Professor Patricia Pulham
About
Biography
Patricia Pulham is Professor of Victorian Literature and currently President of the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS). At Surrey, Patricia is Head of the School of Literature and Languages. She completed her doctorate at Queen Mary, University of London in 2001, and taught at Brunel, Goldsmiths, Birkbeck and QMUL, where she was Lecturer in Poetry from 2002-03. In 2004, she was appointed to a lectureship in English literature at the University of Portsmouth. She joined the University of Surrey in 2017, having previously held a Readership and a series of research leadership roles at Portsmouth, including Director of the university's Centre for Studies in Literature. Patricia is a member of the AHRC PRC, the UKRI FLF PRC, and sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies and Volupté.
She has supervised several PhD students to completion and has examined numerous PhD theses in the UK and abroad. She welcomes enquiries from prospective PhD students wishing to study in any of the following areas: decadence, aestheticism, Victorian literature and visual cultures, late-Victorian Gothic, spiritualism, or neo-Victorian fiction.
Her latest book, The Sculptural body in Victorian literature: Encrypted Sexualities (2020) was published by Edinburgh University Press in their Critical Studies in Victorian Culture series and republished in paperback in 2022.
Areas of specialism
University roles and responsibilities
- Director of Research
ResearchResearch interests
Nineteenth-century literature and culture, Decadence, Aestheticism, Victorian literature and visual cultures, late-Victorian Gothic, spiritualism, and neo-Victorianism.
Research interests
Nineteenth-century literature and culture, Decadence, Aestheticism, Victorian literature and visual cultures, late-Victorian Gothic, spiritualism, and neo-Victorianism.
Supervision
Postgraduate research supervision
Current Supervisions:
- Megan Williams, '"Priceless Gems of Living Thought”: Literary Encounters with Anarchism at the fin de siècle
- Catherine Peck, ‘The Little Cottage in the Woods’: the Symbolism of the Country Cottage in the ‘Golden Age’ of Children’s Literature
- Helen Murray, ‘Artists at Home: Self-Representation and the Construction of Celebrity, 1860-1914’
- Louise Wenman James, ‘Women of the Yellow Book’
- Sue Terry, ‘Enchanted Modernism and Radical Reform of the Interwar Family: Female Empowerment in the Magical Modernist Fiction of Five British Women Writers’
Completions:
- Garth Wenman-James, ‘Poverty Porn’ in Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Surveillance, Spectacle and Space in the Victorian Imagination’
- Gursimran Oberoi, ‘Global Watts’ (in association with Watts Gallery, Surrey)
- Alex Reeve (Creative Writing): ‘Constructing transgender identity in a Neo-Victorian Crime Novel
- Danielle Dove, ‘Sartorial Spectres: Re-Fashioning the Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel’
- Kate Brombley, ‘Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlockian Fandom’
- Lucy Smith, ‘The Archives of Fantasy: The Interpretation and Legacy of the Freshwater Circle in the Works of Post-Victorian Writers’
- Alex Messem, ‘Suicide at the Fin de Siècle: Self Harm in New Woman Writing 1880-1900’
- Emily Scott (co-supervised), ‘Reading the Revenants of Trauma: Neo-Victorian Literature and the Contemporary Consumption of Suffering’
- Jane Ford, ‘Vampiric Economics: Parasitism ‘Predatism and the Politics of Consumption in the Literature & Culture of the Fin de Siècle’