Dr Carl Thompson
About
Biography
Carl joined Surrey in September 2017, having previously been at St Mary's University, Twickenham. Prior to that (2003-2016) Carl was Reader in English Literature and Travel Culture at Nottingham Trent University, and from 2000-2003 Junior Research Fellow in English at Trinity College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the University of Surrey's Institute for Sustainability, and co-lead of the Institute's Sustainability, Creativity and Communication research programme.
Carl completed his DPhil at Oxford University in 2001. This became the basis of his first book, The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2007). Since then he has published extensively across a range of research areas. He is the author of Travel Writing (2011) in Routledge's New Critical Idiom series, and more recently edited The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing (2016). His main research focus in recent years has been on women travel writers in the 18th and 19th centuries. He has just completed a scholarly edition of Jemima Kindersley's Letters from Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope and the East Indies (1777) and Maria Graham's Journal of a Residence in India (1812) for the Chawton House Library / Taylor and Francis series Women's Travel Writings in India and is currently completing a monograph on Maria Graham (1785-1842) for Oxford University Press.
Carl also maintains an interest in maritime culture and the literary depiction of the sea in this period, with a particular focus on representations of shipwreck. His principal publications in this area have been two edited collections, one of primary materials - Romantic-Era Shipwreck Narratives: An Anthology (Trent Editions, 2007) - and one of critical reflections - Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day (Routledge, 2013).
Affiliations and memberships
ResearchResearch interests
- Travel writing in all forms and across all periods (but with particular emphasis on the 18th and 19th centuries)
- Exploration; literature and science; the emergence of geography, sociology and other travel-related disciplines
- Women's travel writing
- Maria Graham (1785-1842)
- Women and science (and other forms of disciplinary expertise, such as art history)
- Travel writing, science and geography in Romantic-era educational texts
- Romantic-era maps and mapping
- Romantic-era intellectual networks and disciplinarity
- Representations of shipwreck
- The literature of the sea and maritime cultures
Carl welcomes enquiries from potential doctoral students or research collaborators in all these areas.
Research interests
- Travel writing in all forms and across all periods (but with particular emphasis on the 18th and 19th centuries)
- Exploration; literature and science; the emergence of geography, sociology and other travel-related disciplines
- Women's travel writing
- Maria Graham (1785-1842)
- Women and science (and other forms of disciplinary expertise, such as art history)
- Travel writing, science and geography in Romantic-era educational texts
- Romantic-era maps and mapping
- Romantic-era intellectual networks and disciplinarity
- Representations of shipwreck
- The literature of the sea and maritime cultures
Carl welcomes enquiries from potential doctoral students or research collaborators in all these areas.
Teaching
MA English Literature
- ELIM005 Research and Writing Skills
- ELIM047 Travel Writing Past and Present: Themes, Forms and Critical Perspectives
- ELIM043 Open Writing
BA English
- ELI3031 Gothic to Goth
- ELI1011 Theories of Reading II
- ELI2031 Romantic Literature
Sustainable development goals
My research interests are related to the following:
Publications
Highlights
Books:
- Travel Writing, in the New Critical Idiom series (monograph; Routledge, 2011, 2nd edition 2025).
- Jemima Kindersley: Letters from Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope and the East Indies (1777) & Maria Graham: Journal of a Residence in India (1812) (new editions, with introductions, forming Volume 1 of Women’s Travel Writings in India; Chawton House Library / Taylor and Francis, 2020)
- The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing (edited, multi-author collection of 42 chapters; Routledge, 2016)
- Sarah Wilson: The Fruits of Enterprize (new edition, with introduction, in the Chawton House Library’s 4-vol. series Women’s Travel Writings in Africa and the Middle East; Pickering and Chatto, 2014)
- Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day (edited, multi-author collection of 12 essays, with 12,000-word introduction; Routledge, 2013)
- The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination (monograph; Oxford University Press, 2007)
Journal Articles and Book Chapters:
- ‘Byron and Travel’, in Alan Rawes and Jonathan Shears (eds), The Oxford Handbook to Byron (Oxford University Press, 2024)
- ‘Maria Graham and the Chilean Earthquake of 1822: Contextualizing the First Female-Authored Article in Transactions of the Geological Society’, in C.V. Burek and B.M. Higgs (eds), Celebrating 100 Years of Female Fellowship of the Geological Society: Discovering Forgotten Histories (Geol. Soc. Special Publications, 2021)
- ‘Producing and Protesting Imperial Map-Mindedness: Multimodal Pedagogy and Feminist Frustration in Sarah Atkins Wilson’s Geographical Primers’, in Sally Bushell, Julia Carlson, and Damian Walford Davies (eds), Romantic Cartographies: Literary Mapping and Romantic Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
- ‘Women Travellers, Romantic-Era Science and the Banksian Empire’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society (2019)
- ‘Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing’, in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (eds Nandini Das and Tim Youngs; Cambridge University Press, 2019)
- ‘Journeys to Authority: Reassessing Women’s Early Travel Writing 1763-1862’, Introduction to SI of Women’s Writing 24.2 (2017)
- ‘Sentiment and Scholarship: Hybrid Historiography and Historical Authority in Maria Graham’s South American Journals’, in SI of Women’s Writing 24.2 (2017)
- ‘Des Exploratrices: Genre Féminin, Voyage et Decouverte Dans La Tradition Britannique, 1780-1850’, in Des Voyages Vers L’Inconnu Entre 1630 et 1880 (ed. Florence D’Souza; Editions L’Harmattan, 2016)
- ‘Introduction’, in The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing (ed. Carl Thompson; Routledge, 2016)
- ‘Travel Writing Now’, in The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing (ed. Carl Thompson; Routledge, 2016)
- ‘“Only the Amblyrhynchus”: Maria Graham’s Scientific Editing of the Voyage of the Blonde’, Journal of Literature and Science, 8.1 (2015)
- ‘Shipwrecks, Mutineers and Cannibals: Maritime Mythology and the Political Unconscious in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Framing the Ocean, 1700 to the Present: Envisaging the Sea as Social Space (ed. Tricia Cusack; Ashgate, 2014)
- ‘Shipwreck and the Forging of the Commercial Nation: the 1786 Wreck of the Halsewell’, in Shipwreck in Art and Literature (ed. Carl Thompson; Routledge, 2013)
- ‘Introduction: Shipwreck, Modernity, Postmodernity’, in Shipwreck in Art and Literature (ed. Carl Thompson; Routledge, 2013)
- ‘The Explorer as Saint: Mungo Park in West Africa’. Extract from The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination, reprinted in Travel Writing: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, 4 vols. (eds. Tim Youngs and Charles Forsdick; Routledge, 2012)
- ‘Earthquakes and Petticoats: Maria Graham, Geology, and Early Nineteenth-Century ‘Polite’ Science’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 17.3 (2012)
- ‘The Grosvenor Shipwreck and the Figure of the Female Crusoe: Hannah Hewit, Mary Jane Meadows and Romantic-Era Feminist and Anti-Feminist Debate’, English Studies in Africa, 51.2 (2008)
- ‘Romantic Travel Writing’, in Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (ed. Nicholas Roe; Oxford University Press, 2004)
- ‘The Heroic Age of the Tin Can: Technology, Ideology and Exploration in the Arctic, 1818-1835’, in Maritime Empires (eds. D. Killingray, M. Lincoln and N. Rigby; Boydell and Brewer, 2004)
- ‘The Double Voice of James Bruce, Abyssinian Traveller’ in Eastern Deserts: Minerals, Missionaries and Explorers (eds. Janet Starkey and Okashi El-Daly; Astene Books, 2001).
- ‘Redmond O’Hanlon: A Critical Appraisal and Bibliography’, Post-War Literatures in English (March, 2000)