Centre for Victorian Studies, University of Leicester: Annual Public Lecture and Spring Research Seminar programme

Dear colleagues,

On behalf of the Centre for Victorian Studies at the University of Leicester, UK, I wanted to extend a warm welcome to a programme of upcoming events of interest to those working in the nineteenth century. The annual public lecture is in person, but the other events are hybrid, so you can attend from anywhere in the world. Please see the links below for further information.

We hope to see you there!

Best wishes,

Claire

Dr Claire Wood, Associate Professor in Victorian Literature, University of Leicester

Annual lecture: The Amazing Lives of Billy Waters: How to be Famous in the 19th Century

• Wednesday 18 February 2026, 5.00pm – 6.15pm (GMT), Lecture Theatre 1, Attenborough Seminar Block, University of Leicester IN-PERSON
• Speaker: Dr Mary L. Shannon
• Book your place here

William ‘Billy’ Waters: busker, sailor, immigrant, amputee, father, lover, extraordinary talent, and a forgotten Black celebrity from Regency London. Like so many marginalised people from the past, however, he left no papers, writings, or diaries, and many basic facts about his life are missing. What remains are the nineteenth-century images of him and Victorian tales of his life. This talk explores how visual images can be used to ‘fill in’ the gaps and silences in the records we have of past lives, and asks what it might mean to look with, rather than at, Billy Waters and others.

Speaker biography

Dr Mary L. Shannon’s latest book, Billy Waters is Dancing: Or, How a Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency Britain (Yale 2024), tells the story of Regency London’s forgotten Black celebrity. It won a 2025 NYC Big Book Award and has been turned into a graphic novel for school children. Mary is a writer and Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Roehampton, London. She’s the author of the award-winning Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street (2015) and you can find her online.

2026 Spring Seminar Series: Victorian Bodies

Seminars start at 5.15pm (GMT) with a  50-minute paper followed by questions

 ‘The eyes of a sick man’: Fevers and Flu at the Fin de Siècle

• 25 February
• Speaker: Dr Emily Vincent (University of Durham)
• ATT1707 and online
• Book your free ticket

George Eliot’s Ethics of Violence

• 25 March
• Speaker: Dr Olivia Krauze (Cambridge University)
• Attenborough 1707 and online
• Book your free ticket

Queer Endurance, Ill Health and Homophobia at the Fin de Siècle: George Cecil Ives’s The Missing Baronet

• 13 May
• Speaker: Dr Fraser Riddell (University of Durham)
• Attenborough 1707 and online
• Book your free ticket

Alumni Student Showcase

• 20 May
• Speakers:
  • Hannah Palmer (Loughborough University): Elizabeth Gaskell and the Distribution of Women’s Health: Letters and Patient Case Notes
  • Dr Aaron Eames (Bath Spa University): Writing Wilde: Oscar Wilde’s Sexuality in Biographical Literature
• Attenborough 1707 and online
• Book your free ticket