Dr Holly Furneaux

BA (King's, London), MA (Birkbeck, London), PhD (Birkbeck, London)

Reader in Victorian Literature

Contact Details:

• E: hf35@le.ac.uk

• 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 also co-editor, with Sally Ledger, of Dickens in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and editor of John Forster's Life of Dickens (Sterling, 2011).  

She is now working on an interdisciplinary book-length project, 'Military Men of Feeling: Masculinity, Emotion and Tactility in Victorian Warfare'. Focusing on the Crimean War, the project investigates overlooked aspects of soldiers' felt experience, such as family feeling in regiments, soldier adoptions, the production of trench art, and battlefield nursing. Recognising a widespread cultural emphasis on the gentle soldier, this project desposes persistent ideas about Victorian masculinity as well as enhancing our understanding of the complexities of battlefield feeling.

Dr Furneaux is Secretary to the British Association for Victorian Studies.

She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and on the editorial board for 19.

Projects

• Men in Nursing and the Victorian Gentle Man
• Dickens Day

• Dickens at Leicester

Current Postgraduate Supervision

Dr Furneaux is currently supervising PhD projects on Dickens, and his reception, the Crimean War and its cultural afterlife, 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

Full list of publications