Category: Research
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Teresa Mangum Wins Award
Teresa Mangum, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, was awarded the 2026 Francis Andrew March Award by the Associated Departments of English (ADE) in recognition of her significant contributions to literary studies and academic leadership.
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Festival of Monsters: Oh, the Horror!
Oh, The Horror!”, a panel where they will talk about monsters, horror, and why they write stories that scare.
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Talking Tales of the Undead
October 8, 2025 at 6:30 PM | Santa Cruz Public Libraries Downtown Branch Join UC Santa Cruz professors Michael Chemers (The Monster in Theater History), Renée Fox (The Necromantics), and Kimberly J. Lau (Specters of the Marvelous) as they discuss the histories and politics of vampires, ghouls, zombies and other undead monsters in literature, theater, and pop culture in this free…
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This spooky season, join UC Santa Cruz experts in exploring what scares us and why
As Halloween approaches, UC Santa Cruz faculty are undertaking scholarly investigations of zombies, digging up cultural histories of vampires, and delving deeply into the metaphysics of creepiness.
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Renée Fox Wins the 2025 Sonya Rudikoff Award
In April, the Universe’s own Renée Fox, Co-Director of the Dickens Project, Associate Professor in the UCSC Literature Department, and the Jordan-Stern Presidential Chair for Dickens and Nineteenth-Century Studies, was awarded the Northeast Victorian Studies Association’s (NVSA) Sonya Rudikoff Award for her 2023 book, The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish…
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Visiting the Dickens Collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum
Caitlin Croughan reviews some literary history at the Victoria & Albert Museum, exploring original Dickens manuscripts, character paintings, and more.
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Nora Gilbert, Gaslighting, and the Friends Faculty Fellows
By Beth Penney, Friends of the Dickens Project Board Member According to CNN, “Gaslighting is so commonly discussed that Merriam-Webster deemed the expression its word of the year in 2022, after experiencing a 1,740% increase in searches for the term.” Recent misuse of the term seems to define it as “You don’t agree with me,” or “You’re not…
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Beyond the Universe
Since 2006 the Project has co-hosted, with the Dickens Society, a panel every year at the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual conference. These panels share cutting edge research and typically consider Dickens (and other 19th century authors) in ways that relate to current issues and trends both in academia and in the world outside.
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How Toni Morrison Helps My High School Students Understand Dickens
This article explains how Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ (1987) has become an important intertext for Charles Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations’ (1860–61) in the author’s high school teaching. It suggests that the reading practices of nonexperts, along with unconventional text pairings, may help Victorianists fruitfully rethink disciplinary boundaries and field borders.
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“This Pagan Festival”
Queen Victoria was not alone in celebrating. The Victorians enjoyed Halloween traditions familiar to us today as well as traditions not at all familiar.
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An Interview with Professor Talia Schaffer
An Interview with Professor Talia Schaffer, from Queens College CUNY and the Graduate Center CUNY, about her new book ‘Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction’ (2021, Princeton University Press)
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The Dickens Code: Enduring mystery of Dickens shorthand letter solved with crowd-sourced research
An international team of volunteers and amateur decoders have helped experts solve the enduring mystery of a letter written by celebrated novelist Charles Dickens in his own brand of adapted shorthand, which he called ‘The Devil’s Handwriting.’