Friday, Sept. 7
2:45-3:30 ABL Cox Hall
Reception for Professor Clare Simmons, 2018 Three-month Research Fellow at the ABL
3:30-4:30 ABL Lecture Hall
Dr. Kristen Pond (English, Baylor) will present her Sabbatical Talk titled, “‘I Spy a Stranger!’: Victorian Newspapers and the Stranger at the Great Exhibition of 1851.”
How do you define who is a stranger and who is not? In what ways do we use the category of a stranger to construct a sense of community and of one’s self? This talk takes up these questions in one particular historical moment, The Great Exhibition of 1851 in Victorian England, when “all the world” came to London. The talk explores how this event put pressure on already strained class relations and how the Victorians framed the problems of class through the figure of the stranger. We will see how the lower-class stranger was constructed in the newspapers and the important role newspapers played in developing perceptions of the stranger.
