Event Report
The #VPFA Religion Twitter Taster for the postponed study day on Religion and Victorian Popular Literature and Culture took place on Saturday 30 May with a day of short papers in the form of Twitter threads.
We began at 11.00 UK time with a fantastic keynote by Dr Anne-Marie Beller and Dr Kerry Featherstone on ‘“No greater spiritual beauty than fanaticism”: Women Travellers’ Encounters with Islam in the Nineteenth Century’. This was followed by 15 shorter papers covering topics as diverse as the occult science fiction, purgatorial punishment for child deaths and hymns to the Victorian railways.
The event attracted international attention with delegates from America and Germany and the occasional appearance of a few feline interlopers! Lively discussion and debate in response to the papers continued in the threads throughout the day and the following week.
For anyone who missed the event, the paper threads have now been archived on the VPFA website. Many thanks to the VPFA webmistress Dr Courtney Floyd for her assistance with this.
The study day, which was to have taken place at Sheffield University in May, has been rescheduled for Spring 2021. Further details will be announced in the autumn.
Naomi Hetherington and Clare Stainthorp
If you would like to run a VPFA study day or suggest another type of event (online or physical), please email Janine Hatter and Helena Ifill at vpfainfo@gmail.com.