My Papers

Here’s a list of papers that I have delivered at conferences and seminar groups:

• ‘“Don’t the English Love a Good Ghost Story”: Supernatural Horror and the “Moustache-Twirling Villain” in the BBC’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood’ at ‘Sights and Frights: Victorian Visual Culture, Horror and the Supernatural’, University of Sussex, 19 June 2014
• ‘“I’ll be content to eat my own head, Sir!”: Grimwig, Grimaldi and excessive consumption in the Dickens pantomime’ at ‘Devouring: Food, Drink and the Written Word 1800-1945’, University of Warwick, 8 March 2014
• ‘“The coachman with the hoarse voice […] took an imperial pint of vinegar with his oysters, without betraying the least emotion”: Extreme drinking as performance in the Dickens pantomime’ at ‘Public Drinking in the 19th Century’, University of Bristol, 22 February 2014
• ‘“… that jocund world of Pantomime, where there is no affliction or calamity that leaves the least impression”: Visiting Dickens’s Pantomime Land Then and Now’ at Roehampton University Research Seminar Series, 27 November 2013
• ‘“Oh just, subtle and mighty opium”: ‘drugs and stalking’ in The Mystery of Edwin Drood’ at ‘Neo-Victorian Cultures: The Victorians Today’, Liverpool John Moores University, 26 July 2013
• ‘“Oh Doctor, Doctor, don’t expect too much of me! I’m only a woman, after all!”: The (dis) embodiment of Lydia Gwilt in Collins’s Miss Gwilt’ at ‘Bodies and Victorian Popular Culture’, Institute of English Studies (London), 11 July 2013
• ‘“The ‘wicked man’ was a bastard boy of seven”: Dickens’s Villains in the BBC Dickens Bicentenary Productions’, at ‘Neo-Victorian Villainy: Adaptation and Reinvention on Stage, Page and Screen’, University of York, 25 May 2013
• ‘Parochial Flagellations and Nutcrackered Infants: Charles Dickens’s Slapstick Violence’, at ‘Dickens and Popular Culture’ (Dickens Day 2012), Institute of English Studies (London), 13 October 2012
• “‘Patch’ Re-patched: The Clown as a Humoristico-sartorial Figure in Dickens”, at The Dickens Society Symposium, University of Kent (Canterbury), 14 September 2012
• “‘… a face after the portraits of the late Mr. Grimaldi’: The Dickensian Clown in Word and Picture”, at ‘Dickens and the Visual Imagination’, University of Surrey, 9 July 2012
• “‘You could not see the new city from the old one’: Rushdie’s ‘Dickensian’ Cities”, at ‘The Other Dickens: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Contexts’, University of Portsmouth, 6 July 2012
• “‘Ten Thousand Million Delights’: Dickens and the Pantomime Clown” at ‘Childhood, ‘great expectations’ and the idea of the ‘Dickensian’’, University of Kent (Chatham), 6 Feb 2012 (Part of “Dickens and the Idea of ‘The Dickensian’: A Tale of Four Cities – A Bicentenary Traveling Conference” 2-8 Feb 2012)
• “‘…of every dramatic library we ought to see it, Joe-king apart’: Dickens’s Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi Reappraised”, at ‘The Famed and The Forgotten’, University of Oxford, 10 July 2011
• “‘An Actor on the Stage of Life’: Drama-tisation in the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi”, at ‘Romantic Identities, Selves in Society, 1770-1835’, Institute of English Studies (London), 13 May 2011
• “‘A man of great feeling and sensibility’: The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi and the tears of a clown” at ‘Mr Popular Sentiment: Dickens and Feeling’ (Dickens Day 2010), Institute of English Studies (London), 16 October 2010
• “‘From Stage to Page’: Dickens Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi and ‘The Pantomime of Life’” at ‘Victorian Popular Culture: Prose, stage and screen’, Institute of English Studies (London), 23 July 2010
• “‘We are all actors in The Pantomime of Life’: Charles Dickens and The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi” at ‘The ‘Sister Arts’ in the Popular Theatre, c. 1820-1910’, University of Birmingham, 8 July 2010
• “‘Clowns that beat Grimaldi all to nothing turn up every day’: Identity as Performance in Dickens’s Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi” at ‘Framing the Self: Anxieties of Identity in Literature and Culture, 1800-Present Day’, University of Portsmouth, 21 May 2010