School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies

Profile

My research interests centre on nineteenth, and twentieth-century literature, art and culture, with a particular focus on Decadent writing (especially Vernon Lee), sensation and crime fiction, queer studies, and the neo-Victorian novel. I am author of Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales, (Ashgate Press, 2008) and have co-edited, with Catherine Maxwell, Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales (Broadview Press, 2006), the first annotated edition of selected short stories by Vernon Lee, and Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), the first collection of critical essays on Lee’s work.

In addition, I have published on a range of other nineteenth-century writers including Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde and Olive Custance in academic journals such as the Yearbook of English Studies and the Victorian Review. Most recently, I co-edited two collections of essays: with Rosario Arias, Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and with Bran Nicol and Eugene McNulty, Crime Culture: Figuring Criminality in Fiction and Film (Continuum, 2011). 

Next year, I will be involved in co-organising ‘The Other Dickens’, a major international conference to be held at the University of Portsmouth to mark the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth. Future plans include a four-volume facsimile collection on Spiritualism, 1840-1930, due out with Routledge in 2013/14.

Qualifications

• PhD in English Literature (Queen Mary, University of London)
• M.A. (Hons.) Modern English Studies Writing and Society (1700-1820); (Queen Mary, University of London)

Main Publications

• Spiritualism, 1840–1930(4 vols.), (forthcoming, Routledge, 2013/14).
• Crime Cultures: Figuring Criminality in Literature, Media and Film, (contracted to Continuum, 2011)
• Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past(forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
• Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales, (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2008).
• Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales(co-edited with Dr Catherine Maxwell), (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006)
• Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics(co-edited with Dr Catherine Maxwell), (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

Current Research

Patricia's current research centres on the sculptural body in nineteenth-century literature and art, focusing on Pygmalionism and agalmatophilia. She is also in the process of co-editing a collection of essays on haunting and spectrality in the neo-Victorian novel.