VICTEUR: European Migrants in the British Imagination: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture is a 5-year project funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. The study will use big data to address a key unanswered societal question, how does migration impact on the cultural identity of both migrant and host communities in the historical long-term.
Victorian Britain was much more diverse than we assume today. It was the target destination for large numbers of migrants from across Europe fleeing war, political turmoil and economic deprivation.
Professor Gerardine Meaney
Principal Investigator
What is VICTEUR?
What can the large scale literary datasets now available tell us about the ways in which national cultures develop and the role of migration in that development?
This project seeks to push beyond the frontiers of current understanding of the role of migration and migrants in the dynamics of cultural change and continuity, examining intra-European migration in the Victorian period through the ‘macroscope’ of text mining and the microscopes of literary scholarship. During the Victorian period Britain was the target destination for large numbers of migrants from across Europe fleeing war, political turmoil and/or economic deprivation.
VICTEUR will focus on how the intra-European cultural exchange triggered by this movement of population is embedded in Victorian fiction. It will identify persistent and residual narratives and attitudes to a cross-section of European migrants by members of the host community and the cultural output of these migrants across a very large literary data set, the 35,918 volumes of fiction in the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus operationalised for text mining via Curatr.
Dr Derek Greene
Co-Investigator
VICTEUR in numbers
Creation of 10 research positions – PhD students, post-doctoral researchers, a research technologist and a research assistant – at UCD.
VICTEUR will involve text analysis of nearly 36,000 books, in the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus, and shared by them in digital format.
The project has been awarded a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant of €2.5 million for a 5-year study.
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The VICTEUR team
VICTEUR’S research team combines UCD’s strengths in cultural criticism and social network analysis, traditional humanities and new computational approaches, established and early stage researchers.
Learn more about previous and upcoming VICTEUR events.
