allows us to see sensation fiction not just as entertainment, but as a culturally significant form that negotiates the meanings of illness, morality, and human vulnerability in a rapidly changing world. 20-minute papers are invited on any aspect of the health humanities and sensation fiction. Topics may include, but are not limited to the following: • Madness, Hysteria, and the Sensation Heroine • The Role of Doctors and Medical Authority in Se…

🚨Call for Papers!
❓Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities: A VPFA Study Day
🗺️Loughborough University
📅27 March 2026
💷 FREE
For full CfP: victorianpopularfiction.org/studyday/for...
Contact the organiser Anne-Marie Beller (@braddonite.bsky.social) at a.m.beller@lboro.ac.uk for more information

Contents page of a book

Proofs arrived! @kerryfeatherstone.bsky.social and I translated and edited #MaryElizabethBraddon’s only serial written for the French press 🇫🇷 and her only published fiction written in French.

Such a great keynote. #VPFAExtremes

First panel of the day is Mental Illness in Braddon, which couldn’t be more up my street! #VPFAExtremes

Lovely #VPFA peeps ♥️

THRILLED to share that my book has won the VPFA Second Book Prize! 🎉

Victorian Popular Fictions 7.1 8 Butler-Way Helena Esser, Steampunk London: Neo-Victorian Urban Space and Popular Transmedia Memory. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, 248 pp. HB £85.00. ISBN: 9781350433908 Reviewed by Emma Butler-Way Downlo…

Exciting new issue of VPFJ is now out in the world, featuring my review for Helena Esser's fantastic Steampunk London: Neo-Victorian Urban Space and Popular Transmedia Memory. I'm a big fan. Get your libraries on it.
@vpfa.bsky.social @helenaesser.bsky.social
doi.org/10.46911/TWO...

Just chaired an excellent first panel of #VPFAExtremes with fellow #Birkbeck Victorianists @janetteleaf.bsky.social, Jeremy Newton, & Gordon Bates on Hypnotic Gothic Fictions!

We are delighted to welcome the @VPFA1 for day 1 of their 3 day conference "Heights, Depths and Extremes."

#VPFAExtremes #VPFA #bmi1854 #birmingham #victorian

Starting the Intertextuality and Adaptation panel, we've got Julia Kuehn joining us online to talk about Marie Carelli's novel The Sorrows of Satan and its stage adaptations #VPFAExtremes

‘Even grammatical’! 😂

My favourite fact of the first day! #VPFAExtremes

Great paper on vivisection and dehumanisation by Brandi Burns. Some quite horrible details though 😢

Now we have Crescent Rainwater talking about Netta Syrett’s novel The Victorians and its debt to a wide spectrum of Victorian fiction in its representation of sexual liberated modern women, as well as lesbian desire #VPFAExtremes

I had the best time presenting this paper! It was such a great panel to be on - by a *wild* coincidence, we had two separate papers, featuring two separate books that both just so happened to have a character with the last name of Tempest, and someone accidentally selling their soul...
#VPFAExtremes

On the Sappho and Swinburne panel, first we’ve got V J Rene joining us online to discuss extremity in Swinburne’s work, including masochism, erotic transgression and political radicalism #VPFAExtremes

Next we have Professor Andrew King very appositely discussing the ‘Brummagem popularity’ of Granville Bantock’s song cycle Sappho #VPFAExtremes