Our first research seminar of the 2021–22 academic year took place on Wednesday 20th October. Dr Claire Wood joined us from the University of Leicester, to talk about her new research on Charles Dickens and Decadence.
Dr Wood’s research centres on Victorian fiction and death culture, with a particular focus upon the contradictions and complexities inherent in the Victorian ‘celebration of death’. Her book on this subject, Dickens and the Business of Death, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. This explored Dickens’s fascination with the many different ways that you could make money from a corpse in Victorian England, from anatomy to authorship. She is currently working on ‘Dead Funny’, a project that examines death comedy in the work of Dickens and a range of other nineteenth-century writers. She is also co-editing the Edinburgh Companion to Dickens and the Arts for Edinburgh University Press.