About Me

I am an independent writer and researcher, specialising in literature of the long nineteenth century. I completed my post-doc at Hertford College, University of Oxford, in 2019.

After graduating with a degree in English Language and Literature from Oxford University in 2006, I went on to take my MA, for which I was awarded a Distinction, at Bristol University. I remained at Bristol for my doctoral research, writing a thesis entitled 'Friendship and Community in Last Man Literature, 1806-1833'. Between 2012 and 2014, I worked as a Lecturer in English at St Hilda's College, University of Oxford, where I taught various papers covering the period 1660 to the present day.

After being widowed in early 2019, I made the decision to take some time out of formal academia in order to raise my baby and focus on writing. Having resigned from my permanent lectureship, I am now pursuing projects on Jane Loudon and the figure of the resurrected mummy in literature of the 1820s; H. G. Wells and the fin de siècle Last Man; Mary Shelley's Gothic; and Horace Walpole's engagement with the concept of authorship.


Research

In addition to the Romantic 'Last Man' theme, my research interests include wider ideas of apocalypse and dystopia in nineteenth-century English literature; the Gothic; Mary Shelley; H. G. Wells; Lord Byron; Jane Loudon; Victorian depictions of subterranean spaces; and friendship in Romantic literature.


Selected Publications

The Connell Short Guide to the Gothic (Connell, 2017) Click here to buy

'"Great safe places down deep": Subterranean Spaces in the Early Novels of H. G. Wells', in Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H. G. Wells and William Morris: Landscape and Space, ed. Emelyne Godfrey (Palgrave, 2016), 123-38

'"No love was left": The Failure of Christianity in Byron's "Darkness"', The Byron Journal, 43.2 (2015), 131-40

'"The till now unseen object of my mad idolatry": The Presence of Jane Williams in Mary Shelley's The Last Man', Romanticism, 19.1 (2013), 89-99

'The Last Man and Romantic Archaeology', in Grasmere, 2012, ed. Richard Gravil (HEB, 2012), 160-70

'Percy Bysshe Shelley', 'Psychical Investigation', and 'Suburban Gothic', in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, ed. William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith, 2 vols (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), II: 624-25, II: 524-26, II: 658-60

I have contributed several short articles to the Routledge Annotated Bibliography of English Studies, and write for English Review magazine, The Conversation, and the Wordsworth Trust's Wordsworth and Romanticism blog.

I have reviews published in the BARS Review, The Byron Journal, Romanticism, and La Questione Romantica.


Awards

• British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award Holder (2016-17).

• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (2014).

• Finalist in the BBC / AHRC New Generation Thinkers competition (2013).

• Awarded third place (Highly Commended) in the Keats Shelley Prize for my essay 'Rural Idylls and Urban Nightmares in Mary Shelley's The Last Man' (2012).

• Arts and Humanities Research Council doctoral award holder (2009-2012).

Teaching

I have taught various undergraduate papers at the University of Oxford:

Prelims Paper 1B (Introduction to English Language and Literature: Approaches to Literature)
Prelims Paper 3 (1830-1910)
Prelims Paper 4 (1910-present)
FHS Paper 4 (1660-1760)
FHS Paper 5 (1760-1830)

I have also supervised both MSt and third-year undergraduate dissertations on a number of topics covering the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In the past, I have worked as a Senior Associate Teacher at Bristol University (2010-13), where I convened the undergraduate unit 'Ways of Reading 2: Critical Thought and Theory', taught on the MA unit 'Romanticism, History, and Politics', and taught on the undergraduate units 'Literature 3: 1700-1830', 'Critical Issues', and 'Contemporary Writing'. I have also taught on the undergraduate unit 'Romantic Literature' at Oxford Brookes University as an Associate Lecturer (2012).


For further details, please see my page at Academia. I tweet as @C_Redford_