Group members

Doug Battersby

Doug works on the history and theory of the novel in English. He is particularly interested in how novelists’ techniques for describing thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations have evolved over the history of the form. 

Andrew Bennett

Andrew has published widely on British Romantic literature – especially on Wordsworth and Keats, and especially in relation to poetics, writing/composition, and the question of literary posterity. His current book-length project is a detailed study of Keats’s letters with the working title John Keats and the Poetics of Letter Writing. 

Stephanie Codsi

Steph works on British radical literature of the 1790s. Her BA/Leverhulme small grant for a project entitled ‘Spies, Suspicion and Sincerity in British Radical Literature 1790-1804’ is being developed into a book (EUP, forthcoming 2026). Dr Codsi also publishes on William Blake, and more broadly Romantic and Gothic literature. 

Stephen Cheeke

Stephen publishes on Romanticism – particularly Byron and P.B. Shelley – and on the relationship between literature and art in the nineteenth century. His current work includes a study of Walter Pater and Personhood, and a project on Antinomianism. Other interests include the work of Yeats, the 1890s, and early modernism.

Sue Edney

Sue'sresearch focuses on dialect writing and its functions in 19th-century literary language, and on investigating how the georgic as a ‘mode’ (rather than a ‘genre’) manifested itself in poetry and prose from the early 19th to early 20th centuries, including the use of dialect and ‘terms of art’.

Erin Forbes

Erin specializes in African American and U.S. literature of the long 19th century, with interests in the intersections between race and environment, aesthetics, late 18th-century yellow fever epidemics, crime writing / the popular periodical press, the penitentiary, slave insurgencies/revolts, and literature and religion, especially the Spiritualist movement. 

Timothy Gao

Tim’sresearch investigates Victorian fictionality, in particular how Victorian novelists and authors conceptualised their relationships with imaginary objects, places, and people – and whether these relationships can be described as ‘virtual’. More broadly, he is interested in the history and theory of the novel, and relationships between literature and technology.

Billie Gavurin

Billie is interested in the intersections of literature and science from the nineteenth into the early 20th centuries. Her PhD examined mythic animal-human hybrids in late Victorian and Edwardian literature in connection with evolutionary theory. Her current project focuses on counterfactual depictions of prehistoric hominins from 1870-1930.

Deborah Lam

Deborah’sresearch in the long nineteenth century is wide-ranging, with a particular focus on poetry, art, and art writing from 1760-1910. She is also interested in the Romantic Period more broadly, especially with regards to epistolary poetics, poetry, phenomenology, and the essay form.

Pam Lock

Pam's research focuses on alcohol in nineteenth-century literature. Her monograph, The Drunkard in Victorian Fiction and Culture, is forthcoming with EUP. Pam co-directs or co-leads the Drinking Studies Network, an NCN-funded project on women and alcohol in 19th-century British and Polish cultures, and the Drinking Studies Faculty Research Group.

Samantha Matthews

Samantha researches Romantic and Victorian literary, visual, and material cultures, especially women’s and non-canonical poetry and literary afterlives. She has special interests in manuscript albums, Romantic media, the Wordsworth circle and Charles and Mary Lamb. She is working on a scholarly edition of Charles Lamb’s poetry.

Noreen Masud

Noreen has published and presented in the field of 19th-century nonsense writing, with a particular focus on Edward Lear.

Ralph Pite

Ralph works on Romantic Period writing, particularly Anglo-Italian literatures, and on ideas of place in 19th and 20th century writing.

Joan Passey

Joan’s research focuses on representations of seas and coasts in 19th-century literature and culture with a focus on anxious, polluted, ecocolonial, and queer ecologies. She also works on regional literatures, Celticity, representations of Cornwall, and the Gothic from the eighteenth century to the present day.

Tara Puri

Tara works on women’s writing and women’s magazines in the mid- to late-19th century. More broadly, she is interested in questions of feminist literary history, dress and material culture, and empire.

Jane Wright

Jane publishes on Victorian poetry and the stylistic features of 19th-century prose. She is editing volume 3 of The Complete Works of Tennyson (OUP) and co-editing an essay collection on Poetic Allusion in the Long 19th Century. Her current book project is provisionally titled Poetical Bees in Victorian Poetry.