The Hand: Emotions, Embodiment and Identity
London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London
8-9 January, 2026
Registration
Tickets for The Hand: Emotions, Embodiment, Identity are now live on the University of the Arts London e-store. Click here to reserve your place.
Attendees have the option to choose a ticket for one or both days - if you intend to attend the conference on both 8th and 9th January, make sure to add both tickets to your selection! We would also be delighted if you would join us for an informal conference dinner on the evening of 8th January at Park Kitchen & Bar, Sadler's Wells East - please note there is a per-head cost for this option and can be booked via the e-store.
Plenary Speakers
The Victorian Hand is delighted to announce that the plenary speakers for our upcoming conference are Dr Sarah Jackson from Northumbria University, Professor Peter J. Capuano from University of Nebraska and photographer Caroline Seymour.
Sarah Jackson is Vice Chancellor's Fellow at Northumbria University, where she works at the intersections of literature, art and technology. Drawing on Didier Anzieu's theory of the skin ego, her first collection of poetry, Pelt (Bloodaxe, 2012), won the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry. Alongside this, her works include Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing (Edinburgh University Press, 2015); Literature and the Telephone (Bloomsbury, 2023); and Telepoetics (Edinburgh University Press, 2026).
Peter J. Capuano is the James E. Ryan Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. His first book, Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2015. It was shortlisted for the British Society of Literature and Science Book Prize that year. He has also edited a collection of essays by other Victorian scholars who have taken up an interest in the representation of hands in literature, philosophy, and cultural studies more broadly. Victorian Hands: The Manual Turn in Nineteenth-Century Body Studies was published by the Ohio State University Press in 2020. His most recent book is Dickens’s Idiomatic Imagination: The Inimitable and Victorian Body Language, which was published by Cornell University Press in 2023.
Caroline Seymour is a photographer based in Oxford, UK. An exhibition of her recent work, called ‘Close to the Bone’ was shown at the Royal Colleges of Surgeons of Dublin, Glasgow and London in 2024, and an expanded version of that show, ‘Beyond Fear’, was shown at The Barn Gallery, St John’s College, Oxford, in July this year. Her photobook 'Beyond Fear’ was published in February 2024 by Dewi Lewis Publishing.
Draft Programme
Please note that this programme may be subject to change.
Day 1: Thursday 8 January
Welcome: 09.30-09.45
Session 1: 10.00-11.30
Panel A: Hand-Workers
Melanie Bell and Alice Sage - Handmade: The Invisible Craft and Labour of Film Costume (short film, 6 mins, and discussion).
Anna Duffield - Embroidery-as-Research: Exploring the history and process of needlework through the re-creation of a family embroidery sampler.
Kate Sekules - Hand/Mending: News from the Coalface.
Panel B: Victorian Hands
Tilly A.F. Guthrie - Keeping in Touch: Tactile materiality in the correspondence of the British blind community, c. 1840-1905.
Jay Sullivan - Severed Hands in Victorian Egyptomania.
Jonathan Westaway - ‘But there is Art and ART’: Winckelmann, Pater and the Haptic Aesthetics of Mountaincraft.
Coffee break: 11.30-12.00
Session 2: 12.00-13.30
Hands on workshop led by textile artist, Ruth Singer.
Lunch: 13.30-14.30
Session 3: 14.30-16.00
Panel C: Iconic Hands
Eve Connor - The Many Thinking Hands of Jack Sheppard.
Sarah Potvin - Walt Whitman’s Hands.
Bertha del Valle - Fidel Castro’s Hands: Sentiment and Affect as Sources of Political Legitimacy in Revolutionary Cuba.
Panel D: Practice Based Research
Janine Goldsworthy - Between Hands and Pixels
Fiona Snow - The Thinking Hand: Embodied Learning in Art, Craft and Design Pedagogy.
Elise Maynard - The Hand as Temporal Bridge: Cross-Modal Translation Through Practice-Based Research.
Coffee break: 16.00-16.20
Session 4: 16.20-17.50
Panel E: Hands and Healthcare
Daniel Grey - Out of Touch? Life and Death in the Hands of Midwives in England, 1871-1914.
Louise Bell - ‘It’s always been a good fitting leg because I made do myself’: Adapting prostheses in the aftermath of two world wars.
Doris George Yohannan - Air Anatomy: The Hand as a Medium of Embodied Learning in Anatomical Education.
Panel F: Artists’ Hands
Mattea Gernentz - The Impression of Touch: Hands that Paint and Cultivate.
Rebecca Fortnum - A Gesture to Genius.
Margarita Kamalyan - The Eloquent Hand in Arto Chakmakchyan's Art.
Day 2: Friday 9 January
Session 1: 10.00-11.30
Panel G: Virtuality and Touch Phenomenon
Gwendolyn Bolderink - I want your hands on me: how to be a sex object.
Brian L. Frye - The Invisible Hand of the Muse.
Weerada Muangsook - The Hand in Motion: The Performative Gesture of Page-turning in the Consumption of Jet Age Fashion Media.
Panel H: Victorian Makers
Lena Ferriday - Touching Skill: The Place of the Hand in Rural Labour, 1840-1910.
Róisín Quinn-Lautrefin - Victorian women’s domestic crafts and the hands that made them.
Coffee break: 11.30-12.00
Session 2: 12.00-13.30
Hands on workshops
Rebecca Whiteley - Illustrations of hands and intimate touch in obstetrical and gynaecological books.
Michelle Baruch-Baron - Using haptic experiences from the Clay Field to explore the potential of somatic healing.
Lunch: 13.30-14.30
Session 3: 14.30-16.00
Panel K: Fashion
Nico Frederick - Quee(ring) the Hand: Coded Accessories, Lesbians, and Rings.
Lauren Bell - Covered in Flesh: Fashion, Eroticism, and Music Video Aesthetics.
Petra Egri - Embodying Heritage: The Hand, the Glove, and the Survival of Craft in Pécs.
Panel L: Hands of Power
Kate West - Unruly Hands: Gestural Resistance and Metropolitan Carceral Power.
Rachael Haslam - ‘Giving his Faith in his Hands’: The Hand and Embodied Trust in Late Medieval Church Court Disputes.
Maybell Romero - Handed Down.
Plenary: Tactile Subjects, 16.20-17.50
Sarah Jackson, Peter J. Capuano and Caroline Seymour.
Closing Remarks, 17.50-18.00
Call for Papers
Since prehistoric humans used pigments to stencil their hands on cave walls, hands have been a metonym for humanity. The imagery and symbolism of hands are a constant in visual and material culture. Hands appear in countless linguistic etymologies. Across history, the hand has variously been used to idolise heroes, typify Otherness, and connect the material world with the supernatural. In the present, we store data behind fingerprint security, and communicate through touch screens, typing and swiping to initiate connection. In an era of deceptive artificial intelligence, hands remain challenging for AI to recreate, gesturing to human talent and authenticity.
We invite abstracts for papers of 15-20 minutes, for presentation at our 2-day interdisciplinary conference, part of The Victorian Hand: Emotions, Embodiment, and Identity, Past and Present, supported by UKRI.
In recognition of the hand’s ability to reach across boundaries and make connections, we welcome presentations from multi- and interdisciplinary research fields, including Critical Studies, Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences and STEM. We encourage proposals from artists, makers and performers alongside more traditional academic research papers.
Potential research themes related to the hand include, but are not limited to:
Care: healing, medicine, surgery, philanthropy, justice, carceral systems, psychology, wellbeing.
Communication: gesture, performance, sign language, tactile communication, literary and visual representations.
Connection: life and death, remembrance, symbolic hands, supernatural hands.
Embodiment: touch, hapticity, identity, intimacy, selfhood, play.
Work: class, crafting, making, creative practice, labour, feminism, race and anti-racism, LBGTQ+ activism, skilled work under AI.
Please send abstracts up to 300 words, and biographies up to 100 words to victorianhand@fashion.arts.ac.uk.
Deadline: 22 September 2025