My PhD examined the relationships between science and the periodical press in the late nineteenth century.  Since then, my work has continued to examine forms of writing that lie beyond conventional literary categories – particularly in science, journalism and digital publishing – and to question the role of text as a medium for information, both in the nineteenth century and today.

I currently teach the following courses:

Undergraduate:

• Literary Aesthetics, 1800-present
• Critical Practice
• Writing and the World in the Nineteenth Century (module convenor)
• Victoria's Secrets: Secrecy and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (module convenor)
• Hacking the Book: Skills for the Digital Age (module convenor)

Postgraduate:

• Victorian Modernity (module convenor)
• Research Methods (Literature, Culture and Modernity) (module convenor)

I supervise a range of undergraduate dissertations and research projects. I also supervise MA dissertations.

I am the program convenor for the MRes Literature and Modernity and one of the convenors for the new MA Literature, Culture and Modernity. For details of postgraduate research supervision, see below.

I supervise MA by Research, MRes and PhD students on a range of literary and cross-disciplinary subjects and would welcome applications in the following areas:

• Nineteenth-century literature and culture
• Media history
• Science
• Digital humanities

My most recent book, The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age has just been published by Palgrave. This book considers how digitization enables us to reimagine both the nineteenth-century press and the period that produced it. I argue that to understand a period one must understand its media, and this applies equally to the nineteenth-century press and various forms of digital technology today.

I am one of the editors of the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse), a digital edition of six nineteenth-century magazines and newspapers launched in beta in 2008.  In 2012 ncse joined NINES, a peer-reviewed hub for nineteenth-century scholarship online.

My previous book, Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press (Ashgate, 2007), brought together work in the sociology of science with literary theory and book history to consider the place of materiality in textual objects.

I have published work on a wide range of subjects including nineteenth-century science publishing, the politics of digitization, the influenza pandemics of the 1890s, visual culture in the nineteenth-century media, and nineteenth-century astronomical photography. I am the editor of the ‘Digital Forum’ in the Journal of Victorian Culture and serve on the steering group for 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, published by Birkbeck’s Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies.

I believe strongly in the importance of interdisciplinary research and am active in a number of research groups including the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) , British Society for the History of Science (BSHS), British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS), and the British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS).  I serve as webmaster for the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and I am on the board of the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck College. 

• You can follow my research on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jimmussell

• I blog at http://www.jimmussell.com

The Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse) was launched in beta in May 2008. In 2012 ncse joined the peer-reviewed research hub NINES.  I continue to be interested in the digital humanities and am keen to explore digital technologies and methodologies in my teaching and research.

At Birmingham, I help run the Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity and organize the seminar series ‘Late Victorianism and Modernism: The Making of Modernity.’  Earlier this year I helped organize 'W.T. Stead: Centenary Conference for a Newspaper Revolutionary', held at the British Library, 16-17 April to commemorate Stead's death on the Titanic.  In 2011, I was one of the organizers of the annual BAVS conference, held at the University of Birmingham in the summer.  Previously, I co-organized ‘Rigid Boundaries of Space and Time: Reading, Writing, and Editing Periodicals’ at the Institute of English Studies (2003) and ‘The Long Nineteenth Century: The Future for Victorian Studies’ (2005).  In 2007 I co-organized Minds and Bodies Machines at Birkbeck College in collaboration with the University of Melbourne and Constraint Technologies International.  For the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse) I co-organized two symposia (2005, 2006) and the project launch (2008).

Major publications:

• The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age (Palgrave: 2012).
• (Ed., with Laurel Brake, Ed King, and Roger Luckhurst), W.T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary (London: British Library, 2012).
• (Ed., with others), Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse) (2008).
• Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press (Aldershot: Ashgate 2007).

Journal articles and book chapters:

• “Teaching Nineteenth-Century Periodicals Using Digital Resources: Myths and
  Methods”, Victorian Periodicals Review, 45 (2012), pp. 201-209.  This will be available from Birmingham's ePrints repository soon.
• "'Characters of Blood and Flame': Stead and the Sensationalist Press", in W.T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary, edited by Laurel Brake, Ed King, Roger Luckhurst and James Mussell (London: British Library, 2012), pp. 22-36.
• "The Passing of Print: Digitizing Ephemera and the Ephemerality of the Digital", Media History, 18 (2012), 77-92.
• “Writing the ‘Great Proteus of Disease’: Influenza, Informatics, and the Body in the Late Nineteenth Century”, in Minds Bodies Machines, 1790-1920, ed. by Deidre Coleman and Hilary Fraser (Palgrave: 2011), pp. 161-178. 
• “Science and the Victorians”, in Dickens in Context, ed. by Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux (Cambridge University Press: 2011), pp. 326-333.
• “Private Practices and Public Knowledge: Science, Professionalization and Gender in the Late Nineteenth Century”, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 5 (2009).
• “Arthur Cowper Ranyard, Knowledge and the Reproduction of Astronomical Photographs in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press”, British Journal for the History of Science, 42 (2009), pp. 321-344. Or in Birmingham’s ePrints repository.
• “Cohering Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century: Form, Genre and Periodical Studies”, Victorian Periodicals Review, 42 (2009), pp. 93-103.  Also available in Birmingham's ePrints repository.
• “Science and the Timeliness of Reproduced Photographs in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press”, in The Lure of Illustration, ed. by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 203-219.
• (with Suzanne Paylor), “Editions and Archives: Textual Editing and the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse)”, in Text Editing, Print, and the Digital World, ed. by Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 137-158.
• “Ownership, Institutions, Methodology”, roundtable contribution to Journal of Victorian Culture, 13 (2008), 94-100.  Also available in Birmingham’s ePrints repository
• “Digital Culture, Materiality and Nineteenth-Century Studies”, forum contribution to 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (2008).
• ''Nineteenth-Century Popular Science Magazines, Narrative, and the Problem of Historical Materiality'', Journalism Studies, 8 (2007), pp. 656-666. There is a pre-print version in Birmingham’s ePrints repository.
• ''Pandemic in print: the spread of influenza in the Fin de Siècle'', Endeavour, 31 (2007), pp. 12-17.
• ''Bug-Hunting Editors: Competing Interpretations of Nature in Late Nineteenth-Century Natural History Periodicals'', in (Re)creating Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. by Amanda Mordavsky Caleb (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007), pp. 81-96.
• “’This is Ours and For Us:' The Mechanic's Magazine and low scientific culture in Regency London'' , in Repositioning Victorian Sciences, ed. by David Clifford et al. (London: Anthem Press 2006), pp. 107-118
• (with Suzanne Paylor) ''Mapping the "Mighty Maze": the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition'', 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (2005).