Profile
I grew up in Sydney, Australia, and completed my PhD at the University of Sydney on the literary and visual afterlives of Pre-Raphaelite artist, poet and muse Elizabeth Siddall. Before joining Queen Mary as a Lecturer in 2019, I taught Victorian Literature at Oxford (University College), the University of London (Goldsmiths), and the University of Sydney, and held postdoctoral research posts at the University of Kent, the State Library of New South Wales, the University of Sydney, and the Australian National University.
I specialise in the relationship between literature and visual culture, with particular expertise in the long nineteenth century. I have published widely on nineteenth-century texts and visual art, with emphasis on technologies of replication and discourses about artistry and authenticity in art, especially literary representations of material culture, sculpture, and sculpting machines. I also work on literature and urban culture, sculpture and public statuary, London’s museums and museology, art and activism (especially environmental), literary tourism and the history of interdisciplinarity in English Studies including the global circulation of reading and scholarly practices.
The foundations of my research and teaching lie in the archive, the gallery, and the periodical press. I am passionate about drawing on my long-standing interest in historical pedagogy to cultivate innovative and experimental off-campus teaching in archives, galleries, museums, and London’s streets and urban spaces.
Research
Research Interests:
- the relationship between literature and visual culture
- literature and urban culture: pedestrianism, urban space, public statuary, London literary networks, literary tourism
- London’s museums and museology, art and activism, literary tourism
- nineteenth-century texts and visual art, especially technologies of replication, discourses about artistry and authenticity in art, material culture, sculpture and sculpting machines, Decadence and Aestheticism, Pre-Raphaelitism
- Victorians as global readers; book history and global communities of reading (particularly colonial readerships, literary societies, and literary lectures), periodicals and global reviewing culture
- pedagogy from the early nineteenth century to the present day
- the history of interdisciplinarity in English Studies including the global circulation of reading and scholarly practices
Recent and On-going Research
Reading Victorian Sculpture
My monograph, Reading Victorian Sculpture (forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press), traces a cultural history of nineteenth-century sculpting machines to argue that the representation of sculpture in Victorian literature allegorises broader cultural anxieties surrounding the authenticity of works of visual and literary art in the age of increasing mechanical reproduction. Exposing technologies of sculptural replication involving famous and forgotten figures from James Watt to Augusto Bontempi and investors like Arthur Conan Doyle and sculptor W.G. Jones, the book investigates the role of the periodical press in publicising and prompting debate over these remarkable inventions. It provides revealing new readings of nineteenth-century texts by Charlotte Brontë, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Edmund Gosse, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Vernon Lee and Edith Nesbit, interrogating sculptural replication in relation to the death mask as replica, the authenticating touch of the artist, female sculptors and absence, the destabilizing mobility of colonial sculpture, and fragmentation and modernity. Drawing upon interdisciplinary methodologies from literary studies, art history and book history, the book shows how a greater transparency in the periodical press surrounding the processes and technologies involved in sculptural production revealed the importance of collaboration between artists and workers, artistry and industry, humans and machines in ways that ignited significant anxieties about authenticity and replication in the sculptural arts.
I have recently published on this topic in Sculptures, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, and the Journal of Australasian Victorian Studies, and given invited papers at Birkbeck’s Nineteenth-Century Forum and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. I was also the invited editor of the ‘Victorian Sculpture’ issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, described by Victorian sculpture expert Prof. David Getsy (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) as ‘help[ing] to advance the ways in which Victorian sculpture studies seeks to redefine itself in the 21st century.’
The Rise of English Studies: the Circulation of Literature and Scholarly Practice
My second current research project examines the contribution of literary societies to the rise of English studies through the global circulation of literary texts, pedagogies and reading practices in the late nineteenth century. My research shows how nineteenth-century literary societies devoted to Wordsworth, Shelley, Browning, the Brontës, and Dickens became agents for disseminating ground-breaking reading practices, spreading debate about curricula, relevance, and the public benefit of studying vernacular literature over the English-speaking world from the UK to Europe, India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and America. In offering a parallel history to the well-documented institutional account of the evolution of English studies, the project will demonstrate how the activities of amateur literary societies were intertwined with the development of formal disciplines, as they were evolving both within nineteenth-century universities and in the popular imagination. The project will explore the extent to which these informal global literary networks left legacies that continue to influence the reading and studying of English literature globally today. I was invited to present this work at the Cardiff’s Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research and have published research on this topic in Modern Language Quarterly, in Mapping Fields of Study: The Cultural and Institutional Space of English Studies (University of Nancy Press), and Nineteenth Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s (Cambridge University Press).
Eleanor Vere Boyle
I am academic advisor for the archive of Victorian writer and illustrator ‘E.V.B’ (Eleanor Vere Boyle), heading up a small research team and planning the first major exhibition of her work since 1902 as well as a programme of public engagement activities.
Publications
CONTRACTED AND FORTHCOMING
Reading Victorian Sculpture (Edinburgh University Press)
Art and Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (4 vols, Routledge)
EDITED COLLECTIONS
Co-edited with William Christie and Q.S. Tong, Tribute and Trade: China and Global Modernity in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1784-1935 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2020).
Editor of Special Issue on ‘Victorian Sculpture’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (June 2016) < https://19.bbk.ac.uk/issue/123/info/
ESSAYS AND ARTICLES
‘Sculpture in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: James Watt, Technologies of Replication and Anxieties of Authenticity in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Sculptures 8 (2021): 17-29.
‘“The Newest Culte”: Victorian Poetry and the Literary Societies of the 1880s’, in Nineteenth Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s, ed. Penny Fielding and Andrew Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 53-79
‘Victorian Experiments in Reading Scientifically’, in Mapping Fields of Study: The Cultural and Institutional Space of English Studies, ed. Richard Somerset and Matthew Smith (Nancy: University of Nancy Press, 2019), 147-170.
‘“All the senses would melt into one”: Theodore Watts-Dunton’s Aylwin and the Decadent Pleasures of the Roman à Clef’, Decadence and the Senses, ed. Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé (Oxford: Legenda, 2017), 83-100.
‘Sculpture in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: James Watt, Technologies of Replication and Anxieties of Authenticity in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Sculptures 8 (2021): 17-29.
31 entries in the Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism, ed. Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (2nd edn, eBook: ProQuest, 2017).
‘Reading Victorian Sculpture’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 22 (June 2016): 1-14. <doi: 10.16995/ntn.776>
‘Thomas Woolner’s “Bad Times for Sculpture”: Framing Victorian Sculpture in Vocabularies of Neglect’, Journal of Australasian Victorian Studies (2014): 32-44.
‘Nineteenth Century Sculpture and the Imprint of Authenticity’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 19 (November 2014): 1-22 < doi: 10.16995/ntn.704>.
‘The Shelley Society, Literary Lectures and the Global Circulation of English Literature and Scholarly Practice’, Modern Language Quarterly 75.2 (June 2014): 279-96.
‘Australian Symbolism’, Burlington Magazine (August 2012) 154: 601-2.
‘“An Interesting Failure”: Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity and the Sexual Politics of Pre-Raphaelite Aestheticism in Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown (1884)’, in Literature and Politics, ed. Peter Marks (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012), 23-34.
‘The myth of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix as memorial painting’, British Art Journal (2010) 11/1: 89-92.
‘“I am Plain Morris”: Reimagining the Everyday William Morris in H.D.’s White Rose and the Red’, in William Morris and the Art of Everyday Life, ed. Wendy Parkins (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), 155-74.
‘Stunner: The Sensation of Elizabeth Siddal’, in Literature and Sensation, ed. Anthony Uhlmann, Helen Groth, Paul Sheehan, Stephen McLaren (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), 24-33.
Supervision
I warmly welcome enquiries from potential doctoral students interested in any of the areas of my research.
Supervised doctoral projects include:
Lilyemma Whalley, ‘Complete unity in Nature’: The Natural World as Home in Children’s Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century
Suzanne Lovell, The Writing of British Postwar Land Art
Public Engagement
Academic Advising
I have worked as an academic advisor on various curation and gallery projects and welcome future opportunities for this kind of community and creative engagement.
Digital Humanities Projects
I have a keen interest in digital humanities projects that develop freely available online resources, and have contributed to several. The Edinburgh Review in the Jeffrey Years (1802-1829) is a website developed by Will Christie (Australian National University) and myself which provides open access to transcripts of editorial letters, a collaborative Edinburgh Review encyclopaedia and interactive timelines and geotagging, all accessible at http://edinburghreview.net.au/.
I also contributed to a database of Victorian Special Correspondents with Cathy Waters (University of Kent), providing information on the first generation of special correspondents and special artists working in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century. The database is freely accessible at https://research.kent.ac.uk/victorianspecialsdatabase/#.
Public Lectures
I have presented a range of public lectures and interviews in Australia and the UK, and welcome future opportunities to speak or engage with public outreach.
