iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Pay as you can virtual workshop on Shakespeare coming up! www.eventbrite.com/e/shakespear...

eventbrite.com

Shakespeare Now

An Urgent Political Conversation

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

I had to wait to get to my editing software at home to post this but here is Olafur Eliasson’s “Your rainbow panorama” from #Dickenssociety2026 and featuring @drchrislouttit.bsky.social in a brief cameo.

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

I ended my #Dickenssociety2026 with a stop off in London to take a class with Dimitri Gruzdev. He killed me, but in the best way possible. Exercising my mind and my body this week!

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Beautiful images shared by Jeremy Parrott in his talk about the Adelphi in London. I will now be doing some side quest literary tourism. #dickenssociety2026

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Céline Prest defines Jo’s not knowing “nothink” as equating to his not existing. Jo is continually defined by negative terms and his body gradually loses its integrity through the narrator’s description. #Dickenssociety2026

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

A symposium first on day 3 of #Dickenssociety2026 : a double panel! Nora Schalkers & Matthias Bauer on the uses of ‘enlightenment’ in Dickens.

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

🎉 I am thrilled to work alongside such wonderful Dickensian scholars as @liliu430.bsky.social who won the Parlow Prize and @saramalton.bsky.social and Meg Cronin who won the Paroissien Prize! 🎉

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Dickensians watching England v. Argentina! ⚽️ 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇦🇷#Dickenssociety2026

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Day 2 of #dickenssociety2026 provides a beautiful walk to ARoS museum for our symposium dinner. Denmark is gorgeous!

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Thank you, @dickenssociety.bsky.social for letting me talk about ghosts again. I’ll hit a new topic next year.

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Virginia Zimmerman discussing homemade children’s literature, including the Gad’s Hill Gazette’s (produced by Dickens’s younger teenage sons) story on the death of the Dickens’ family dog, Turk. #Dickenssociety2026

Gad’s Hill Gazette printing of the death of Dickens’s dog, Turk.

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Michelle Allen Emerson speaking about Edwin Stanley Brookes, Dickensian actor, elocution teacher, & psychical researcher, who was witness to “Dickensian Miracle.” After losing his voice before a show, 👻 Dickens lended his voice to Brookes a mere 30 minutes prior to the recital. #Dickenssociety2026

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

“Typographical Exuberance” of serial installments offer excitement for the reader (see below) but Joel Brattin also examines the lack of consistency in Dickens’s textually exuberant writing: Pocket-Breaches or Pocket Breeches? The world may never know. #Dickenssociety2026

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Meoghan Cronin discussing narrators of ‘The Signal-Man’ and Sarah Smith’s ‘The Traveling Post-Office’ of Mugby Junction: each narrator has a compulsion to solve the mystery. They imagine they are subjective but they are not. #Dickenssociety2026

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Natalie McKnight on Dickens’ tendencies to deconstruct binaries: the Shakespearean wise fools, Mr. Dick & Dora, become more emotionally intelligent than the hero of his own novel with their “the mind[s] of the heart”. #Dickenssociety2026

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

‘Dickens Thinking on His Feet’: Edward Grimble discussed how aggression peppers Dickens’ descriptions of walking. The imaginative labor required of him to write was difficult to endure; the need to walk the streets was bound to his writing. #Dickenssociety2026

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Wiktoria Pierzak outlined alternative family models: social surrogacy, neighborly adoption, & families of choice. Pierzak explained how David abandons his alternative lifestyle & childhood with social outlier, Betsy, in favor of social normalcy. #Dickenssociety2026

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Rob Jacklosky dissects Dickens’s humor, pointing out that comedy is structured through incongruity and juxtaposition, and it’s a meeting point between two incompatible frames of reference: to see the world as it is AND to see it slant. #Dickenssociety2026

Slide highlighting Dickens’ letter to John Forster re. “Great Expectations” and Dickens’ comedic crafting.

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Lillian Nader: the brain as the “organ of the mind” versus a “temporary housing for the soul.” Elliotson, intimacy with God, and phrenology all weigh into Dickens’ thoughts & were especially on his mind during “Barnaby Rudge” with John Willet and Barnaby: material brain vs soul #Dickenssociety2026

John Elliotson. “Human Physiology”, 1835

A graph showing heavier use of the word “brain” in Dickens during the years of his friendship with Elliotson

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Mark Cronin on the verbose, amorous description of Belle’s daughter in “X-mas Carol”: “did he not know he was speaking out loud?!” 😂 The narrator of ‘Carol’ exists in an undefined space—fully realized at times, rhetorical device at others. It changes with each Stave. #Dickenssociety2026

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Departing a rather balmy Atlanta (62% humidity) for a similarly balmy Aarhus. At least I’ll feel at home as I sweat. #Dickenssociety2026

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

I’m reading GWTW for the first time and I have enjoyed Scarlett: she is a hilarious PAIN, hates the war, and also makes some great points about women’s rights. BUT Mitchell’s take on Reconstruction is flawed. Abell explains why and counters with Mitchell’s ATL contemporary, WEB DuBois!

atlantahistorycenter.com

The Dunning School: The Biased Study of Reconstruction that Shaped "Gone With the Wind"

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Reposted by Katie Bell 🇵🇸

cait (and adonis) @cait.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

when you're not a morning person but you get a morning person job, everyone tells you you'll get used to waking up early but i'm here to tell you that's a fat fucking lie

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Reposted by Katie Bell 🇵🇸

👻madeline bOoOoOoOodent👻 @oldenoughtosay.com · 08/04/2026

all these universities kept axing medieval history departments as if they thought tyrants beefing with the Pope was going to stop being relevant

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

Just in case my account meets readers looking for the perfect matching of Christopher Lee and MR James for Xmas Eve… archive.org/details/ghos...

archive.org

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Reposted by Katie Bell 🇵🇸

ianVisits @ianvisits.co.uk · 03/10/2025

In memoriam...

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

I love the #PeterRabbit stories and illustrations by #BeatrixPotter and once saved up my allowance to buy a pencil box depicting Peter Rabbit, but I did some work for Joel Chandler Harris’s Wren’s Nest in Atlanta when I was finishing my graduate degree, and discovered something fascinating! A 🧵

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

Tickled that this story in a random book I picked up of Irish Literature is the spitting image of Uncle Colm’s dialogue from Derry Girls.

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

Hello, reader! Interested in hearing about gory horror stories? Come to my free lecture next Wednesday! It’s virtual and free.

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

Went to the Root House in Cobb County and it was all done up for Christmas! Very accurately, too.

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

Was gifted the FULL SET of Pop figure Muppets Xmas Carol characters at work today. 🎄 I used them to enact a brief summary of the plot to kids who don’t know either reference. 👌

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

Just some little guys. Doin little guy things…

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

For all the #Dracula fans out there: I’m reading it fully for the first time and I have some questions. Chiefly, the sub plot surrounding Whitby. I know Carfax Abbey is based on Whitby but as it’s in London, why does the Demeter land in Whitby if greater London is the destination?

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Paul Renfro @renfro.bsky.social · 21/03/2024

I’m absolutely delighted to share the cover of my book, which will be published by @uncpress.bsky.social this fall. Many thanks to the design team at the Press and everybody who made this possible.

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Reposted by Katie Bell 🇵🇸

The Dickens Society @dickenssociety.bsky.social · 21/03/2024

Delighted to share our new YouTube video of artist Gerry Mooney, creating his linoleum cutting illustrations for “Bleak House”! youtu.be/wd_80NIiuEI?...

youtu.be

This video was filmed by Gerry Mooney, a (now retired) commercial artist and illustrator from New York. Mooney is also a longtime Charles Dickens fan and has...

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Reposted by Katie Bell 🇵🇸

The Dickens Society @dickenssociety.bsky.social · 19/03/2024

Fresh new blog post is up: “Those ‘Dark Spirits’ Within Us: Interpretive Power & the Legacy of Fandom”, which delves into the wonderful Miss Wade of “Little Dorrit”. dickenssociety.org/archives/4310

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 20/01/2024

Peer reviewer 1 comment that I’m living high on today: Bell obviously knows Dickens but….and I’m going to stop my hyper focusing at that ‘but’.

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Katie Bell 🇵🇸 @decadentdickens.bsky.social · 08/01/2024

This new student loan plan is making me feel insane. I pay MORE now than I did pre-Covid because I make (marginally) more as a county employee, but it doesn’t count for inflation. I also feel as if my married with children friends pay less than me. Shouldn’t I be rewarded for staying childless? 😂

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