Zoomcast Overview

Adrian S. Wisnicki speaks with Kira Braham, Indu Ohri, and Bre Simpson, three scholars whose work he helped facilitate in developing a series of lesson plans on Mary Seacole, now published by Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom. The discussion begins by exploring how each of these scholars became involved in the lesson plan initiative, then turns to the content of the lesson plans themselves. As part of the discussion, the participants reflect on their development of the lesson plans through an iterative process, why they chose to focus on Mary Seacole in the first place, and the overall collegiality of the collaboration. The discussion closes with a review of some of the lessons they learned through the collaboration process, with the goal of sharing insights and observations that might be useful to other scholars looking to work together on the Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom project or in other contexts. The Zoomcast also includes a supplemental statement from Heidi Kaufman, a scholar who worked as part of the  group on the Seacole lesson plans, but whose schedule prevented her from appearing in the Zoomcast.

Collaboration Series

This cluster of Zoomcasts reflects upon team-based scholarship as a strategy of undisciplining and empowerment in both learning and teaching. Although collaboration often lies at the heart of digital humanities projects like Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, the single-scholar mode of endeavor and production often remains the default for many Victorianists. The Zoomcasts in this cluster, therefore, highlight successful collaborations within Victorian Studies and beyond in order to uncover strategies and models that Victorianists and other scholars might employ to broaden the scope and impact of their work. By doing so, scholars have the potential to develop new and exciting modes of inquiry, while breaking with traditional Eurocentric ways of engaging with Victorian and other kinds of British and Anglophone literature.

Guest Biographies

Kira Braham completed her Ph.D. in English at Vanderbilt University in 2020. She will join the faculty of the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts in Fall 2021. Her fledgling book project, Victorian Vita Activa: Work Ethics and Prowork Politics, explores nineteenth-century philosophies of work and their potential role in reenergizing and reimagining twenty-first century labor politics. Her research interests include nineteenth-century British and transatlantic literatures, Caribbean literatures, working-class literatures, histories and ethnographies of work, science fiction, and utopian studies. Her work has appeared in Extrapolation and The Gissing Journal.

Heidi Kaufman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon. She works on nineteenth-century literary culture, archives, and digital humanities. Her forthcoming book, Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London’s East End (University of Virginia, expected publication 2022) explores the creation and study of archives as a response to cultural silences and marginalized perspectives. Her corresponding digital archive, The East End Digital Library, creates a space for engaging with writing from the East End of London and of responding to absences in the cultural record. She teaches courses in nineteenth-century literature, digital humanities, and archival theory.

Indu Ohri is a Preceptor and the current Echols Fellow in the University of Virginia’s English Department. Her book project examines how the ghosts in women’s supernatural fiction reflect various unspeakable social concerns of late Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain. Her research and teaching interests include Victorian and Edwardian women’s ghost stories, Victorian authors of color across the British Empire, and the intersection between feminism and community engagement. She has published her work in the Victorians Institute Journal Digital Annex, Preternature, and Adaptation in Young Adult Novels: Critically Engaging Past and Present (edited by Dana Lawrence and Amy Montz, Bloomsbury, 2020).

Breanna Simpson is a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant in the Department of English at York University in Toronto. Her research focuses on gender studies and queer theory, classical reception, world literature, and late Victorian fiction. Her dissertation, In Pursuit of Cupid’s Daughter: The Construction and Control of Desire in Ancient and Victorian Narratives, interrogates the concept of desire by examining forms and practices of reception, power, subjectivity, and identity.