MA, M.St, D.Phil (Oxford)

Lecturer in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literature

Contact Details:

• E: fj21@le.ac.uk

• T: +44 (0)116 252 2199

Research Interests

Dr James works on late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature, with a particular interest in sociability, friendship and creative exchange amongst writers, and in life-writing. She has written a number of articles on Charles Lamb and friendship amongst Romantic writers, and her book Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008.

Her current research focuses on Unitarian networks of readers and writers in the Romantic and Victorian periods, including authors such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, the Aikin family, Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Gaskell. She is interested in family biographies and life-writing among Dissenters, and how we might read family interactions and writing practices. This is reflected in a new collection of essays, Religious Dissent and the Aikin-Barbauld Circle, 1740 to 1860, co-edited with Prof. Ian Inkster (Nottingham Trent) which has recently been published by Cambridge University Press (2011): http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item6510137/?site_locale=en_GB

Dr James is now writing a monograph which stems from research undertaken on a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship, on Dissent and life-writing. 

Projects

Postgraduate Supervision

Dr James is currently supervising a PhD on Elizabeth Gaskell and citizenship, and would welcome postgraduate students with research interests in any of the following:

• Charles Lamb, Charles Lloyd, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and their circle.
• Writing of the 1790s.
• Religious Dissent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (including but not limited to Unitarianism).
• Life-writing, biography and autobiography in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Teaching and Administration

• EN1010: Reading English
• EN1020: A Literary Genre: The Novel
• EN2050: From Satire to Sensibility: Literature 1660-1789
• EN3020: Romantics to Victorians
• Special Subject, EN3163: Telling Lives 1798 - 2011
• Tutor for BA English & History
• Student-Staff Committee (undergraduate) 

Recent Publications

Full list of publications