VIDES
Free online journal
Interdisciplinary essays produced by our MSt in Literature and Arts students
An annual online journal, produced by students on the Master's in Literature and Arts, VIDES is a free volume of interdisciplinary essays which explore a wide range of topics through the analysis and comparison of two related textual or visual documents.
Students produce VIDES as part of their work on the course, in their second year as part of the preparation for the dissertation. Collaboratively, students are divided into small committees who are then responsible for peer-reviewing, proof-reading, copy-editing and designing the journal.
VIDES means 'you see' in Latin, but in this context also stands as an acronym: 'Volume of Interdisciplinary Essays'.
Vides 2026
This fourteenth issue of VIDES offers a wide-ranging perspective on British culture — in the broadest sense of the term — from the early modern period to the early twentieth century. Across twenty-four diverse articles, contributors from around the world present interdisciplinary reflections on objects, images, texts, and ideas from both the distant and more recent past. The articles lie at the intersection of literature, art, history, and philosophy, and are organised into four thematic sections: ‘Nature, Science, and Modernity’; ‘Social Worlds: Class and Gender’; ‘Forms of Seeing: Aesthetics and Representation’; and ‘Empire and Material Culture’. Together, they chart a rich and varied map of British life — domestic and imperial, elite and popular, official and subversive — through the material traces that remain.
The articles address a wide range of topics, from forgotten scientists and the moral authority of Victorian domestic life to the complexities of identity. Questions of class, gender, and representation are explored through painting, poetry, and prose, alongside the imperial reach of British culture as reflected in porcelain, sculpture, and garden design. This volume moves between stage and landscape, between symbols of mourning and medieval rites, and across satirical prints and portraiture.
With its richness of perspectives and interpretations, VIDES XIV, sheds a distinctive light on what British culture made of itself and of the world across four centuries.
Previous volumes
Earlier volumes of VIDES are also available here:
