Members of the Nineteenth-Century Centre

My work focuses on British Romanticism, and the literature and intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Within these parameters I’m especially interested in William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley, poetry and poetics, periodization, literary inheritance, theories of humour, the history of emotions, sounds in literature and modes of listening, and ecology ...

Dr Zoe Hope Bulaitis is an educator and researcher who is motivated by better articulating the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Drawing on expertise in both nineteenth-century and contemporary studies, Zoe is the author of a recent open access book, Value and the Humanities: The Neoliberal University and Our Victorian Inheritance (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture, and ...

I research eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, especially letter-writing and archive formation, prose style and the development of the novel, authorial reputation and literary celebrity, and the interplay between formal and material aspects of writing.

My current work focuses on the reception of ancient Egypt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More broadly, I am interested in the materiality and history of the book, as well as notions of the supernatural and the occult, particularly as these ideas operate at the edges of a range of scientific discourses. I teach literature from the late eighteenth century to the present, with particular ...

My work focuses on American art and literature and visual art in the early twentieth century and explores the ways in which cultural forms adapted to the new circumstances of American modernity.

I study interactions and overlaps between literature and science, focusing on the long nineteenth century. Within this area my specialisms are the literature of the earth sciences, scientific writing for general readers, and turn-of-the-century adventure novels. My earlier work has examined the literary popularisation of dinosaurs and my current project is called ‘Borderline Geoscience and ...

I study eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature (chiefly the work of William and Dorothy Wordsworth). I am interested in patterns of formal and generic innovation, and in exploring how memory, imagination, and art shape the identities of places and people

I enjoy thinking and writing about British art and literature of all periods, especially in relation to landscape, locality and the presence of the past. I am the author of ‘Romantic Moderns’ and ‘Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies’, and my current projects include work on Virginia Woolf; seasonal ceremony and the marking of time; antiquarianism and local ...

I work on British and American literature of the long nineteenth century, with a special focus on the late writings of Henry James. I am interested in the place of style in literary non-fiction, the practice of editing, and the relations between personal correspondence and other types of life-writing (autobiography, biography, and memoir). I teach widely across eighteenth-, nineteenth- and ...

I am interested in questions of voice, influence, and achievement in English poetry and in particular the poetry of the Romantic period. I teach across the spectrum of English literature - especially from the eighteenth-century onward.

I joined the department in 2015 as Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture. My research focuses on the relationship between scientific ideas and cultural forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including poetry, architecture and the visual arts. More widely, I work on and teach a wide range of nineteenth-century literature, with interests in poetry and poetic form, especially the ...

My specialisms are French and British sculpture and the decorative arts 1800-1900, with a particular interest in intersections between sculpture and the decorative arts, between art and industry, and in curating the decorative. 

My teaching and research interests move across the early modern period, through Shakespeare and into the Romantic period, with a particular focus on the way in which later writers respond to, adapt and use earlier writers. My current teaching includes leading seminars on Shakespeare’s Tragedies (final year) and Poetry (first year), as well as lectures across my areas of expertise. My ...

As PVC Education, Deborah is a member of University Executive Board, and supports the Vice-Chancellor in setting and implementing University strategy, with a specific strategic remit for excellence and innovation in teaching and learning. She provides academic leadership across the education portfolio, working closely with colleagues across the five Colleges, and with our Professional Services ...

As a corpus linguist, I am interested in language as a social phenomenon and the way in which we use language to understand and shape the world we live in. A large part of my research focuses on the language of Dickens’s fiction, literary linguistics, and discourse analysis.

I am currently Principal Investigator on the AHRC funded CLiC Dickens project.

I speak about Corpus ...

My scholarship focuses on Victorian literature and culture broadly defined, and I’m especially intrigued by the study and depiction of the creative process, the self/other relationship, and the textual/visual interface; these interests also drive my work in textual editing. I teach across the long nineteenth century.

I work on nineteenth and twentieth century literature and visual culture. I have published work on Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Vernon Lee, Walter Pater and a range of other late Victorian and modernist art and literature.

I am an art historian of Britain and the British Empire, focussing particularly on the Victorian period.

My research focuses on Gothic fiction and on maritime writing, both as separate and overlapping areas of study. I have a long-standing interest in voice and utterance in literary writing, and my work on the Gothic focuses on the haunted and haunting voices that resonate within late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century American Gothic literature. I also work on the deep sea as it is depicted in a ...

I am a Research Associate on the Stuart Hall Archive Project (2023-2026).

I have had a long freelance career in music and drama and am still an active performer in both fields. My specialist academic areas are nineteenth-century theatre, popular theatre studies, technology and performance and any area of music and drama.

My research focusses on the relationship between the British Empire and Victorian Literature, with specialist interests in migration, settler colonialism, memory and textual and material culture. I have further interests in decolonisation, museums, literature and the visual arts. I teach and work on a wide range of nineteenth-century and neo-Victorian literatures, with an emphasis on decolonial ...

I specialise in literature and science studies, medical humanities, and the cultural history of medicine, especially in the long nineteenth century. I have an interdisciplinary background with a BSc (hons.) in biology and higher degrees in the humanities. My research interests include: Victorian literature and culture, particularly Gothic fiction and the scientific romance; postcolonialism, ...

My research focuses on disease and the Gothic in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. As a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, I survey British detective fiction, Gothic fiction, and periodicals to investigate narrative representations of influenza. My previous work has focused on maternal grief, spiritualism, and women’s ghost stories at the fin de siècle.

My ...

PhD Title: From Vesuvius to the Thames. The fortunes of Baroque Neapolitan art in English collections, 1680-1820
Supervisor: Dr Kate Nichols
PhD History of Art

PhD title: The publications of police detectives 1880 - 1930: Genre, identity and the consumption of crime
Supervisors: Dr Rex Ferguson, Dr Melissa Dickson and Dr Victoria Stewart (University of Leicester)

PhD English Literature

PhD title: From music and dance to poetry and prose: an investigation of musicality in the life and work of Thomas Hardy.
Supervisors: Dr Melissa Dickson, Dr Nathan Waddell and Dr Rebecca Mitchell
PhD English Literature

PhD title: Demonic Transformations and Meaning in Nineteenth Century Male-Authored British Gothic Fiction: From the Wanderer to the Self
Supervisors: Dr Jimmy Packham, Dr Eleanor Charlotte Dobson
PhD English Literature

PhD title: Mutations,Manipulation, and Metamorphosis: Representations of Genetic Change and Species Identity in Feminist Long-form Contemporary Science-Fiction Literature, 1987-2018

Supervisors: Professor John Holmes, Dr Matt Hayler and Dr Emil Toescu

PhD Contemporary Transatlantic Science Fiction

PhD title: Cultivating the Bard: The Construction of Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century 
Supervisors: Dr Kate Rumbold and Professor Michael Dobson; Temporary Supervisor: Dr Hazel Wilkinson 

PhD Title: Sound and sight: the implied soundscapes of visual culture c.1760 - c.1830
Supervisor: Dr Kate Nichols and Dr Matthew Ward
PhD History of Art