Whether technically autumn or not (it certainly feels like it outside) it has been a busy few weeks here at Piston, Pen and Press to close the summer. Last week Victorianist scholars, students and researchers from across the UK, and from further afield, descended upon Dundee for the British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS) conference. The three-day event was packed with exciting and engaging papers and discussions.
On Thursday 29th August, our panel, ‘Literary Cultures in the Industrial Workplace’, took to the floor to share our work on the Piston, Pen and Press project:
First up on the panel was our very own Kirstie Blair, ‘Addressing the Machine’. Twitterers seemed to really enjoy engaging with the panel:
Next up was another of our team, Mike Sanders, talking ‘Billy Boy’s Shop and “The Nottingham Spy”’:
Lastly, but by no means least, was Oliver Betts’s paper on ‘Pistons and Presses, Spaces and Places, in Working-Class Industrial Writing 1850-1914’:
And Edinburgh’s Fringe festival may be over, but further north in Dundee the 5 star reviews were flooding in…
To tie-in with the BAVS conference in Dundee, we had also set up our ‘Literature in the Factories and Mills’ exhibition at the city’s Verdant Works museum. There were queues to get in! Here’s proof:
Many thanks to our partners at Verdant Works for hosting the exhibition, and for all their help in setting it up.
We’ve also printed of our poetry anthologies, containing materials from our project. We have physical copies which can be picked up from our exhibition sites (depending on availability), and they can also be viewed or downloaded in pdf form here:
So that was August. September is full of its own exciting Piston, Pen and Press events. This Friday (6th September) at Verdant Works in Dundee, Arran born fiddler and singer Gillian Frame and Scottish singer-songwriter Findlay Napier perform brand new material inspired by findings from the Piston, Pen & Press research project:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/piston-pen-press-performance-tickets-62585803824
The event starts at 19:00 and tickets are only £5.
We also have another exhibition to set up, using our ‘Literature in the Mines’ materials, this time at North Lanarkshire Heritage Centre in Motherwell. Thanks to Pheonix Print Dundee Ltd for their great work in printing the banners:
See you there!
