Co-Chairs

The co-chairs regularly organise the longstanding Nineteenth-Century Research Seminar series and the Nineteenth-Century Writing Group.

Dr Alice Crossley‘s research interests lie in nineteenth century literature, with an emphasis on three main areas: ageing, gender (especially masculinity), and material culture (particularly printed ephemera). Her recent publications include the monograph Male Adolescence in Mid-Victorian Fiction (Routledge 2018), special issues on ‘Age and Gender’ for Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (2017) and – co-edited with Dr Amy Culley – on ‘Narratives of Aging in the Nineteenth Century’ for Age, Culture, Humanities (2021), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on childhood, adolescence, old age, sexuality, and gender in the nineteenth century. She’s currently working on a new book, Old Fashioning: Ageing Masculinity in Western Fiction, 1830-1930. Alice also writes on Victorian valentines. She’s Secretary of the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS).

Dr Pietro di Paola’s research focuses on the history of anarchism and labour history from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. He is the author of The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora 1880-1917 (Liverpool University Press, 2013) and continues to publish on anarchists in late Victorian London in works such as ‘Banal and everyday (inter)nationalism: French and Italian anarchist exiles in London, 1870s–1914’, co-authored with Constance Bantman in Nations and Nationalism (2022). Pietro is the co-editor of the journal Acronia. Studies in the history of anarchism and radical movements.

Dr Laura Gill’s research covers three principal areas related to the long nineteenth century: the influence and reception of the writing of John Milton on nineteenth-century culture; image-text relations, particularly painting and illustration; and, increasingly, ecocriticism and the blue humanities. She has written about a nineteenth-century volume of Milton’s poems bound in leather made from human skin (Milton Quarterly, 2022), and about Miltonic passive power in the writing of Herman Melville and the paintings of J.M.W. Turner (The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Elizabeth Ludlow, 2020). Laura’s first monograph on Milton’s intermedial influence in the nineteenth century is forthcoming. Her research interests are currently converging in a project on flood narratives in nineteenth-century image and text, partially read as response to Milton’s account of the Deluge.

Members

Dr Erin Bell’s research spans the early modern period to the early nineteenth century, with a particular interest in religion and gendered norms of behaviour. Erin has focused in her research on Quakerism from the mid-C17th to mid-C19th: she recently contributed a chapter on ‘representations of Quakers and crime in the metropolis, 1696-c.1815’ to Quakerism in the Atlantic World, 1690-1830 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021).

Dr Scott Brewster has written widely on Gothic and the ghost story across the nineteenth century. His recent book, Gothic Travel through Haunted Landscapes: Climates of Fear (Anthem, 2022), co-authored with Lucie Armitt, dealt with writers such as Walter Scott, Charles Maturin, Sydney Owenson, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen and M. R. James. In The Routledge Introduction to the American Ghost Story (2024), co-written with Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Scott explores the development of supernatural fiction in authors including Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce Henry James and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. He contributed a chapter on the Victorian Ghost Story for the Cambridge History of the Gothic Vol. 2 (2020), and has an essay on Dickens forthcoming in the Edinburgh Companion to the Victorian Ghost Story (2024).

Dr Jim Cheshire‘s research examines the literary and visual culture of the nineteenth century and thematically is centred on Victorian medievalism. He has worked on stained glass, the Gothic Revival and publishing history especially the literary and material culture surrounding the career of Alfred Tennyson including a monograph about Edward Moxon (Tennyson’s publisher) and his impact on Victorian poetry. He is has contributed chapters on ‘Victorian Medievalism and Secular Design’ to the Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism (2020), and on ‘William Morris and Stained Glass’ to the Routledge Companion to William Morris (2021). More recently, Jim has published on the memorial to William Hodson in Lichfield Cathedral in the Journal of Victorian Culture (2022).

Dr Owen Clayton’s specialism is late nineteenth and early-twentieth century transatlantic literature, with particular research interests in the representation of vagrancy and homelessness and the relationship between literature and photography. His first monograph was Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850-1915 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). Owen’s second monograph, Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos: The Literature and Culture of U.S. Transiency 1890–1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) won the 2024 British Association for American Studies book prize. He also recently edited the letters of William ‘Roving Bill’ Aspinwall: Roving Bill Aspinwall: Dispatches from a Hobo in Post-Civil War America (Feral House, 2022).

Dr Amy Culley’s research interests are in the literature and culture of the Romantic period, particularly life writing, ageing, and women’s literary history. She is the author of British Women’s Life Writing, 1760-1840: Friendship, Community, and Collaboration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), co-editor (with Daniel Cook) of Women’s Life Writing 1700-1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and co-editor (with Anna Fitzer) of Editing Women’s Writing, 1670-1840 (Routledge, 2017). Amy is currently working on her second book, ‘On Growing Old: Women’s Late Life Writing 1800-1850’ (supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship [2020]) which recovers narratives of ageing in journals, correspondence, memoirs, and biographies by early nineteenth-century women in both manuscript and print. Most recently, Amy has contributed (alongside Alice Crossley) a chapter on ‘Older Age in Women’s Late Life Writing 1800-1850’ to The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging (2024).

Prof. Kate Hill

Dr Sarah Longair

Dr Rebecca Styler’s primary research interest lies in women’s religious writing of the nineteenth century, and literary explorations of religion in relation to gender. Having published on writers including Josephine Butler, Harriet Martineau, Anne Bronte, Anna Jameson and Elizabeth Gaskell, and on spiritual autobiography and biography, her current project explores maternal ideas of God in the era 1850-1920, as well as editing a primary source volume on nineteenth-century religion and literature for Routledge. Other interests include life writing, Gothic literature, utopia fiction, childhood, and feminist spirituality. Rebecca founded the Nineteenth-Century Research Group in the Lincoln College of Arts.

Prof. Jason Whittaker’s main research interests are the reception of William Blake in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as developments in digital publishing and the impact of technology on journalism. He has published widely on these subjects, as well as on magazine journalism more generally.

Dr Renée Ward’s interest in the nineteenth century focuses primarily on Victorian medievalism in literature and book culture, excavating the writing of previously unrecognized women writers who adapt medieval materials for children. She has published extensively on Eleanora Louisa Hervey (née Montagu, 1811-1903), specifically on her reimaginings of medieval stories such as the Old English Beowulf and Chaucer’s Griselda, from The Clerk’s Tale. She has also published on Hervey’s adaptation of the Arthurian myth, exploring how she rehabilitates medieval Arthurian characters and how she deploys the Gothic in her Arthurian retelling. In 2022, with Miriam Edlich-Muth (Univeristy of Düsseldorf) and Victoria Coldham-Fussell (Victoria University of Wellington, NZ), she co-edited The Arthurian World (Routledge, 2022), a volume which includes various chapters on post-medieval Arthurian, including material from the nineteenth century.

This page was last updated in August 2024.