By Kristen LaRue-Sandler — August 12, 2026
Two ASU Department of English doctoral students in literature spent part of summer 2026 in a prestigious graduate seminar on "Crying" at Yale University’s Lewis Walpole Library.
Don't worry; everyone's alright. The "Crying," in this case, is the yelling or broadcasting of wares as practiced by nineteenth-century street vendors.
Samantha “Sam” Brierley and Courtney Hermansky were in residence at the Walpole June 9 and 10 for programming around "Street Life: The ‘Cries' in British Visual Culture, 1711-1877.” They also visited the Yale Center for British Art and the Beinecke Library and spent two additional days in the Walpole Library to pursue further research related to their individual projects.
Brierley and Hermansky are both students of Regents Professor Devoney Looser, who recommended them for the seminar.
In an interview, the pair discussed research on milkmaids and the Muffin Man, nineteenth-century advertising, and why hands-on historical work is still valuable for making new discoveries.
Question: Can you tell us about your particular projects on which you were working at the Library?
Samantha Brierley: I was studying the figure of the milkmaid — how she was depicted, how she became such a major figure in eighteenth-century British culture, and how she stood as a sort of mediator between the human and animal worlds.
Courtney Hermansky: My project centers on Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the social aesthetics of Victorian sensation fiction, particularly “Aurora Floyd” and “Lady Audley's Secret.” I'm tracing how Braddon's fiction manages "minor" or marginal figures and mediates broader structures of imperial power through its depictions of commodified bodies and objects.
At the seminar, I focused this lens on the "Cries" tradition: images and texts depicting street vendors in London alongside counterparts in Calcutta, the Caribbean, Lima, New York, and Paris, and how these "taken from the life" images construct racialized and colonial types that echo sensation fiction's treatment of colonization, foreign threats, and displaced subjects.
Q: How did you become interested in that project/topic, in the seminar, and in doing research at the Walpole Library?
SB: My current research analyzes how women and animals are perceived together in really convoluted, fascinating ways, so when I learned about the seminar on town criers and its emphasis on milkmaids, I knew it would be an amazing opportunity! The Walpole Library also houses some really fantastic materials for my research in general, so I made sure to save some time to geek out over them. Courtney and I are extremely fortunate to work with Dr. Devoney Looser on our committees, and she was the one who told us about the seminar and recommended we apply. It truly was a phenomenal, whirlwind experience!
CH: My interest grew out of coursework in Victorian literature, sensation fiction, and postcolonial literature at ASU, where I kept noticing how often Braddon's plots turn on scenes of exchange and surveillance. The seminar's collection-based, transnational approach to street vendors and print culture seemed like exactly the material culture background I needed, and the Walpole Library's depth in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British prints — alongside its ties to the Beinecke and the Yale Center for British Art — meant I could see the visual archive first hand rather than only in reproduction.
Q: What discoveries did you make while there?
SB: One interesting source I read was a scrapbook compiled by Richard William Silvester, a British printmaker in the early nineteenth century. The scrapbook was an impressive collection of newspaper clippings spanning several years and contained everything from ads for ornamental hair museums to travelling circus billings.
One of my favorites was an ad that claims anyone can pay one shilling to see "the Wonder of the World" — an apple that supposedly looks exactly like a baby's head. Silly ads aside, this opportunity has been a great boon to my dissertation, and I am walking away with a few new primary sources to include in my chapters and a new working theory about horses' eye contact in visual art.
CH: Two moments stood out. Gillian Forrester's tour through “Street Life” let us see, through her intimate knowledge of the collection, the serial "tasting menu" quality of the Cries genre—how suites of prints repeat and vary across editions, which turned out to be a useful model for thinking about repetition and "type" in sensation fiction.
And Katie Trumpener's session on Cries for Juveniles showed very concretely how a figure like the Muffin Man gets codified in children's books such as Walter Crane's “London Town” and transmitted to young readers as settled knowledge — giving me a much sharper vocabulary for how sensation fiction does something similar with its own recurring figures.
Q: Have you done archival research before? If so, how did this compare? If not, how was this experience and are you looking forward to more like it?
SB: I have previous archive experience, and the Walpole seminar and archive stands out as one of the best! Not only did we get to tour different exhibits and attend lectures by the experts, but also we had incredible support from the curatorial team as a whole. For example, I had asked a few follow-up questions to one of the curators, Cynthia Roman, about the plates used for printing in the eighteenth century. She gave me incredibly helpful information about the basics of copper plates, including some texts I could look into for further info.
What's more, she knew Courtney and I planned to spend the day after the seminar in the reading room to squeeze in as much time with the archive as possible before our flight home. Dr. Roman came through the doors that next morning with a whole cart of materials and gave an impromptu lesson on plates, awls, and the entire printmaking process! She went out of her incredibly busy way to not only show us these incredible materials, but take the time to teach us and answer our endless questions. I hope to return next summer for a short-term fellowship so I can continue diving into their collections.
CH: This was my first sustained experience doing archival research, and it was a wonderful introduction to it. Working directly with the prints and rare books changed how I read the material in ways I hadn't anticipated. I'm especially grateful for how generous and willing the Yale team was in supporting a newcomer — from Sue's help navigating the collections to Gillian and Katie's willingness to slow down and explain context. That support made the experience feel approachable, and I'm genuinely looking forward to more archival research as I move into dissertation work.
Q: Were you able to enjoy other areas around the Library or on the Yale campus while you were there?
SB: Yes! The seminar was incredibly well thought-out; we spent the first half of the seminar at the Lewis Walpole archive and the second half touring the Beinecke Library and the Yale Center for British Art. It was an excellent way for us to get a sense of both the collections and how they might lead to archive work there in the future.
Another phenomenal aspect of the seminar was the housing. The Walpole is situated next to the historic Timothy Root House, where scholars on short-term fellowships are able to stay while they study in the archive. It was such an immersive experience to be able to wake up in the morning in a house built in 1784, then walk across a short gravel path to study documents written and published in the same period.
CH: Yes—I saw the exhibitions at the Yale Center for British Art (Painters, Ports and Profits) and the Yale University Art Gallery (People of the Twentieth Century), and spent time in Beinecke's reading room.
Q: What was the experience at the seminar and the Library like? Would you recommend it to other students?
SB: Highly recommend! The experience was absolutely incredible. If any grad students are nervous about venturing out into the archival world, the Walpole is a fantastic place to start; the extraordinary people who run it are very supportive. Upon first walking into the reading room, I had a quick chat with the wonderful person working the desk, and next thing I know, he has paged for this super fascinating source that aligns perfectly with my research interests! I cannot express my gratitude enough for all the people who made this opportunity happen; I will be on the lookout for similar programs in the future.
CH: The seminar was intellectually generous in a way that's hard to replicate outside a small group — faculty across art history and literature were all in conversation with the same objects, so a single print might be discussed through several disciplinary lenses in one afternoon. I'd absolutely recommend it to other students, especially anyone working across literary and visual/material culture, or on empire, urban space, or print history.
Q: What will you take away from your time there?
SB: My experience there reaffirmed that curiosity and an appetite for learning always help! I think it would have been tempting to see the flyer for the seminar on street criers and say, "Oh, that's not my exact field," and not apply. But, I firmly believe that one can always learn something from every field/text/course/etc., and diving into the seminar gave me a wealth of information.
CH: I'm leaving with a richer visual vocabulary for bodies and typology in sensation fiction, and a clearer sense of how street cries shaped readers' imaginative geography of empire. I'm also taking away a stronger sense of how to put literary texts in dialogue with archival material, and real familiarity with the Walpole Library, the Beinecke, and the Yale Center for British Art as resources I hope to return to.