University of London, Birkbeck College

Department Member, English and Humanities

Associate Lecturer

About

I am an early career researcher in the field of nineteenth-century women's religious, political and literary culture. My current research project is a book-length study provisionally entitled The New Woman and Religious Culture: Fiction, Faith and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle. It shows the importance of religion in shaping both women’s political struggle at the end of the nineteenth century and the conceptualisation of that struggle through its distinctive emphasis on literary sources. My work is the first to map the variety and complexity of women’s religious culture at the fin de siècle and the bearing this had on the late-Victorian Woman Question. It uses religion to interrogate the relationship between popular discourse on women’s rights and the politicised female subject.

I am also co-editing a special issue of Victorian Review on Religion and Sexuality with Professor Joy Dixon, University of British Columbia, Canada. This results from an international workshop funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and is the first collection systematically to rethink the role of religion in the formation of modern sexual subjectivities since the rejection of “the repressive hypothesis” transformed our understanding of the transition from a “Victorian” to a “modern” sexual regime. This collection reconsiders the historical and cultural contingencies which shape both sexual and spiritual desires and challenges the scholarly consensus that science, not religion, is the paradigmatic form of modern sexual knowledge

I have teaching interests in the areas of nineteenth- and twentieth century English Literature and am a member of the Higher Education Academy.