In this episode, we talk about Queen Victoria’s early reign and her marriage to Prince Albert. Listen in to learn about German sausage slander, being cold and emasculated, and our distorted assumptions about female rulers. What did you think of Victoria and Albert’s love story?

References:

• Queen Victoria's Early Letters by John Raymond (ed.)
• Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions by Matthew Dennison
• Mistress of Everything: Queen Victoria in Indigenous Worlds by Sarah Carter and Maria Nugent (eds.)
• Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert by Stanley Weintraub
• Painting: 'The Secret of England's Greatness' (Queen Victoria presenting a Bible in the Audience Chamber at Windsor), National Gallery
• 'Of Hype and Type: The Media Making of Queen Victoria 1837-1845' by John Plunkett
• 'Queen Victoria : A Reference Guide to Her Life and Works' by C. V. Reeds
• 'Queen Victoria – Icon of the Victorian Age and Feminism' by Aimée Stagl and Günter Fahrnberger
• 'Sex, sovereignty and sausages: TV writer traces prejudice against Germans back to Victoria’s time' by Vanessa Thorpe (The Guardian)
• '"She will wear the britsch": Masculinity and the iconography of Prince Albert' by Hannah Bradshaw
• 'The Historiography of Queen Victoria: On the Threshold of Private Psychoanalysis and Public Feminism' by Rebecca Willis
• 'The Bicentenary of Queen Victoria' by Miles Taylor
• 'Visualising Victoria: Gender, Genre and History in The Young Victoria (2009)' by Julia Kinzler
• '"We Don't Want Any German Sausages Here!" Food, Fear, and the German Nation in Victorian and Edwardian Britain' by Keir Waddington

This week, we chat about the movie Sylvie's Love (2020), directed by Eugene Ashe and starring Tessa Thompson and Nnamdia Asomugha. The film poses the question of whether romance stories can be stripped of their political context. We dissect the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, jazz history, and the civil rights movement.

In this episode, we reference the following works:

• ‘Sylvie’s Love’ Nnamdi Asomugha and Writer-Director Eugene Ashe Reflect on Telling a Story Audiences Hadn’t Seen Before by Scott Huver
• Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement by Barbara Ransby
• The New Negro Aesthetic: Selected Writings from Alain Locke
• "Our History," published by the NAACP
• A History of the Harlem Renaissance edited by Rachel Farebrother and Miriam Thaggert
• "Black Women Working Together: Jazz, Gender, and the Politics of Validation" by Tammy L. Kernodle
• "The Harlem Renaissance and its Blue-Jazz Traditions: Harlem and its Places of Entertainment" by Virginia Whatley Smith

This week, we're talking about the Netflix adaptation of Jane Austen's 1817 novel Persuasion, starring Dakota Johnson. Join us as we discuss the gendered relations of the era, issues of aristocracy vs. meritocracy in early-nineteenth-century Britain, and the theme of empire that lies just under the surface of Austen's work.

P.S. We mention the Victorian period throughout this episode and its strict separation of gender, but Persuasion was technically written a few years before this period officially began. These themes, however, were already emerging in the run-up to Queen Victoria's reign.

In this episode, we reference the following works:

• 'Gender Roles in the 19th Century' & Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum by Kathryn Hughes
• 'Jane Austen on Screen' & Jane Austen: Writer in the World by Kathryn Sutherland
• Orientalism by Edward Said
• 'Decolonizing Imperialist Discourse in Jane Austen's Persuasion' by Muna Abd-Rabbo, Ghadir Zalloum, and Ziad Nemrawi