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.