OUR LECTURERS
Our lecturers are distinguished literary scholars with strong Cambridge connections
Scott Annett
Dr Scott Annett is a Fellow of Robinson College, University of Cambridge. He teaches in the Faculties of Italian, Divinity and English, and has a particular interest in emotion in Medieval literature. He also teaches Tragedy and Shakespeare and has published on Dante, Samuel Beckett and other topics. Webpage.
Gillian Beer
Professor Dame Gillian Beer is a leading Cambridge scholar. She is a teacher much loved by generations of students at Cambridge and around the world, and has written ground-breaking books on Darwin, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Byron, Freud, literature and science, literature and the past, women writers, poetic rhyme, and many other topics. She specialises in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, and has a keen interest in contemporary writing. She was a Booker Prize judge in 1993 and Booker Prize chair in 1997.
Formerly the Edward VII Chair of English Literature and President of Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge, Dame Gillian is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. Her many academic honours include honorary degrees from Harvard, Oxford, London, the Sorbonne and the University of St Andrews.
Her numerous books include Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground; Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction; Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter; Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney, and, most recently, Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll, which won the prestigious Truman Capote Prize. Gillian Beer published an essay on Alice in Nature, 17 November 2016: read here.
Further information on the Cambridge English Faculty webpage on Gillian Beer.
Kasia Boddy with author Toni Morrison, 1998.
Kasia Boddy
Professor Kasia Boddy is a Fellow of Fitzwillliam College and a Professor of English at the University of Cambridge. She teaches a wide range of literature post-1900, with a particular interest in short fiction and in the American novel. Webpage. She has published extensively on short fiction, including The American Short Story since 1950 (2010), and has edited or co-edited several anthologies, including The New Penguin Book of American Short Stories (2011). Now working on a book on the idea of the Great American Novel, she has also published Boxing: A Cultural History (2008) and Geranium (2013). ResearchGate list of publications.
Rebecca Bowler
Dr Rebecca Bowler is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century English Literature at Keele University. She is the author of Literary Impressionism: Vision and Memory in Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H.D. and May Sinclair and co-editor of May Sinclair: Re-Thinking Bodies and Minds. She is on the board of the May Sinclair Society and is one of the General Editors of the forthcoming Edinburgh Editions of the Works of May Sinclair, which will be a landmark edition of Sinclair's work. She is secretary of the British Association for Modernist Studies and is also on the board of the Northern Modernism Seminar. She is currently working on a new book on modernist food, wellness and dietetics.
Anne-Laure Brevet
Dr Anne-Laure Brevet has taught at the University of West Brittany and now teaches in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge.
She has published on Doris Lessing in both French and English, including the Ecole Normale Supérieure website and the journal of Doris Lessing Studies. She wrote the introduction and notes to the French Livre de Poche anthology on Doris Lessing.
Sarah Cain
Dr Sarah Cain is a Lecturer and Director of Studies in English at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where she teaches a broad range of modern literature, with a special interest in T. S. Eliot. She has published on literature and science, on fact-checking in the New Yorker, and lectures widely, including at the T. S. Eliot Festival.
Paul Chirico
Dr Paul Chirico is College Lecturer, Director of Studies in English, and Senior Tutor of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He teaches literature of the eighteenth century and Romantic periods, with a particular research focus on the early nineteenth-century poet John Clare. His book John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader was published by Palgrave Macmillan. His article on John Clare’s ‘The Woodman’ appears in the John Clare Society Journal (2000). He is founding chair of the John Clare Trust, which has established an educational, environmental and cultural centre at Clare's birthplace in the village of Helpston, near Peterborough.
Greta Colombani
Dr Greta Colombani works on communication with the Other World in British Romantic poetry. She has taught literature of the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at Cambridge. Her books include A Gordian Shape of Dazzling Hue: Serpent Symbolism in Keats’s Poetry (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017) and Talking across Unbridgeable Distances: Anglo-American Fiction and the Theme of Supernatural Communication in the Early Nineteenth Century (Edizioni ETS, 2023). She is also interested in poetry and poetic language, depictions of animals and the supernatural, and questions of communication and otherness in British Romantic-period literature.
Ildiko Csengei
Dr Ildiko Csengei is a freelance lecturer and English teacher, and the owner of the tutoring company English Tuition Cambridge. Ildiko held a lectureship at Southampton University and research fellowships at Pembroke College and the Faculty of English at Cambridge. She was lecturer and Director of Studies in English at Newnham College, Cambridge, then senior lecturer and course leader in English at the University of Huddersfield.
Ildiko’s research focuses on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature. Her publications include the book Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Palgrave) and journal articles on emotion, war and literature in the long eighteenth century, including works by Laurence Sterne, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron. Her most recent research explores how the emotional impact of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars is manifest in Romantic period writing.
Claire Davison
Claire Davison is Professor of Modernist Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, and former Chair of the French Virginia Woolf Society. She is the author of Translation as Collaboration: Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky and has co-edited several volumes of Katherine Mansfield's work for Edinburgh University Press. Her essay 'Hearing the World "in Full Orchestra": Voyaging Out with Woolf, Darwin, and Music' was published in Woolf Studies Annual (2017), and her co-authored book Cross-Channel Modernisms was published in 2021. Website.
Marion Dell
Dr Marion Dell has taught for the Open University and is now a freelance writer and lecturer, focusing on the life and work of Virginia Woolf with special reference to her nineteenth-century forebears. Her books include Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: Remembering St Ives (2003) and Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears: Julia Margaret Cameron, Anny Thackeray Ritchie and Julia Prinsep Stephen (2015). She has published articles and reviews in many journals including the Virginia Woolf Bulletin. She has published substantial biography of Julia Stephen in the form of a website. She is Vice Chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain.
Oliver Goldstein
Dr Oliver Goldstein wrote his PhD at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. His research explores radical conservatism in the nineteenth century, with particular interest in Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, and the Brownings. His article on Thomas Hardy's revisions of Swinburne is published in the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies (2017). He is now a barrister.
Parker T. Gordon
Dr Parker Gordon works on twentieth-century writers including Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Hugh Walpole. A musician by training, Parker is interested in the intersections of literature and music, especially in drama, which led him to pursue a PhD on historical pageants at the University of St Andrews (supervised by Prof. Emma Sutton and Dr Michael Downes). He has lectured across the UK on pageants and performed his arrangements of pageant music (often from unpublished scores) by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Martin Shaw, Gustav Holst, Edward Elgar, and William Cole. Parker's research of the literary friendship between Woolf and Walpole is published in ELH (2022), and an article on Eliot's The Rock appears in T. S. Eliot Studies Annual (2022).
Angela Harris
Dr Angela Harris has taught modern literature at Durham University, Florida State University in London and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She has published articles on Virginia Woolf in various journals including English, Modernist Review, and Selected Papers from the 2022 Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. She is currently writing a book entitled Woolf's Ecstatic Epistemology: Faith, Wonder and Ethics. Photo by Seb Peters.
Violet Hatch
Violet is a PhD candidate in English at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge. Before coming to Cambridge she did her BA in English and Related Literature at the University of York, and an MA in modern and contemporary literature at University College London.
Violet’s PhD thesis, entitled ‘Interwar Hauntings: Processing Death, Loss and Post-war Trauma through Modernist Radio Drama at the BBC 1924-41’, explores how radio writers navigate individual and national post-war trauma through the process of broadcasting sound. Her research focuses on the neglected material scripts of early radio work that has not been recorded, exploring the value of the imaginative retrieval of lost sound. Violet supervises students at Cambridge on various aspects of modernism, literature and technology, literature and sound, literature and disability, and specific authors including Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.
Alison Hennegan
Alison Hennegan is retired Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. She has lectured for many years in the Cambridge English Faculty on a wide range of topics from tragedy to contemporary fiction. Her interests include British writing of the First World War, juvenile fiction, decadence, Wilde, Mansfield, Woolf, Forster, twentieth-century writers, women writers, gay writers. She has published on Wilde, Elizabeth von Arnim, First World War writings, Benjamin Britten and many other topics. Her essay ‘Coming Out: The Emergence of Gay Literature’ is published in Kate McLoughlin, ed., British Literature in Transition, 1960-1980: Flower Power. She has a rich experience in publishing and journalism alongside her academic work. Website.
Photo by Seb Peters.
Michael Hrebeniak
Dr Michael Hrebeniak has held posts at Wolfson College and Magdelene College, Cambridge. He worked previously as a journalist, musician and arts TV documentary producer. His interest in interdisciplinarity is reflected in his first book, Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form. He is founder and convenor of an experimental HE project, the New School of the Anthropocene, in collaboration with October Gallery in Bloomsbury. His 70-minute film-poem, Stirbitch: An Imaginary, was premiered by the Heong Gallery in December 2019.
Mark Hussey
Professor Mark Hussey retired from Pace University in New York after teaching there for forty years. He is founding editor of Woolf Studies Annual, General Editor of the Harcourt Annotated Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, on the editorial board of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, and is a co-editor of Virginia Woolf Miscellany. In addition to his many works on Woolf, Mark has written Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism: A Biography and edited Selected Letters of Clive Bell. His Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel will be published in 2025 by Manchester University Press.
Photo by Susan Stava.
Karina Jakubowicz
Dr Karina Jakubowicz is a graduate of University College London, Clare College Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin. She is particularly interested in modernist representations of space and place. She is the author of Garsington Manor and the Bloomsbury Group (Cecil Woolf Press, 2016) and is the winner of the 2017 Katherine Mansfield essay prize for an essay on Woolf, Mansfield and 'Kew Gardens', published in Katherine Mansfield Studies (2018) She is currently writing a book entitled Gardens in Virginia Woolf’s Fiction: Modernism, Nature and Space. She teaches at James Madison University Virginia and Florida State University. An article on Miss La Trobe in Between the Acts can be read online in Virginia Woolf Miscellany (2017-18), pp. 14-16. Karina creates and produces the Virginia Woolf Podcast for Literature Cambridge.
Zoe Jaques
Dr Zoe Jaques is a Fellow of Homerton College and Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Her publications include Children’s Literature and the Posthuman, a co-authored book on the publishing history of the Alice books, and articles on Charles Kingsley, Lewis Carroll, and J. R. R. Tolkien.
Danell Jones
Dr Danell Jones is a writer and scholar with a PhD in literature from Columbia University. She is the author of The Virginia Woolf Writers Workshop; the poetry collection Desert Elegy; and An African in Imperial London, which won the High Plains Book Award for Nonfiction. Her most recent book is The Girl Prince: Virginia Woolf, Race, and the Dreadnought Hoax (Hurst, 2023).
Ewan Jones
Dr Ewan Jones is a Fellow of Downing College and Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature in the Faculty of English, Cambridge. He has published on Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson and other poets. His book Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form was published in 2014. Ewan is involved in a project to digitise manuscripts relating to Alfred Lord Tennyson. This project also explores the relations between poetry, visual culture and music in Tennyson's work.
Peter Jones
Dr Peter Jones is a Fellow and former Librarian of King's College, Cambridge, where many Bloomsbury archives are preserved. These include the papers of John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Roger Fry. From 2008 to 2016 he taught a course on ‘Bloomsbury and twentieth-century English culture’ for the Pembroke King's Programme in Cambridge, and he is a regular teacher on Literature Cambridge summer courses. Webpage. He is the author of ‘Carrington (and Woolf) in Cambridge, 1928’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 13, 3 (2006), 301-34. Read here. Photo: Jeremy Peters.
Louise Joy
Dr Louise Joy is Senior College Lecturer in English at Homerton College, Cambridge, where she is a Fellow and Director Studies. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, especially women's writing, early prose fiction, and the history of children's literature. She is the author of Literature's Children: The Critical Child and the Art of Idealization and has co-edited two collections of essays, The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry and Poetry and Childhood. She is currently writing a book on eighteenth-century women writers and the development of novel form.
Michael Kalisch
Dr Michael Kalisch is a Departmental Lecturer in English and American Literature at Oxford. He read English at Oxford and received his MPhil in American Literature and PhD from Cambridge, spending a year of his doctorate at Princeton as a Procter Fellow. Michael works on modern and contemporary American literary culture, and his first book, The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction, is forthcoming from Manchester University Press.
Kate Kennedy
Dr Kate Kennedy is a biographer and BBC broadcaster, and Associate Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-writing. A Research Fellow at Wolfson College in Oxford, she teaches for the English Faculty, covering topics such as twentieth century literature and music, women's literature, biography and life-writing, and illness narratives. She previously held Research Fellowships at Girton College and the English Faculty in Cambridge. She is the author of Dweller in Shadows: The Life of Ivor Gurney (2021) and co-editor with Dame Hermione Lee of Lives of Houses. She has also edited Literary Britten, and co-edited with Trudi Tate The Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice.
Ann Kennedy Smith
Dr Ann Kennedy Smith has a PhD from Queens' College, Cambridge, and has taught 19th-century literature at Cambridge University's Institute of Continuing Education. In 2015 she was awarded an MA in Biography and Creative Nonfiction from the University of East Anglia, and she is now a writer and researcher with essays and reviews published in the Journal of Victorian Culture, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Slightly Foxed, King's Parade magazine and the Times Literary Supplement. Her books and articles include Painted Poetry: Colour in Baudelaire's Art Criticism (2011) and 'Tennyson's French Reception' in The Reception of Alfred Tennyson in Europe (2017). She is currently working on a biography of Ida Darwin and her Cambridge circle. She is a Fellow Commoner of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Website.
Gerry Kimber
Dr Gerri Kimber is Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton. She is the author or co-editor of nearly 40 books on Katherine Mansfield, including Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years, and has contributed chapters to many other volumes. She has published widely in numerous journals, notably for the Times Literary Supplement and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She was President of the Katherine Mansfield Society for ten years (2010–20). She has recently been commissioned to write a new biography of Katherine Mansfield for Reaktion Books. Website
Miles Leeson
Dr Miles Leeson is the Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester. His works include Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist (2010), Incest in Contemporary Literature (2018), Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration (2019), and Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination (2022). He also hosts and produces the Iris Murdoch Podcast.
Isobel Maddison
Dr Isobel Maddison is retired College Lecturer in English and Fellow Emerita at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. Her publications include: Elizabeth von Arnim: Beyond the German Garden; Katherine Mansfield and World War One (ed. with Alice Kelly; ‘Cross-Currents: Elizabeth Von Arnim, Max Beerbohm and George Bernard Shaw’ in Women: A Cultural Review; Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim; ‘The Popular and the Middlebrow’ in The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s. She has edited Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April (1922) for Oxford World Classics (2022). She is President of the International Elizabeth von Arnim Society, and was for several years Vice-President of Lucy Cavendish College.
Ellie Mitchell
Ellie Mitchell is currently based at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where she works on the influence of theatre on Virginia Woolf ‘s fiction. She has written and lectured widely on Woolf, with topics ranging from late-Victorian physics and early-twentieth-century archaeology to materialist philosophy and modern anthropology. She holds a BA and MPhil from Pembroke College, Cambridge, and she was for two years the Production Manager of the ADC Theatre in Cambridge.
Lisa Mullen
Dr Lisa Mullen is a Senior Teaching Associate in English at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College. Her research is in modern and contemporary literature, with a particular interest in mid-twentieth-century authors including George Orwell, and in nature-writing and the environment. Her first book was Midcentury Gothic (2019) and her next will be Orwell Unwell. She edited the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (2021), and has published research on T. S. Eliot, the films of Powell and Pressburger, Walter Benjamin, poetry and architecture, typewriters, tattoos, Watership Down, and more. She has written and presented BBC Radio features on Mary Wollstonecraft, architecture in post-war Coventry, and the cultural history of the blackthorn tree prunus spinosa, and occasionally presents the arts programme Free Thinking for BBC Radio 3.
Claire Nicholson
Dr Claire Nicholson is a Lecturer for Literature Cambridge and for the Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge. She works on Virginia Woolf's complex relationship with clothing and fashion, and on Bloomsbury art and ideas. She is Chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and has published articles on Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group in a variety of contexts. She co-edited volume 1 of The Women Aesthetes 1870–1900 and also The Voyage Out: Centenary Perspectives to mark the hundredth anniversary of Woolf's first novel. Photo: Jeremy Peters.
Anna Nickerson
Dr Anna J. Nickerson has taught at Newnham College, Cambridge and is currently a Research Fellow and College Lecturer at Girton College. Her work focuses on 19th and 20th century poetry and she has published on Thomas Hardy, T. S. Eliot, and modernist poetics. She is currently editing a collection of essays on Walter de la Mare. Her main project is a book about the English poet and Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Varsha Panjwani
Dr Varsha Panjwani teaches at New York University (London). Her research explores the ways in which Shakespeare is deployed in the service of intersectional feminism and how this approach, in turn, invigorates Shakespeare. Her forthcoming book, Podcasts and Feminist Shakespeare Pedagogy is under contract with Cambridge University Press and she is the creator of the podcast series, ‘Women & Shakespeare’ (www.womenandshakespeare.com). Her essays have been published in international journals such as Shakespeare Survey and Shakespeare Studies, and in edited collections such as Shakespeare: Race and Performance, Shakespeare and Indian Cinema, and Eating Shakespeare. She has also co-edited a special issue of Multicultural Shakespeare and is co-editing a forthcoming essay collection, Indian Shakespeare Cinema in the West to be published by Bloomsbury. She was one of the principal organisers of ‘Indian Shakespeares on Screen’ - an international conference, film festival, and exhibition in collaboration with the BFI Southbank and Asia House.
Fred Parker
Dr Fred Parker is Senior Lecturer in English and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. He works mainly on literature between Milton and Byron (1660-1830) and on its connections with moral philosophy. He also teaches Shakespeare and Tragedy. His book The Devil as Muse (2011) looked at the Devil as literary inspiration for Blake and Byron. In On Declaring Love: Eighteenth-Century Literature and Jane Austen (2018), he explores the process of getting engaged (or seduced) in the novels of the period. Jane Austen is one of his special interests, and he has also published on Byron, Addison, Blake, Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, and much else. Website.
Jan Parker
Dr Jan Parker writes on Tragedy and Classical Epic in Cambridge, where she teaches Tragedy in the Faculty of English. Her latest book The Iliad and Odyssey: The Trojan War, Tragedy and Aftermath (2021) is inspired by generations of her Cambridge students. Her books include Tradition, Translation, Trauma: The Classic and The Modern (2011) and an edition of George Chapman’s classic translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey. She founded the international journal Arts and Humanities in Higher Education. Her latest article, ‘Accounting for Dignity in the Iliad, Ajax, Electra’ is published in Literature and Medicine, 38, 2 (2020).
Jan’s teaching is based on providing glossed texts – translations with Greek key words marked in – which enable students to create engaged, critical readings for themselves: to read ‘through’ rather than ‘in’ translation. She discusses this in her Dialogic Education and the Problematics of Translation in Homer and Greek Tragedy, ch. 3, ‘Engaging with the Classic: Seeing through Translations’.
Natasha Periyan
Dr Natasha Periyan is an Early Career Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies. Her first book was The Politics of 1930s British Literature: Education, Class, Gender (Bloomsbury, 2018) and won the International Standing Conference for the History of Education First Book Prize. She is currently working on a book on Woolf and the concept of intelligence.
Adrian Poole
Professor Adrian Poole is Emeritus Professor of English Literature and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He has written and lectured extensively on Shakespeare, especially the tragedies, and on the afterlives of Shakespeare in the work of later artists, writers and readers. His many books include Tragedy: Shakespeare and the Greek Example; Shakespeare and the Victorians; and Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction. He has written on Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Henry James, and he edited the Cambridge Companion to English Novelists. He is one of the General Editors of the Complete Fiction of Henry James for CUP. Profile of Adrian Poole is in the English Faculty Alumni newsletter, 9 West Road (2015), p. 16.
Jane Potter
Dr Jane Potter is a Reader in Publishing at Oxford Brookes University. She works on early twentieth-century writing by women, popular fiction, publishing history, and First World War writings. Her books include Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women's Literary Responses to the Great War 1914-1918; Wilfred Owen: An Illustrated Life (2014); Working in a World of Hurt: Trauma and Resilience in the Narratives of Medical Personnel in Warzones (with Carol Acton, 2015); Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War (ed. with R. Schneider, 2021); and A History of World War I Poetry (2022).
Susanne Raitt
Professor Suzanne Raitt is Chancellor Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at the College of William & Mary. Her books include May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian; Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf; and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. She co-edited Women's Fiction and the Great War (with Trudi Tate) and edited a collection of essays on lesbian criticism, Volcanoes and Pearl Divers. Editions include the Cambridge Edition of Woolf's Orlando (co-edited with Ian Blyth), the Norton Critical Edition of Woolf's Jacob's Room, Katherine Mansfield's Something Childish and Other Stories for Penguin, and Virginia Woolf's Night and Day for Oxford World's Classics. She has published numerous essays and articles in journals including Modernism/Modernity and History Workshop Journal, and for twelve years she was on the editorial collective of Feminist Studies. She is currently working on a biography of British psychoanalyst Joan Riviere.
Corinna Russell
Dr Corinna Russell is Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where she is also a Tutor for Admissions. Her work focusses on the literature and thought of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a particular interest in the ways in which literary language patterns and forms ideas. She has published on repetition in the poetry of Wordsworth, Blake, and Byron as well as the novels of Dickens, and is working on a new project on the idea of song in Romantic and Victorian writings. She lectures for the Faculty of English on a wide range of subjects and teaches on the English Faculty MPhil.
Jan-Melissa Schramm
Dr Jan-Melissa Schramm is a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Professor of Literature and Law in the Faculty of English, Cambridge, and has served as Deputy Director of CRASSH. She was a lawyer before she became a literary scholar, and her work focuses on the ways in which questions of law, crime, evidence, and ethics are explored in literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She currently teaches an MPhil course on post-colonial re-writings of Great Expectations.
Her books include: Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative;Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology and Censorship, Dramatic Form, and the Representation of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century England.
Susan Sellers
Professor Susan Sellers published an acclaimed novel about Woolf and her sister, Vanessa and Virginia, and is one of the General Editors of the scholarly edition of Woolf, published by Cambridge University Press. She also edited the Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Her second novel is Given the Choice. Her other books include A History of Feminist Literary Criticism (with Gill Plain), Myth and Fairytale in Contemporary Women's Fiction and translations of French feminist theory. She teaches literature and creative writing at the University of St Andrews. Her most recent novel is Firebird, about the dancer Lydia Lopokova and her relationship with John Maynard Keynes and the Bloomsbury Group. Website.
Anna Snaith
Anna Snaith is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at King’s College London. Her publications include Virginia Woolf: Private and Public Negotiations (2000), Modernist Voyages (2014), Palgrave Advances in Woolf Studies (2007) and Virginia Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place (co-edited with Michael Whitworth, 2007). She has edited The Years for the Cambridge Edition of Virginia Woolf and A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas for Oxford World’s Classics (2015).
Frances Spalding
Professor Frances Spalding CBE is a distinguished art historian and an Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. She was previously Professor of Art History at the University of Newcastle, and has edited the Burlington Magazine. Her books include: Roger Fry: Art and Life; Vanessa Bell; John Minton: Dance till the Stars Come Down; Duncan Grant: A Biography; Stevie Smith: A Biography; and Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family and Affections. In 2014 she published Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision which complements the Woolf exhibition she curated at the National Portrait Gallery (assisted by Claudia Tobin). Frances Spalding discussed artist Vanessa Bell with Virginia Nicholson on BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour, 7 February 2017. Website.
Joseph Steinberg
Dr Joseph Steinberg is a supervisor for many Cambridge colleges and recently completed his PhD at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He works on contemporary Australian writers including Peter Carey, Helen Garner, Kate Grenville, J. M. Coetzee and Thea Astley. He is interested in the ways in which the form of the novel has been shaped by pedagogical practices, particularly by the emergence of creative writing as a subject at university. More generally, he is interested in how cultural institutions shape the production, circulation and valuation of literary fiction across a variety of anglophone contexts. He has articles and reviews in the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Australian Humanities Review, The Cambridge Quarterly, and Australian Literary Studies. Joseph is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Western Australia.
Hugh Stevens
Dr Hugh Stevens is Senior Lecturer at University College London, where he teaches twentieth-century literature, gay fiction, and much else. His publications include Henry James and Sexuality; Modernist Sexualities; The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Literature and several articles on D. H. Lawrence. He is editing the Poetry of D. H. Lawrence for Oxford World’s Classics. Website.
Emma Sutton
Emma Sutton is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews where her research focuses on the relationships among literature, music and politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is author of Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s and Virginia Woolf and Classical Music and Founding Director of the Virginia Woolf & Music project that explores music’s role in Bloomsbury’s (after)lives through concerts, public talks and commissions of new works of art. Her current research includes a study of music’s role in Pacific colonial history focused on the networks of Pasifika musicians with whom Robert Louis Stevenson made music in the 1880s and 1890s. Emma has broadcast on music, decadence and visual art for Russian TV, Australian radio and the BBC Proms. Website.
Trudi Tate
Dr Trudi Tate is Director of Literature Cambridge and Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. Her books include Modernism, History and the First World War; Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830-1970 (ed. with Helen Small); The Silent Morning: Culture and Memory After the Armistice (ed. with Kate Kennedy); and A Short History of the Crimean War. She has a special interest in refugee writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. She teaches 19thC, 20thC and contemporary literature at the University of Cambridge. Her work on Woolf includes 'Mrs Dalloway and the Armenian Question', in her book Modernism, History and the First World War and 'King Baby' in The Silent Morning, ed. Tate and Kennedy. She is currently preparing a new edition of Mrs Dalloway for Oxford World Classics and co-editing a book of essays on The Waves with Garrett Eng. Website. Photo by Seb Peters.
Jeremy Thurlow
Dr Jeremy Thurlow is a composer, pianist, and Fellow in Music at Robinson College, Cambridge. He has produced books, articles and radio broadcasts on many nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers. He has lectured on Woolf, Bloomsbury and music for Literature Cambridge summer courses, illustrated by some wonderful playing on the piano. He has recently composed a piece called ‘I See a Ring’, based on the first episode of Woolf’s novel The Waves. Website. Photo by Jeremy Peters.
Claudia Tobin
Dr Claudia Tobin works on the relationship between the visual and verbal arts in the early twentieth century. She worked with Professor Frances Spalding on the exhibition Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision at the National Portrait Gallery (2014), and she has written two papers on Vanessa Bell’s abstract painting, which were commissioned for publication as part of a Tate Gallery InFocus project. See her guest blog on this project on our Blog page. Claudia has taught English and History of Art at the University of Bristol, and recently devised a programme on Literature and Art at the Royal Drawing School. Claudia was a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, and is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Post-doctoral Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. Her first book, Modernism and Still Life: Artists, Writers, Dancers (2020) explores the genre of ‘still life’ across different media, in prose, poetry, painting, dance, and sculpture of the early- to mid-twentieth century. She also co-edited Ways of Drawing: Artists' Perspectives and Practices. You can hear a talk by Claudia for the British Institute in Florence, ‘From Il Palmerino to Bloomsbury: Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, Ottoline Morrell, Vanessa Bell’ on YouTube.
Nadine Tschacksch
Dr Nadine Tschacksch wrote her PhD at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Her thesis explores early twentieth-century queer fiction and the British radical tradition, focusing on E. M. Forster, A. T. Fitzroy, Radclyffe Hall and Mary Renault. Her research interests range from political and social radicalism to the concepts of queerness and deviancy in genre and Modernist fiction. Her article ‘Sexual Identities and Patriotism in Wartime Britain: A Literary No Man’s Land’ is published in the journal English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 in summer 2017 (http://muse.jhu.edu/article/657891). She reviews regularly for the academic journal Women: A Cultural Review. She is currently a Graduate Trainee in university administration in the Ambitious Futures programme at the University of Cambridge, and she is doing research on childhood and sexuality in British popular fiction of the early twentieth century.
Clare Walker Gore
Dr Clare Walker Gore is Associate Professor in English at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. She previously held a Junior Research Fellowship and a College Lectureship at Trinity College Cambridge, and was a Lecturer at the Open University. Her first book, Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, is published by Edinburgh University Press; she has also edited Dinah Mulock Craik's 1866 novel, A Noble Life, for Victorian Secrets, and edited a collection of essays on Charlotte M. Yonge for Palgrave Macmillan. Her current project explores the connections between the life writing and fiction of a group of Victorian women writers. You can hear her talking about her research on Radio 3 here and here and read more about her work here.
Jennifer Wallace
Dr Jennifer Wallace is Lecturer and Director of Studies in English at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where she teaches English literature 1700-1900 and Tragedy. Her many books include Shelley and Greece, Digging the Dirt: The Archeological Imagination, The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy, The Oxford History of the Classical Reception in English Literature, 1790–1880, and Tragedy since 9/11, plus a novel, Digging Up Milton. She is editing A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Modern Age. Website.
Valerie Waterhouse
Valerie Waterhouse is a PhD Researcher at the University of Salford, currently writing a biography of Malachi Whitaker. A former travel journalist, she has a BA (Hons) in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford and an MA (with Distinction) from the University of Lancaster. In 2017, she wrote the Afterword for The Journey Home and Other Stories (Persephone Books), the first volume of Whitaker’s stories for 30 years. In 2019, with Bradford Civic Society, she co-organised the installation of a Blue Plaque at Whitaker’s birthplace house in Wrose, Bradford. She has lectured widely on Whitaker at the Bradford Literature Festival, Ilkley Literature Festival, Persephone Bookshop, London, ENSFR Conference, University of Lisbon, and Leeds Art Gallery.
Mariah Whelan
Dr Mariah Whelan was The Jacqueline Bardsley Poet-in-Residence at Homerton College, University of Cambridge and a Fellow in Creative Practice at University College London. She is the author of the novel-in-sonnets The Love I Do To You (Eyewear, 2019) which was shortlisted for The Melita Hume Prize and won the AM Heath Prize. Her creative-critical research explores the intersection of trauma, archives and form. Her research has been published in the journal Writing in Education (2019) and On Commemoration: Global Reflections Upon Remembering War (2020). In 2020 her literary journal bath magg, which she founded and continues to co-edit, won a funding award from Arts Council England. In 2021 Mariah published a pamphlet of poems based in the colonial archives at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Post-war: Commemoration, Reconstruction, Reconciliation. A further pamphlet, Michael, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2022.
Kabe Wilson
Kabe Wilson is a multimedia artist with a particular focus on literary adaptation across different forms. His work on Virginia Woolf includes ‘The Dreadlock Hoax’, a performance piece that adapts and inverts the infamous Dreadnought Hoax of 1910, where Woolf passed as an Abyssinian royal. Wilson has presented his work internationally, and is interested in how Woolf is viewed as a figure across different cultures. See his guest blog post about her significance to the literary culture of the US, and an article in the Guardian on his work. In 2020 he published a diary-essay and paintings, ‘On Being Still’ in the Modernist Review.
