Dr Eleanor Dobson BA, MA, PhD, FHEA

• Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy
• PhD in English, University of Birmingham
• MA by Research in English, University of Birmingham
• BA (Hons) in English, University of Birmingham

I joined the University of Birmingham as Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature in September 2017, having previously been employed as a Visiting Lecturer and Teaching Associate (since 2013). I completed my PhD, MA, and BA at the University of Birmingham. 

I lecture and teach across a range of undergraduate modules, including ‘Gothic’, ‘Daphne du Maurier’, and ‘Children’s Literature’.

I welcome applications for doctoral projects directly related to my research specialisms.

My most recent project, Gothic Archaeologies, examines the dark dimensions of archaeology and heritage culture. Bringing together literary and cinematic representations with non-fiction accounts of archaeological discovery, the project explores how encounters with human remains, historic sites, and recovered artefacts evoke the uncanny, the sublime, and the weird. Focusing on Pompeii, Tutankhamun's tomb, and the wreck of RMS Titanic, it argues that archaeology is inherently Gothic, linking the living with the dead and the present with the past, and helping to explain the enduring hold these sites exert on the popular imagination.

My second book, entitled Victorian Alchemy: Science, Magic and Ancient Egypt (UCL Press, 2022), focuses on science of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly when it intersects with contemporary ideas about the supernatural or occult. It integrates and builds on my previous work on the intersection between electromagnetic radiation and texts with ancient Egyptian subject matter, establishing the quasi-alchemical ways in which depictions of electrical phenomena and X-rays are presented as emblematic of magical lore of the ancients, and, simultaneously, the pinnacle of modern scientific understanding. The book's other chapters trace similar parallels in optical science, astronomy, and psychology, and Victorian Alchemy concludes by charting these tropes forward into modern media, spotlighting particular nineteenth-century legacies.

My first monograph, Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), examines the mutual influences of Egyptology and literary culture across the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth, in the wake of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. In this book I conceive of a culture that at once encompasses Egyptological writing, popular forms of fiction, as well as works of ‘high modernism’, from the writings of archaeologists such as Howard Carter, through to the fiction and poetry of figures as diverse as H. Rider Haggard, Marie Corelli, Oscar Wilde and H.D. It also brings into conversation the physical books published by authors and Egyptologists alike, establishing the complex relationships between these objects as products of Egyptological study and the objects of Egyptological study themselves: artefacts often housed in museums, and sometimes in the private collections of these very authors.