Dr Charlotte Mathieson
About
Biography
I am a Senior Lecturer in 19th-century English literature, and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow 2022-23, working on a project titled "Cultures of Suntanning in late 19th to mid 20th century Britain".
I specialise in Victorian literature and culture, with an interest in travel and mobility in the mid-nineteenth century novel, focusing on authors including Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell and Charlotte Bronte. My publications include a monograph, Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and the edited collections Mobilities, Literature, Culture (Palgrave, 2019), Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-present (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920 (Pickering and Chatto, 2014). I am co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture.
I joined Surrey in 2016, having previously worked as a Teaching Fellow in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University (2015-16) and Research Fellow at Warwick's Institute of Advanced Study (2012-15). I gained my PhD in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick in 2011.
Areas of specialism
My qualifications
Affiliations and memberships
ResearchResearch interests
My research has focused upon establishing a historical and theoretical basis of mobilities studies in the nineteenth century, including in my monograph Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). I am the editor of 3 collections, most recently Mobilities, Literature, Culture (Ed. with Marian Aguiar, Lynne Pearce; Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). My research has recently been funded through the award of British Academy Small Research Grant (2017-2019),and I have recently been awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for 12 months from September 2022, for my project "Cultures of Suntanning in late 19th to mid 20th century Britain.
I have been instrumental in developing the field of literary mobilities studies, internationally and within the UK: I am co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture, co-lead Surrey’s Mobilities in Literature and Culture Research centre, co-convene the Institute of Historical Research Transport and Mobility History Seminar, and am on the editorial board of Transfers.
I am also leading collaborations in the field of skin studies, and with Dr Nicole Nyffenegger (Bern), co-convene the international Cultural Skin Studies network.
I was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Researcher of the Year 2022.
Selected recent talks:
Keynote: “Cultures of Suntanning: new dialogues between medical, cultural and commercial histories in 19th and 20th century Britain.” Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Festival of Research, FASS Researcher of the Year Keynote Talk. 25th January 2023.
Respondent: IAS Talking Points Seminar: Dr Asha Hornsby, ‘Contagious Crossings: Representing Seafaring and Disease…’. Institute of Advanced Study, UCL, 12 January 2023.
“The textured language of tanned and burnt skin in 19th century culture.” Invited paper. Liminal Matters: Textures in 19th century Material and Literary Cultures. University of Konstanz, September 2022.
“Decolonising the geographies of nation and empire in Victorian studies teaching and research.” BAVS panel on “Decolonising Victorian studies”, English Shared Futures conference, 8th-9 July 2022, Manchester.
Respondent: Vagrancy in the Victorian Age by Alistair Robinson, book launch panel. Hosted online by Birkbeck Centre for 19th Century Studies. November 2021.
“Sunburnt at Sea: developing understandings of sunburn and tanning in 19th-century maritime medicine.” Invited paper. Locating Intersections Of Medicine and Mobility in 19th-century Britain, Friedrich-Alexander University, Germany, October 2019.
“Roundtable: mobility pasts and futures.” Invited participant. Centre for Mobilities Research and Academy Mobility Humanities, Konkuk University Korea, Mobilities symposium, Lancaster University, June 2019.
Keynote: “Sea treasures in nineteenth-century literature.” Becoming sea treasures: epistemological constructions and marine resource regulation. 3ROceans conference 2018. University of the Azores, 12 to 14th September 2018.
Keynote: “From walking the Moors to threading the streets: Charlotte Brontë’s journeys.” Keynote presentation. Traversing land, sea, and sky: travel and the landscape. University of Bristol, 25th April 2018.
Research interests
My research has focused upon establishing a historical and theoretical basis of mobilities studies in the nineteenth century, including in my monograph Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). I am the editor of 3 collections, most recently Mobilities, Literature, Culture (Ed. with Marian Aguiar, Lynne Pearce; Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). My research has recently been funded through the award of British Academy Small Research Grant (2017-2019),and I have recently been awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for 12 months from September 2022, for my project "Cultures of Suntanning in late 19th to mid 20th century Britain.
I have been instrumental in developing the field of literary mobilities studies, internationally and within the UK: I am co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture, co-lead Surrey’s Mobilities in Literature and Culture Research centre, co-convene the Institute of Historical Research Transport and Mobility History Seminar, and am on the editorial board of Transfers.
I am also leading collaborations in the field of skin studies, and with Dr Nicole Nyffenegger (Bern), co-convene the international Cultural Skin Studies network.
I was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Researcher of the Year 2022.
Selected recent talks:
Keynote: “Cultures of Suntanning: new dialogues between medical, cultural and commercial histories in 19th and 20th century Britain.” Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Festival of Research, FASS Researcher of the Year Keynote Talk. 25th January 2023.
Respondent: IAS Talking Points Seminar: Dr Asha Hornsby, ‘Contagious Crossings: Representing Seafaring and Disease…’. Institute of Advanced Study, UCL, 12 January 2023.
“The textured language of tanned and burnt skin in 19th century culture.” Invited paper. Liminal Matters: Textures in 19th century Material and Literary Cultures. University of Konstanz, September 2022.
“Decolonising the geographies of nation and empire in Victorian studies teaching and research.” BAVS panel on “Decolonising Victorian studies”, English Shared Futures conference, 8th-9 July 2022, Manchester.
Respondent: Vagrancy in the Victorian Age by Alistair Robinson, book launch panel. Hosted online by Birkbeck Centre for 19th Century Studies. November 2021.
“Sunburnt at Sea: developing understandings of sunburn and tanning in 19th-century maritime medicine.” Invited paper. Locating Intersections Of Medicine and Mobility in 19th-century Britain, Friedrich-Alexander University, Germany, October 2019.
“Roundtable: mobility pasts and futures.” Invited participant. Centre for Mobilities Research and Academy Mobility Humanities, Konkuk University Korea, Mobilities symposium, Lancaster University, June 2019.
Keynote: “Sea treasures in nineteenth-century literature.” Becoming sea treasures: epistemological constructions and marine resource regulation. 3ROceans conference 2018. University of the Azores, 12 to 14th September 2018.
Keynote: “From walking the Moors to threading the streets: Charlotte Brontë’s journeys.” Keynote presentation. Traversing land, sea, and sky: travel and the landscape. University of Bristol, 25th April 2018.
Supervision
Postgraduate research supervision
Current:
Catherine Peck: “The Country Cottage in nineteenth-century literature” (primary supervisor)
Completed:
Michelle Rushefsky: “Horror Capriccios: (Re)Imagining British Nineteenth-Century Fiction through the Veil of American Horror” (primary supervisor)
Alicia Barnes: “The Iron Arm of Empire: Railways, Imperialism and the Tensions of English Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature” (primary supervisor)
Teaching
In 2021-22 I am teaching:
Semester 1
ELI1025 Understanding the Novel
Semester 2
ELI1022 History of English Literature II
ELI3049/M040 Geographies of Nation and Empire: the Victorian novel 1850-90
Publications
Books
Mobilities, Literature, and Culture. Ed. Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson, and Lynne Pearce. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600 to present. Ed. & intro. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920. Ed. & intro. with Gemma Goodman. Pickering and Chatto, 2014.
Peer-reviewed articles
“Stimulated by these agents to vigorous action”: the language of suntanning and materiality of skin in Victorian culture. European Journal of English Studies, Volume: 26, issue: 01, pages 124 - 144. (Open access)
‘A still ecstasy of freedom and enjoyment’: Walking the city in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette.” Journal of Victorian Culture (July 2017).
“'A brown sunburnt gentleman': Masculinity and the Travelling Body in Dickens's Bleak House.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 36.4 (September 2014).
“'A moving and a moving on': Mobility, Space and the Nation in Charles Dickens's Bleak House.” English 61.4 (December 2012).
Book chapters
“Mobile materiality: the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the mobile-material relations of Henry Mayhew’s 1851: or, the Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys.” Anticipatory Materialisms. Edited by Jo Carruthers, Nour Dakkak and Rebecca Spence. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
“Brontë countries: nation, gender and place in the literary landscapes of Haworth and Brussels.” Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives, ed. Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne. Manchester University Press, 2017.
“'The Formation of a Surface': Europe in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit.” Britain and the Narration of Travel in the 19th Century, ed. Kate Hill. Ashgate, 2016.
“'A perambulating mass of woollen goods': Bodies in transit in the mid-19th century railway journey.” Transport in British Fiction: Technologies of Movement 1840-1940, ed. Adrienne Gavin and Andrew Humphries. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
“A Tale of Two Londons: Shakespeare and Dickens in 2012.” Co-written with Peter Kirwan. Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year, ed. Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan. Arden/Bloomsbury, 2015.
“'Wandering like a wild thing': Rural mobility in George Eliot's Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss.” Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920, ed. Charlotte Mathieson and Gemma Goodman. Pickering and Chatto, 2014.
Journal editions
“Introduction: New Writings in Feminist Studies.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 18.3 (February 2017). Ed. with Laura Clancy; introduction, pp. 1-4.
“Introduction: New Writings in Feminist Studies.” Journal of International Women's Studies 17.2 (February 2016). Ed. with Kehinde Olowookere; introduction, pp. 1-4.
“Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Literature and Culture.” Victorian Network 4.2 (Winter 2012). Ed.; introduction, pp. 1-9. Books