Interests

Nineteenth-century literature, landscape, science and anthropology are the principal subjects of my research. My monograph, Discovering Gilgamesh: Geology, Narrative and the Historical Sublime in Victorian Culture, (out September 2013), focuses on the discovery of The Epic of Gilgamesh in 1872 and the tremendous influence that it exerted upon theories of geology, history, narrative and aesthetics in the Victorian period.

I am currently working on my second book, a study of running, being and meaning called Psychojography: the Pursuit of Freedom in the Modern World. The book is loosely based on my blog (www.psychojography.com).

Among my other interests are gender, degeneration and death in Victorian literary and visual culture.  I have published work on Dickens, E.M Forster, Macaulay and Kingsley.  I am also interested in Victorian representations of water and the ways in which they are connected to notions of gender, disease, cleanliness, history and the law.

Research supervision

I have guided several PhDs to completion and am supervising four at the moment.  I am interested in supervising many aspects of nineteenth century culture, but would particularly welcome work on nineteenth-century sustainability and ecology, science, Victorian history and historiography, the sublime and gender (especially queer theory or the representation of women). 

Professional Activities

I am Director of Graduate Studies for the School of English. I am also Co-Director of the Centre for Gender, Sexuality and Writing with Dr Rosanna Cox. I have been a member of the British Association of Victorian Studies for six years

Teaching

Undergraduate:

• Romanticism & Critical Theory 
• Reading Victorian Literature 
• Dickens and Victorian England

Postgraduate

• Dickens, the Victorians, and the Body

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Selected Publications

Some Recent Chapters and Articles:

Books

• Discovering Gilgamesh: Geology, Narrative & the Historical Sublime in Victorian Culture. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013) ISBN: 9780719090516, pp. 350. 
• Syrett, Netta. Nobody's Fault: a Novel & The Sheltering Tree : a memoir (London: Pickering Chatto, 2010) ISBN:9781851966424, pp. 281 (Introduction and editing)

Articles

• ‘Modes of Silence in Forster’s ‘Inferior’ Fiction‘ English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. (56.4) July 2013.
• ‘Running Wilde: Landscape, the Body, and the History of the Treadmill’ in Critical Survey, (24.3) Winter, 2012. 
• ‘The Gilgamesh Controversy: The Ancient Epic and Late-Victorian Geology’ (Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 14, Issue 2 2009 , pages 224 - 237.
• 'Paradigms of Remembrance from Scrooge to Isabel' in Facing the Past, Facing the Future (Istanbul: Bachesehir University Press, 2011).
• ‘Mr Smith and Dr Suess: Originary Narrative and the Late-Victorians.’ in The Victorians and the Ancient World: Archaeology and Classicism in Nineteenth-Century Culture. Ed. Richard Pearson (Cambridge Scholars Press), 2007. 
• ‘Macaulay and the Historical Sublime; or, Forgetting the Past and the Future.’ Nineteenth-Century Prose; (Autumn, 2006).
• ‘Bodies, Boundaries and Queer Waters: Drowning and Prosopopœia in Later Dickens’ – in “Dickens and Sex” edition of Critical Survey, (17.2) Summer, 2005.
• ‘Drowning in Early Dickens’ - in Textual Practice, (19.1) Feb. 2005. 
• ‘Water Defences: The Arts of Swimming in Nineteenth-Century Culture’ in Critical Survey, (16.3) Winter, 2004.
• ‘Only Connected: Forster, Writing and Bloomsbury 1910-1914’ Issue 24, The Charleston Magazine. (Autumn/Winter 2001).

Other publications:

I contributed seven essays to The Companion to the British Short Story & Short Fiction (Facts on File, 2006).  I contributed ten pieces to the bestseller 1001 Novels (Cassell, 2006).  I was then commissioned by the same publishing group to write a 15,000 word chapter on ‘Classic Fiction’ for 501 Books You Must Read, (Bounty, 2006).  This was also a bestseller and has been translated into 10 languages. I’ve also reviewed for Textual Practice, [Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett & Pamela Thurschwell (eds), The Victorian Supernatural (2004)]; Australasian Victorian Studies Journal [David Philip Miller, Discovering Water: James Watt, Henry Cavendish and the Nineteenth-Century ‘Water Controversy’ (2004)] and Moderna Sprak [Karen Aijmer & Britta Olinder, eds. Proceedings from the 8th Nordic Conference on English Studies in Gothenburg Studies in English 84, 2003]. 

 

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