Members

I research eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature, especially letter-writing and literary celebrity, the novel, and the links between material forms and textual meanings.

Dr Melissa Dickson

Lecturer in Victorian Literature

Department of English Literature

My research focuses on the relationships between Victorian literature, science, medicine, and material culture. I am particularly interested in the study and depiction of the senses and the workings of memory in the nineteenth century. My current work is on explorations of the body’s physiological and psychological responses to sound and music in the nineteenth century. I teach across the long nineteenth century.

I work on literature and culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, specifically focusing on representations of Egypt and Egyptology across this period. I am interested in materiality, book history, and literature and science more broadly.

I took my BA in English and Philosophy at the University of Leeds, and my MA and PhD in American Studies at the University of Nottingham, where I then held a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Research Fellowship followed by a Lectureship in American Literature.

My research focuses on American literature and visual art in the decades around 1900 and explores the ways in which cultural forms adapted to the …

I work on British and American literature of the long nineteenth century, with a special focus on the late writings of Henry James. I am interested in the place of style in literary non-fiction, the practice of editing, and the relations between personal correspondence and other types of life-writing (autobiography, biography, and memoir). I teach widely across eighteenth-, nineteenth- and …

I am interested in questions of voice, influence, and achievement in English poetry and in particular the poetry of the Romantic period. I teach across the spectrum of English literature – especially from the eighteenth-century onward.

I joined the department in 2015 as Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture. My research focuses on the relationship between scientific ideas and cultural forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including poetry, architecture and the visual arts. More widely, I work on and teach a wide range of nineteenth-century literature, with interests in poetry and poetic form, especially the …

I joined the University of Birmingham in 1998, having received my Ph.D. from Birkbeck College, University of London, with a thesis on women, the city and the concept of the flâneuse in nineteenth and twentieth-century English and American literature. Previously I studied at the University of Reading, where I took a BA in English Literature & Philosophy, and the MA Literature and the …

Professor Michaela Mahlberg

Chair in Corpus Linguistics

Director, Centre for Corpus Resarch

Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics

As a corpus linguist, I am interested in language as a social phenomenon and the way in which we use language to understand and shape the world we live in. A large part of my research focuses on the language of Dickens’s fiction, literary linguistics, and discourse analysis.

I lecture and research on 19th and 20th century British and American literature and visual culture. I am the director of the Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity, and I am also the Admissions Tutor for English Literature.

My teaching is primarily in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. My research interests are in nineteenth-century American literature, with a particular focus on representations of the failure of language and on the literature of the sea.

I have had a long freelance career in music and drama and am still an active performer in both fields. My specialist academic areas are nineteenth-century theatre, popular theatre studies, technology and performance and any area of music and drama.

Dr Fariha Shaikh

Lecturer of Victorian Literature.

Department of English Literature

My research focusses on the relationships in the nineteenth century between genre, form and globalisation. In particular, I’m interested in the mobility and materiality of literature in the context of nineteenth-century settler colonialism. I work and teach across the breadth of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I’m interested in the relationship between literature and science, especially as it is figured in popular culture from the nineteenth-century to the present. My current work is on the social history of dinosaurs over this period.

I work on British Romanticism, and the literature and intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am interested in poetics (particularly sounds in verse), periodization, literary inheritance, theories of humour, the history of emotions, and the environment.  I teach widely across eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature at undergraduate and postgraduate level.