The BLT19 Research Team

Meet the Team

The BLT19 research project draws from a range of academic backgrounds and disciplines. Below you can find out more about some of the primary contributors behind the content on the site.

Andrew King

Andrew King is Professor of English and Literary Studies at the University of Greenwich and initiator of and lead on the BLT19 project. His research focuses on Victorian popular fiction (he’s president of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association and edits Victorian Popular Fictions) and on nineteenth-century periodicals. He has been publishing on trade and professional periodicals since 2008, and recently provided the first ever proper overview of Victorian trade and professional periodicals for the Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press : BLT19 publishes the underpinning research for that and constitutes examples and extensions of this research by Andrew himself and by colleagues he has worked with.

In addition to having published many articles and chapters in books, Andrew is the author of The London Journal 1845-1883: Periodicals, Production, and Gender (2004), and has edited or co-edited numerous volumes and special numbers, including Victorian Print Media (2005), Popular Print Media 1820-1900 (2005), Ouida and Victorian Popular Culture (2013). The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers (2016) and Researching the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press (2017) both won the Colby prize for the books that most forward our thinking about the Victorian press. Andrew is currently (in 2021) editing a collection of essays for Routledge on work and the Victorian periodical press entitled Living Work for Living People and due out in 2021. A more complete list of his research outputs can be found here.

Dr Deborah Canavan

Deborah Canavan completed her PhD at the University of Greenwich in 2020, supervised by Andrew King and John Morton. Her thesis focused on representations and realities of working-class women in the British Workwoman magazine. She holds an M.A. in English Literature, for which her dissertation explored the paradoxes around the theme of the fallen woman in mid to late nineteenth-century literature. Deborah was responsible for writing the BLT19 Temperance articles, and developing the secondary teaching materials, collaborating with local schools and teachers. She is a Caird Fellow at the Royal Museums Greenwich, 2021-22, while also teaching adult refugees.

Connie Gallagher

Connie Gallagher is an artist and curator, whose research interests lie in labour politics, manufacturing and craft. Recent exhibitions before her work on Keep the Door of My Lips include The Ghosts are in the House at Chopping Block Gallery (2018) and Life Between Buildings at Spinach (2016 – 17). She has also written and presented in a number of symposiums across London and the UK, most recently with the short-circuit article Occupational Realism: Reflecting on my Relationship between my Work-a-Day Job and Artistic Labour for post-graduate arts journal Dandelion.

Dr Ann M. Hale

Ann M. Hale completed her PhD at the University of Greenwich in 2020, supervised by Andrew King and John Morton. Her thesis, for which she won the Sally Mitchell Dissertation prize for the best PhD thesis on the nineteenth-century press in the world, was on the consequences of different kinds of press ownership – sole proprietorship, partnerships, and companies – and the mutability of these legal and business structures over the century. She was awarded the 2014 Rosemary VanArsdel Prize for the best graduate student essay investigating Victorian periodicals and newspapers. The prize-winning essay, “W.T. Stead and Participatory Reader Networks,” appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of Victorian Periodicals Review. Ann holds an M.A. in English literature from the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota). She is also a graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School and a member of the State of Minnesota Bar. Ann was responsible for setting up the BLT19 website in 2016, the initial OCR of the British Workman and the Stationary Trade Review, some undergraduate teaching materials and slideshows, and several of the essays and biographies.

Alexander Rose

Alexander Rose was a graduate intern in 2019. He graduated from the University of Greenwich in 2018 with a degree in English Literature with Creative Writing. His work as an undergraduate focused upon contemporary theatre and he authored a short play that was staged as part of the 2017 Greenwich book festival. For BLT19 he checked the trade periodical database, and wrote some content for the website such a the comparison from his perspective of working life then and now.

Victoria Tunn

Victoria Tunn was a graduate intern working on BLT19 in 2018. She graduated from the University of Greenwich in 2017 with a degree in History. Her dissertation investigated cultural manifestations of the witch in the nineteenth century and mapped the literary witch to evolving constructions of Victorian femininity. For BLT19 she helped with an early version of the database of trade periodicals, interviewed a variety of working professionals about their work practices, attitudes, and career trajectories, and wrote a series of blog-posts based on her findings.

Undergraduate and School-Pupil Contributors

We are very grateful indeed to the ever-increasing number of undergraduates and school pupils from the UK and Europe who are helping us think about “work” and our attitudes to it by contributing creative writing, critical editions and non-fiction reflections about work. They are named on the pages that they contributed.

Metabotnik

We are also very grateful to our collaborators at the University of Amsterdam, the Metabotnik team funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, who early on in their and our projects welcomed our approaches to explore the use of this software for the first time in the digitisation of Victorian periodicals.

BLT19 Contributor Credits

The names of the authors of individual pages is given on the relevant pages, though in the case of frequent contributors, the initials of the primary content author are included at the end of each page or post. Where none is given, the author is AK.

  • AK = Andrew King
  • DC = Deborah Canavan
  • AMH = Ann M. Hale
  • VT = Victoria Tunn
  • AR = Alexander Rose