To situate my book’s narrative, I compiled data about rates of theatre building over the course of the 19th century in London, Glasgow, Manchester and Edinburgh; the overall increase in theatres was 885% London and 900% in Glasgow and Manchester. Spookily parallel! Quantitative scholarship is fun!

“Velvet Goldmine” hot take, following my fifth or sixth watch of the film: Tommy Stone isn’t necessarily Brian Slade! I will not be taking questions at this time.

Theatre historians, esp. of 19th c. Britain: I swear I once saw an image (either photograph or lithograph) of playbills being pasted on a city wall already crowded with bills, reproduced in a scholarly volume. Does anyone have any idea or leads for what I might be thinking of?!

I am working on contextualizing the 1832, 1866, and 1892 select committees about theatre licensing and am grieving the absence of any In Our Time episode that could clarify the hows and whys of the Liberal Unionists.

Four greatest words in the English language.

Crowdsourcing question from a performance historian rather than practitioner: in recent decades, how often are productions revived outside of ballet and opera? Are costumes and sets ever deliberately reused rather than simply pulled from an institution’s stock for financial reasons?

Because I know there are a lot of performance scholars & practitioners here, I thought I'd share that I've just finished a website that explains the various formats that document the performing arts + collates archival collections where they can be found! web.simmons.edu/~wiet/lis488...

Who here is on Substack? I just joined so that I have a space write about the intersections between documentation and performance (and also movies) outside of the formal pitch-and-publish cycle. Let’s follow each other! I’m at ephemerance.substack.com.

Reading up on Isadora Duncan’s relationship with documentation for this project I’m doing has once again made me want to write an article titled “Ellen Terry, Mother of the Avant-Garde.” Genealogy of performance made literal!

I just purchased a theatrical scrapbook from the 1920s on eBay simply so I can post an example on a website about performing arts formats without worrying about copyright. This might be the most Victoria thing I’ve ever done!

My library school classes presume none of us have used card catalogs written in library hand — little do they know what it means to a researcher of 19th century theatre at the BL!!!

For some time I’ve felt like my intellectual interests have left literary studies and shifted exclusively to film and theatre, but reading scholarship about Middlemarch (by smart young women—fellow Dorothea’s?) has made this wayward sheep return to the fold, at least for a visit.

As I board my flight from ORD to LGA for RBMS (and my first game at Citifield), the ticket agent sees my Mets gear and says: “You’re in trouuuuuublllllle.”

I’ve been listening to all of Dylan sequentially as I pack, and though “Blood on the Tracks” has always been a top-5-of-all-time for me, I now can’t fathom the jolt of 1975: having suffered a series of duds and then lowering the turntable needle and hearing the opening chords of Tangled Up in Blue.

I'm not sure how many people here remember me from Twitter, but now that the semester's over, I figure I should share that my affiliation is somewhat changing -- after 5 years at DePauw, I'll be beginning an MSLIS in Archives Management at Simmons this Fall! For the past two years, I've been...

Modest accomplishment worth posting about here: I just finished drafting my fourth chapter, the last of my theatre history chapters. Four more to go, but they're all novel criticism based on my dissertation, with no new archival research to incorporate.

There are many worthier battles to pick with AI, but I consider it a public service to tell the world that this is literally not true! Hobhouse wrote in his diary that Lady Caro fanatically "squeezed" Vestris! He even quoted Sappho after.

Thanks to @publicbooks.bsky.social, I finally got the chance to write about Callas -- and how the gap between archives and live performance can help us appreciate why MARIA is a needed intervention into the predictability of the Oscar bait-y biopic genre. www.publicbooks.org/perfect-reco...

The old man is still alive: the new (amazing) season of You Must Remember This, but also the start of the Mets 2025 season. 🐻‍❄️

Colleagues who study Victorian Britain: who can help me grasp what it makes for a theatre programme to cost one penny in 1880? The National Archives currency converter places this at 28p today, which doesn’t feel like much, but maybe pence were more difficult to come by due to wealth disparity??

I live in an apartment building and I am 100% sure my neighbors know—and are upset—that it is baseball season again.

Popping on to BlueSky to say that being a Mets fan today really reminds you of what the joy of living feels like.

Millennial colleagues/friends: How many of you regularly watched Nick at Nite as a kid? “Like” this tweet as if this was a Twitter poll so that I can furnish data for my students in tomorrow’s lecture on early network television.

I am preparing tomorrow’s lecture on the invention of television and, as a non-expert, I find my mind blown as I finally understand why exactly Liz Lemon reports to a GE executive.

Why did I decide to teach editorial history in my literary methods course by way of “Tess”? This is a rhetorical question, as the answer is obvious (I love to make things difficult for myself).

With this sentence, I've drafted a chapter 12 years in the making: "Disconnected from the bodies that once handled them, Victorian theatrical memorabilia now narrate a history of sexuality that subsists in the subjunctive: not a record of what definitively was, but an index of what was possible."

Why am I even surprised that the Oscar nominations have fêted the completely conventional “A Complete Unknown” (whose chief achievement is Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez) and snubbed the adventurous “Maria” for everything except Ed Lachman’s brilliant cinematography?

I need to start actually writing this essay about “Maria” but instead, in true Victoria fashion, I am scrolling through finding aids looking for the sources Callas biographers cite.

With Lynch’s passing, occurring as I feverishly write about Callas and as I revive my adolescent love of Dylan because I’ve been thinking too much about biopics, I feel toward American culture what Tony says in the Sopranos pilot: “I came in at the end. The best is over.”

Evergreen meme, the only properly decent meme I've ever created.

Syllabus crowdsourcing time: I’m teaching an advanced course on literary methods next semester, and I’m looking for (1) A good recent-ish example of biographical criticism (which to some extent is now a standard part of our toolkit), and (2) an essay that conceptualizes the public humanities.

Realization upon seeing the new restoration of Umbrellas de Cherbourg on the big screen: it’s about the postwar replacement of the romance of the train station (Now Voyager, Casablanca) with the kitsch of the gas station.

My sister and I are debating whether “Choreography” in White Christmas is a satire on Balanchine, Martha Graham or Denishawn.

“White Christmas” would truly be a perfect (holiday) movie if it was just Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen.

Crowdsourcing time: what are examples of biopics that center on the genesis of male genius? The downfall of female genius? So far I have Stardust and A Complete Unknown for the latter, Karen Carpenter Story, Judy, and even TÀR (though fictional) for the latter. And of course Maria—sort of.

Daunt Books really needs an annual auto-ship program for those of us far outside of London who beat up their beautiful and perfectly structured totes through daily use.

I have been teaching writing and research methods for ten years but I still constantly google “inductive vs deductive” when grading papers.

After receiving a turntable last Christmas, I’ve developed a new hobby of record collecting. One thing I didn’t expect to see is evidence of reception I learned to look for from the history of the book: people inscribing their names on covers, or even gluing the vinyl equivalent of a bookplate.

Treats for the last day of class: orange custard & cranberry tarts, an adaptation of Nigella’s bitter orange & blackberry tart (I’ve come to realize that Midwestern college students aren’t the ideal audience for mince pies), and my usual chocolate gingerbread trees topped with white chocolate.

The entire reason to go to grad school is so that you can meet someone at the orientation barbecue with whom you become instant friends after Callas comes up in conversation and then, twelve years later, you end up having an identical reaction to a biopic.

I just saw “MARIA” and I have a lot of Thoughts and Feelings—and hopefully a venue for sharing them?—but right now I’ll say that the final montage of archival candid footage of actual Callas made palpable all that the film lacked. And maybe that’s the point?

My sister tracked down a DVD of “God Help the Girl” and it really is a reminder that no sartorial style will ever surpass the early 2010s hipster aesthetic.

Kristin Chenoweth is a better Glinda because, like Billie Burke herself, she is a lyric soprano with a comic opera background. In this essay I will…

Now that this place is quite active, I finally have an audience of semi-strangers for my bakes again. These are choux buns filled with yuzu creme pat (my Whole Foods actually had punnets of them!) topped with white chocolate, and earl grey creme pat topped with milk chocolate. Also, my cat Oscar.

In literary criticism, this should be “THE Archive, amirite?”

A snippet from my current obsession, one of the diaries for my ch. on Victorian women’s spectatorship: the author’s collector father wages revenge against his collector son-in-law—both early donors to the BM—for eloping with his daughter by claiming that the SIL stole manuscripts from a university!

Greetings! I’ve found it hard to keep up with any text-based socials during my sabbatical, but I’ve heard that there’s been a new wave of migration here! I miss virtual community. (And community of any sort.)

Something to mark my return to this space: for LARB, I got to write about why we keep returning to melodrama by way of some of my favorite things (Todd Haynes, Douglas Sirk, and even “Mad Men”). lareviewofbooks.org/article/outg...

It's time to finally ask: any punchy, pungent advice about EFFICIENTLY transforming a dissertation into a monograph? I have three additional years of archival research, new framing, some new secondary sources, but the concept, methodology, core materials, and argument are basically the same.

Has anyone gotten sick during finals week and realized they can’t give comments on finals even after they promised them? Asking, unfortunately, for myself, who has recovered from the coughing and sneezing but is facing bad headaches and dizziness from sinus pressure.