Dr Louise Curran BA (Camb), MA, PhD (London)

• BA (Camb)
• MA, PhD (London)

I joined the University of Birmingham in 2016 after a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Oxford. I took my BA at Clare College, Cambridge, and completed my MA and doctoral studies at University College London.

I lecture and teach on a variety of first- and second-year modules including ‘Prose’ (on Jane Austen), ‘Romantics and Romanticisms’, and ‘The Gothic’. I also convene the ‘Reformation to Reform’ pathway for the MA Literature and Culture.

I welcome enquiries about research supervision in the following areas: letter-writing and archive formation, literary fame and celebrity, the eighteenth-century novel and prose style, life-writing from the eighteenth-century to the Romantic period.

Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My first book, Samuel Richardson and the Art of Letter-Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2016), examined the links between the novelist’s correspondence and his epistolary novels. As a result of this work, I’m co-editing a volume of letters for The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). My current research project is a book provisionally entitled Archiving the Self: The Ends of Letters in the Eighteenth-Century, which explores the desire for epistolary fame in a range of writers from Alexander Pope to Frances Burney through the examination of the textual content and material layout of their letters. It emerges from a broader interest in the peculiar history of the letter’s association with authorial character and celebrity, whose modern beginnings can be traced back to this period.

Other research interests include eighteenth-century satire (particularly by women poets and novelists), Samuel Johnson, Jane Austen.

I review articles and books for various publishers and academic journals. I am also a member of the British and American Societies for Eighteenth-Century Studies.