An Eventful English Summer: Awards, Book Launches and Conferences

As she prepares for the new academic year, our Professor of English Literature, Claudia Capancioni, reflects on an eventful summer. 

On 13th June 2026, at the annual conference of the English Association, she was welcomed as one of the new elected Fellows during a programme of many interesting panels and activities on climate education and English Studies, the English 4-11 Picture Book Award, and the future of English (from the Curriculum and Assessment review and the new National Curriculum to AI and the ‘post-literate age’). The English Association is cross-sector subject association that connects individuals and organisations from all sectors of education and all areas of English studies. This year marks the association’s 120th anniversary.

Last April, Professor Capancioni’s latest co-edited collection of essays, Re-examining Nineteenth-century Easts: Gendered Narratives of Encounter, was published by Manchester University Press in their ‘Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century Series’. 

The volume collects fourteen contributions from international Victorian specialists from different countries, including a theoretical introduction co-authored by Capancioni with co-editors Mariaconcetta Costantini (a Visiting Professor at Lincoln Bishop University) and Julia Kuehn, which claims the multiplicity of nineteenth-century Easts by pluralising encounters in the global nineteenth century. Capancioni also contributed an original chapter entitled ‘Lucie Duff Gordon's palimpsestuous views of Egypt’. A timely publication, the collection reassesses and contributes novel approaches to formations of gender in relation to sites and lives considered ‘other’ and ‘east’ of the nineteenth-century British world and tackle debates around East/West relations and how the Easts were conceptualised, with real Victorian and contemporary political relevance. It generates new dialogues between understudied texts and writers such as, for example, Lucie Duff Gordon, Mary Adelaide Walker and Mary Edith Durham and more established literary and non-fictional stories of travel and narratives of encounter by authors such as Anthony Trollope, Baroness Orczy and Janet Ross.

This summer, together with Costantini and Kuehn, Capancioni presented the volume during a roundtable on ‘The Victorians and Scholarly Audiences: A Roundtable on Publishing and Public Engagement’ at the 18th Annual Conference of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association on "The Victorians and Their Publics", held at Liverpool John Moores University from 6th to 8th July. Having been elected President of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association last year, at the conference she also took on the role of the President.

This month, Capancioni also co-hosts ‘Pleasure and Pain in Women’s Writing’, the second conference of the International Women’s Writing Association (IWWA) organised in collaboration with the research centre L&GEND and taking place at G. d’Annunzio University, Pescara-Chieti in Italy from 9th to 11th September. Women’s writing is a field of studies at the core of the research produced in the English department.

 At the conference she will present a paper on Celeste Mohammed’s latest novel Ever Since We Small that studies how the novel’s multigenerational polyphonic narration reclaims a legacy of survival by unfolding silenced stories of women’s suffering. Her team colleague Dr Lucinda Newns will also attend the conference. Her contribution is entitled ‘Scars Across My Inner Landscape: Affective Environments in Recent Migrant Women’s Nature Memoirs’. 

To discover English Literature at Lincoln Bishop, visit https://www.lincolnbishop.ac.uk/course-subjects/english