BA, MA, D.Phil (Oxford) 

Senior Lecturer

Contact Details:

• E: jrn8@leicester.ac.uk
  

• T: +44 (0)116 252 2776

Research Interests

Dr. Julian North’s research bridges Romantic and Victorian literature, with special interests in:

• life-writing (biography and autobiography);
• Biography, the body and visual culture 
• the afterlives of the Romantic poets;
• nineteenth-cenutry drug literature
• the life and writings of Thomas De Quincey
• Film adaptations and biopics (especially Jane Austen)
• the literary culture of the 1830s;

Her most recent book, The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet (Oxford University Press, 2009), explores the biographical afterlives of the Romantic poets and the creation of literary biography as a popular form. It focuses on the first Lives of Byron, P. B. Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, published from the 1820s, by Thomas Moore, Mary Shelley, Thomas De Quincey and others, in the context of the development of biography as a genre from the 1780s to the 1840s.

Dr. North is also the author of De Quincey Reviewed (Camden House/Boydell and Brewer, 1997), a monograph on De Quincey’s critical reception from the 1820s to the 1990s, and the editor of vol. 11 and co-editor of vol. 20 of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 21 vols, gen. ed. Grevel Lindop (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000-2003) . Volume 11 includes Thomas De Quincey’s ‘Lake Reminiscences’, his auto/biographical essays on William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge. She has published articles on Victorian drug literature; Jane Austen adaptations; Romantic genius on screen; and the afterlives of Percy Shelley, amongst other subjects.

Dr. North has been involved in the organisation of conferences at the University of Leicester: ‘Victorian Feeling: Touch, Bodies, Emotions’, The Ninth Annual Conference of the British Association for Victorian Studies, (September 2008), and ‘Victorian Studies: Pasts and Futures’, the 40th Anniversary Conference of the Victorian Studies Centre (March 2007).

She has given public lectures on 'Drugs in Victorian Literature' ('High Society' Exhibition at the Wellcome Collection 2011); ‘Wordsworth in the Flesh: Portraiture, Biography and Romantic Genius’ at the National Portrait Gallery;and ‘Character and Caricature in Jane Austen Adaptations’ to the Jane Austen Society, at University College, London. She has been interviewed for BBC Radio 3 on De Quincey; and for videos on  Wordsworth and De Quincey at Dove Cottage (Open University); and Romantic and Victorian Poetry (Cromwell Productions).

Dr. North interviewed the Booker-Prize winning author, Alan Hollinghurst, at the Literary Leicester festival (November 2011).

Conference papers include: ‘The Life/Works relationship in Literary Biopic’, at 3rd Annual Literature on Screen Conference, Amsterdam (2008); ‘Victorian Literary Biography and the Publication of Domestic Life’, at the Life and Works Conference, University of Keele  (June 2008); 'De Quincey's Autobiography and the Technologies of Resurrection' at Thomas De Quinvey, 1785-1859, University of Salford (2009), and 'Romantic Genius on Screen: Jane Campion's 'Bright Star''. at The Writer on Film, University of York (2010).

Projects

She is currently working on representations of the body in 19th-century and early 20th-century biography, including the interactions between biography and portraiture.

Postgraduate Students

Dr. North teaches on the MA in Victorian Studies and leads an MA module on Victorian life-writing. She also leads a module on The Country House in Literature, on an MA run by the Centre for the Study of the Country House. She supervises MA and PhD work in nineteenth-century literature. She would welcome the opportunity to supervise topics in the following areas:

• Romantic and Victorian literature, especially biographical or autobiographical writing in the period c. 1790-1930
• Biographical Projects
• 19th-century literary and visual culture
• 19th-century literary and visual representations of the body
• Drugs in Literature: especially 19th century
• The literary culture of the 1830s
• 19th-century domesticity
• 19th-century authors e.g. Mary Shelley, Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Carlyle

Teaching and Administration

Undergraduate Teaching

• EN3010 Compulsory Dissertation (Convenor)
• EN3131 Gothic: from Otranto to Wuthering Heights (Convenor)
• EN3020 Romantics and Victorians: Literature 1789-1870

Postgraduate Teaching

• EN7021 Approaches to Victorian Literature and Culture
• EN7125 Victorian Lives: Life-Writing in the Victorian Period (Convenor)
• EN7215 The Country House in Literature (Convenor)
• EN7112 Editing and Textual Criticism
• EN7001 Bibliography, Research Methods and Writing Skills for Postgraduates

Administration

Director of Joint degrees with English (BA English and History; BA English and American Studies; BA French and English; BA Italian and English; BA Spanish and English; BA Film Studies and English; BA History of Art and English)

Member of the English Research Committee

Member of the Admissions team

Recent Publications

Full list of publications