![[The University of Leicester]](unilogo.gif)
Dr Holly Furneaux
BA (King's, London), MA (Birkbeck, London), PhD (Birkbeck, London)
Reader in Victorian Literature
Contact Details:
-
T: +44 (0)116 252 2742
Research Interests
Dr Furneaux's main research interests are in the nineteenth century, especially in gender, sexuality, the body, medicine and the Victorian novel. She is author of Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (Oxford University Press, 2009) which explores the affirmative representations of same-sex desire and non-normative 'families of choice' in the novels of Dickens, and how this fiction draws on and develops wider cultural strategies of queer expression.
She is now working on an interdisciplinary book-length exploration of the literary and social history of the gentle man in the long nineteenth century, which focuses on the figures of the male nurse, philanthropist, pacifist and ‘muscular’ Christian.
Dr Furneaux is on the editorial board for e-journal 'Nineteen: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century', and is on the central committee for the British Association of Victorian Studies, for whom she is web-officer. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Projects
Current Postgraduate Supervision
Dr Furneaux is currently supervising PhD projects on Dickens, his reception, and on ideas of heredity and disability in the nineteenth century. She would welcome postgraduate students (MA or PhD) with interests in any of the following areas of research:
- Victorian Literature
- Gender, Histories of Sexuality, Queer Theory
- The Body, Medicine and Literature
- Criticism in Other Media; Adaptations, Pastiche and Spoof
Teaching and Administration
- EN3020: Romantics to Victorians
- Special Subject, EN3140: Before Homosexuality? Representing Same-Sex Desire from Smollett to Dickens
- MA in Victorian Studies ~ Dickens
- MA in Medical Humanities
- MA in the Country House
- Director of External Relations
Recent Publications
