Contact details

Email: Margery.Masterson@bristol.ac.uk

Research Interests

An historian of modern and imperial Britain, my current research is on Victorian masculinity and militarism. I am particularly fascinated by the popularity of self-defence manuals, concealed weapons and military exercises among civilian men in the second half of the nineteenth century. Having explored the resurgent interest in duelling among Victorian men, I am now studying the material culture of the Volunteers movement.

More generally, I am interested in two distinct research strands: Victorian material culture including mourning and memorialisation (of both humans and animals), and the equally interdisciplinary scholarship on public shaming, the erosion of privacy and scandal in the digital age, and in linking these twenty-first century concerns to historical perspectives from the first age of mass media.

Publications

'Dueling, Conflicting Masculinities, and the Victorian Gentleman', Journal of British Studies, 56.3 (2017).

‘Bombay Graveyards and British Beaches: The Tale of a Victorian Imperial Scandal’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 19.3 (2014).

'Dangerous Detours: The Perils of Victorian Periodicals in the Digitized Age' in Eve Patten and Jason McElligott (eds.), The Perils of Print Culture: Book, Print and Publishing History in Theory and Practice (Palgrave McMillan, 2014).