Dr Gowan Dawson

dawson, gowan BA (East Anglia), MA (Nottingham), PhD (Sheffield)

Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature

Contact details:

E: gd31@le.ac.uk
T: +44 (0)116 252 2779

Research Interests

Dr Dawson's main research interests are in the nineteenth-century, especially in the cultural history of Victorian science, as well as in the print culture of the period.

He is the author of Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge University Press, 2007), co-author of Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and co-editor of Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media (Ashgate, 2004). He is also the co-author of the online database Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: An Electronic Index. Additionally, he is the guest editor, with Sally Shuttleworth, of a special number of the journal Victorian Poetry on ‘Science and Victorian Poetry’ (2003), and an associate editor of the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (British Library, 2009).

Dr Dawson has also written for Nature, American Scientist and the Times Literary Supplement, and presented a podcast on nineteenth-century representations of apes for the Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts exhibition at The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

Currently he is writing a book entitled 'Show Me the Bone': Fragmentary Fossils, Functionalist Palaeontology and the Reconstruction of Prehistoric Creatures in Nineteenth-Century British and American Culture, and is general editor, with Bernard Lightman, of an eight-volume series on Victorian Science and Literature (Pickering and Chatto, forthcoming).

Projects

'Show Me the Bone': Fossils, Palaeontology and Prehistoric Creatures in Nineteenth-Century British and American Culture

Postgraduate Supervision

Dr Dawson would welcome postgraduate students (MA or PhD) with interests in any of the following areas of research:

Mid- to Late Victorian literature
Literature and science
Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic writing
Nineteenth-century journalism and print culture

Teaching and Administration

Teaching

Dr Dawson teaches on the following undergraduate and MA courses:

EN3020: Literature 1789-1870 (convenor)
EN3030: Literature 1870-1945
EN3000 Evolution and Entropy: The Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Literature
EN3128 Late Victorian Gothic: Texts and Context
MA in Victorian Studies: Approaches to Victorian Literature and Culture
MA In Victorian Studies: Evolution and Entropy: Representations of the Sciences in Victorian Literature