Dr Helen Groth
Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia
Dr Helen Groth
Position Senior Lecturer in English
Contact Details
Office: W6A 633
Phone: 61-2-9850 8776
Fax: 61-2-9850 6593
Email: helen.groth@humn.mq.edu.au
Qualifications
BA (Syd), PhD (Cantab)
Profile
Special interests: Victorian Literature and visual culture, Victorian women's poetry,nineteenth- century history.
Research
Current Research
Helen's current ARC funded research project is a major interdisciplinary study of optical illusion in Victorian culture, both as a form of popular entertainment and as a discursive field in which new modes of self-representation and knowledge were explored. Focusing on an extensive range of cultural forms including, optical treatise, literary texts, popular entertainments, new visual technologies, newspapers and the periodical press, this project will examine Victorian anxieties about the ethical and aesthetic implications of the illusionistic effects that new visual technologies, such as the diorama, the kaleidoscope,the stereoscope or photography produced; anxieties which provide an important historical context for our own concerns about the cultural impact of new technologies on the increasingly blurred boundaries between different cultures, identities and modes of self-representation.
Selected publications
Publications: Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia; articles and book chapters on various aspects of the relation between Victorian photography, literature and cultural memory, nationalism in Victorian women's writing, Victorian science and gender.
Books
Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia. Oxford University Press,
2003.
Literature and Sensation. Eds. Helen Groth, A.Uhlmann, Paul Sheehan. Cambridge Scholars Press, forthcoming December 2008.
Book Chapters
"Cosmopolitan Sympathies: Edward Bulwer Lytton's Sensational Tale of Pompei", in Literature and Sensation. Eds., Helen Groth, Anthony Uhlmann, Paul Sheehan. Cambridge Scholars Press, forthcoming December 2008.
"Victorian Women's Poetry and Scientific Narratives." Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain, eds., Gender and Genre: essays on women's poetry, late Romantics to late Victorians, 1830-1900. London: Macmillan, 1999.
"Island Queens: Nationalism, Queenliness and Women's Poetry 1837 - 1861," in Poetry and Politics. Essays and Studies, ed., Kate Flint (Cambridge: D.S.Brewer, 1996)
Articles
“Domestic phantasmagoria: the Victorian Literary Domestic and Experimental Visuality,” South Atlantic Quarterly, (forthcoming 2009). Special edition on ‘The Domestic.’ Edited by Dr David Ellison. Contributors include Professor Terry Smith and Professor Anthony Vidler.
“Kaleidoscopic Vision and Literary Invention in an ‘age of things': David Brewster, Don Juan and a Lady's Kaleidoscope,” English Literary History 74 (2007) 217 – 237.
“Reading Victorian Illusions. Dickens’ Haunted Man and Dr Pepper’s Ghost,” Victorian Studies 50.1 (Winter 2007) 35 - 57.
"Literary Nostalgia and Poetic Idylls in Early
Victorian Photographic Discourse."
Nineteenth Century Contexts 25.3 (September 2003) 199-218.
"Consigned to Sepia: Rereading Victorian Poetry." Victorian Poetry 41.4
(December 2003) 611-621.
"Technological Mediations and the Public Sphere: Roger Fenton's Crimea Exhibition
and The Charge of the Light Brigade." Victorian Literature and
Culture 30 (July 2002). 553-570.
"A Different Look-Visual Technologies and the Making of History in Elizabeth
Barrett Browning's Casa Guidi Windows." Textual Practice 14 (March
2000) 31-53.
Reviews
Rev. of Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed. Photography as an Eyewitness, Nineteenth Century Contexts (forthcoming 2008).
"From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography,"
Victorian Studies 48.1 (2005) 197-8.
"Secure from Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian Environment,"Australasian
Victorian Studies Journal 6 (2000) 174 - 6.
Work in Progress
Collaborative Research Project with Dr Natalya Lusty (Gender Studies, University of Sydney)
Dreams: A Cultural History 1840 - 1940
This project will undertake a major interdisciplinary study of writing on dreams from 1840 to 1940. Contemporary understandings of dream theory are firmly rooted in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and yet there is no extensive collection of primary sources that demonstrates that debt, nor a single study that analyses the seminal transformations in the ways in which dreams were narrated and analysed across a wide range of disciplines in the period 1840-1940. In filling this gap, this project will advance our current understanding of the cultural and historical significance of dreams across a wide range of disciplines.
Grants and Fellowships
Australian Research Council Fellow, University of Sydney 1998-2001
Australian Research Council Discovery Grant 2003-2005
Macquarie Early Career Research Grant 2005.
Teaching
ENGL 120 Introduction to English
ENGL 271 Gothic Visions: From Sublime to Suburban Gothic
ENGL 317 Victorian Literary Culture
HONOURS UNIT Decadents, Degenerates and Libertines
ENGL 891 MA in Advanced Research Methods (co-convened with Dr Nicole Moore)
Administrative Roles
University and Division Committees
Humanities Division Research Committee.
University Research and Policy Committee.
Co-Director of the Centre for Cultural History.