My research focuses on how child loss was represented and confronted in late nineteenth-century women’s writing. My thesis will examine the importance of spiritualism, ocular science and domestic architecture in the short fiction and autobiographical writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Florence Marryat and Margaret Oliphant. I am interested in how the supernatural was used to confront child death, how the child was written as a ghost, and how this challenged contemporary gender expectations of maternal mourning.
More broadly, I am interested in studies of the supernatural, spiritualism, the Gothic, EcoGothic, the science of vision and photography, maternity, and fin-de-siècle women’s writing, as well as theories of space, place and therapeutic writing.
I co-founded Gothica, Birmingham’s new, interdisciplinary, postgraduate-led reading group interested in the ever-present role of the Gothic in popular fiction and culture. The group meets once per month to trace the long history of the Gothic genre, from the nineteenth century to the present, and explore its spectral appearance in fantasy, horror, and science fiction. Please contact uobgothica@gmail.com to be added to the mailing list and follow our Twitter @Gothica_UOB for more information. All staff, students, and subjects are welcome.