SPRING 2018: Hello and welcome Honors Contract students!

Hi! I’m Lisa, your instructor, with my introductory post.

If you’re seeing this post on The Blog page, you’ll notice posts below it. These are from previous classes, so don’t worry about them.

So, you may know me already, or learned about me from what we call the “parent” class. I have invited only students from History 105: History of England and History 106: History of Technology for this special contract session on Victorian Science and Fiction.

My interest in this area developed gradually. My original area of study was medieval technology, in particular textile machinery. But I later realized the joys of Victorian fiction, and the joys of studying an area where there were many written documents and a rich tradition of scholarship.

I believe that the Victorian era was in many ways like our own. We seem to share a fascination with gadgetry, and a need to show it off to our friends. We have a society that oscillates between deep morality and deep commercialism. We both revel in and fear the technologies of our time. The telegraph was the internet of its day, providing instantaneous information in ways that upset traditional relationships, the economy, and politics (there’s a great book on this, by the way – The Victorian Internet by journalist Tom Standage). And in both eras, science has a changing relationship to technology, as they impact each other. There are so many parallels.

I am also engaged at the moment in a research project on another parallel – Victorian distance education. We are all learning online together in this class. In the Victorian age, they did that by correspondence classes, by mail!

Please post in this first week about you, but it needn’t be personal if you don’t want it to be. I’m more interested in your scholastic passions – your interest in this subject (if any!), your views on science and technology in our own time, the topics you like to follow in the news or popular culture. And let’s reply to each other as we get used to using this blog for our work.