By Fiona Coll, Floating Academy Editor
The Floating Academy is a blogging collective. We are very pleased to be partnering with the Victorian Review, and we look forward to many productive conversations in this space. We take our name from the slang expression used to describe the Hulks, those notorious merchant and naval ships that were converted into prisons to ease overcrowded gaols between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. More specifically, we take inspiration from the reference to the Hulks found in Dickens’s Great Expectations, during which Pip is threatened with transport to the Hulks on account of his irrepressible habit of asking questions.
We, too, are irrepressible enquirers, and we established The Floating Academy, under the direction of founding editor, Jennifer Esmail, in order to exchange ideas about all kinds of questions in a relaxed and informal context. While our current research projects are diverse, we share a common interest in the affinities between nineteenth- and twenty-first-century culture, technology, and aesthetics. We are interested in Victorian books (the things themselves), novels, and poetry; printed materials such as newspapers, periodicals, and visual images; representations of masculinity and femininity (whether fixed or floating); constructions of disability; the culture of Empire and its management; and technologies of mobility and communication and their transformations or continuations in our own age of digitization and globalization.
The Floating Academy is made up of eight regular contributors. Karen Bourrier is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Calgary. Gregory Brophy is Assistant Professor of English at Bishop’s University. Fiona Coll is Assistant Professor of Literature and Technology at SUNY Oswego, and editor of The Floating Academy. Constance Crompton is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and English at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus. Alan Galey is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information/Book History and Print Culture program at the University of Toronto. Eddy Kent is Assistant Professor in the department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Tara MacDonald is Assistant Professor in English at the University of Amsterdam. Daniel Martin is Assistant Professor of English at MacEwan University.
