Author Archives: Kylee-Anne Hingston

Interview with Nadine LeGier at VSAWC 2015

At the 2015 VSAWC conference, Victorian bodies, we sat down with Nadine LeGier to talk about disability studies and Victorian culture.  Dr. LeGier, who researches deafness and letters in Victorian culture at the University of Manitoba, began her academic career as a Victorianist and first heard about disability studies shortly before beginning her Ph.D. at the University of Manitoba, where she was supervised by Vanessa Warne, a disability scholar and Victorianist working on blindness and literacy in the Victorian era.

In our discussion about her research on deafness and Victorian letters, Legier told us how Amy Levy‘s deafness is often neglected in scholarship on Levy. In the video below, Dr. Legier discusses how Levy’s poetry effectively expressed the experience of deafness through language, particularly in constructing and reconstructing identity as Levy’s hearing loss became more significant.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/ZHdKEJd0koU[/youtube]

Touching on the intersection of disability studies and disability activism, Legier suggests that teaching as a person with disability is a type of activism itself—both in demonstrating the presence of disability in academia and in participating in projects working towards accessibility in the university setting, such as the Liberated Learning Project at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, where Legier lectured in the past.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/1h4zAPBHbgg[/youtube]

Interview with Martha Stoddard Holmes at VSAWC 2015

At the 2015 VSAWC conference, Victorian Bodies, Dr. Martha Stoddard Holmes gave the inaugural McMaster Lecture, “Liminal Children: Making Disability and Childhood in Nineteenth-Century Fiction,” which examined the intersecting developments of disability and childhood as cultural constructs. Victorian Review had the opportunity to talk to Dr. Stoddard Holmes, who wrote Fictions of Affliction, the seminal book on disability in Victorian literature,  about her research and what led her to it.  She told us that her interest in disability was instigated by Victorian studies, just when the field of disability studies was emerging in the humanities in the 1990s.

In the following video clip, Dr. Stoddard Holmes discusses the need for critically studying disability’s cultural construction, and she relates how examining Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens novels led her to become aware of that need. Additionally, she explains how the Victorian era was a crucial time in the development of disability as an object of discourse and social identity.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/QAzGqpENryM[/youtube]

In our discussion with her, Dr. Stoddard Holmes also informed us how activism plays an important role in the field of disability studies, particularly since the study of disability in the humanities came out of disability rights movement that began in the 1970s. In the video below, Dr. Stoddard Holmes describes some of the social restrictions faced by an important Victorian activist for the blind, Elizabeth Margaretta Maria Gilbert—restrictions that appeared even after her death through the biography written by her good friend and fellow women’s activist, Frances Martin.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/5bDwZ_Daw1s[/youtube]

Dr. Stoddard Holmes also noted that in her research experience, she has often found that the Victorians engaged in issues regarding disability that we are still engaging with in the twenty-first century, sometimes in “less imaginative ways than in the nineteenth century.”

Interview with Chris Kent at VSAWC 2015

Dr. Chris Kent, one of the founding members of Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada (VSAWC), met with us at the 2015 conference of VSAWC to talk about his current and past research as a historian and Victorianist.  At this conference, his paper discussed a topic from his latest project, which focuses on the Anglo-American artist Matthew Somerville “Matt” Morgan. Dr. Kent explained to us that Morgan’s work as an artist was in fields often neglected by historians: commercial art, poster art, and theatrical scene painting. In the video below, Dr. Kent comments on the source of interdisciplinarity in his historical research.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoHRa48wKpA[/youtube]

Dr. Kent also mentioned how the development of women’s and gender studies has been one of the most productive avenues in Victorian studies and described how they have fundamentally influenced his research.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PP-vo7ZtGo[/youtube]

Interview with Juliet McMaster at VSAWC 2015

At the 2015 conference of Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada, we were given the opportunity to speak with Dr. Juliet McMaster about VSAWC’s origin, inaugural conference, and role in Western Canada. Dr. McMaster told us that in 1971, following the Middlemarch Centennial Conference held in Calgary and organized by University of Calgary professor Ian Adam, Dr. Adam suggested that they begin a Victorian studies association for Western Canada, since there was a similar organization in Toronto. They decided that, while Toronto’s organization met on a single day, VSAWC would need to hold a longer conference to make it worth the extra travelling that attendees would need to do. Dr. McMaster organized the conference for the following year. “It was a very congenial, happy event,” she said, adding, “In those days, we did conferences about stars. We had six speakers and that was it.” In the video below, she describes that first conference and comments briefly on how the organization has since developed.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnqbN7cTXmY[/youtube]

In this second video, Dr. McMaster reads from a speech given by her late husband, Dr. Rowland McMaster, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the organization. Both Juliet and Rowland note that the core characteristic of the VSAWC, in addition to its high-quality scholarship, has been geniality. Of the VSAWC’s keynote address, newly named the McMaster lecture in honour of both Juliet and Rowland, Dr. McMaster commented, “I would like it to exemplify the best in Victorian studies, by the best.”

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Btxgn3ezZV8[/youtube]