Professor Hilary Fraser, BA (Leicester) DPhil (Oxon)

Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth-Century Studies
Executive Dean, School of Arts

I came to Birkbeck in 2002 to take up the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth-Century Studies. I became Director of Birkbeck’s Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and was the founding Editor of its online journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, launched in 2006. Following a major restructuring of the College three years ago, I was appointed Executive Dean of the newly formed School of Arts.

I have served on grant awarding panels of both the Australian Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK. My research includes monographs on aesthetics and religion in Victorian writing, the Victorians and Renaissance Italy, nineteenth-century non-fiction prose, and gender and the Victorian periodical. I am currently completing a book on women writing about art in the nineteenth century, the research for which was supported by the AHRC.

I continue to contribute to the MA Victorian Studies and to supervise doctoral students in nineteenth-century studies, and welcome applications that match my areas of particular expertise.

Selected publications

Books

• Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1986), xii+287pp.The Victorians and Renaissance Italy. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell (1992), xii + 308pp.
• English Prose of the Nineteenth Century. London and New York: Longman (1997), xiii + 439pp (with Daniel Brown).
• Gender and the Victorian Periodical. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2003) (with Judith Johnston and Stephanie Green), xiv + 255pp.
• Minds, Bodies, Machines, 1770-1930, ed. with Deirdre Coleman. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2011), xi + 230pp.
• Gender, History, Visuality: Women Writing Art History in Nineteenth-Century England. In preparation.

Refereed Journal Articles

• ‘St. Theresa, St. Dorothea, and Miss Brooke in Middlemarch’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 40, 4 (1986), 400-11.
• ‘Browning and Nineteenth-Century Historiography’, Centenary Essays on Robert Browning, ed. Simon Petch and E. Warwick Slinn, AUMLA 71 (1989), 13-29.
• 'Titian's Bravo and George Eliot's Tito: A Painted Record', Nineteenth-Century Literature 50, 2 (1995), 210-17.
• 'Women and the Ends of Art History: Vision and Corporeality in Nineteenth-Century Critical Discourse', Victorian Studies 42, 1 (1999), 77-100.
• ‘Gender and Romance in Ruskin's "Two Boyhoods"', Nineteenth-Century Contexts 21, 3 (1999), 353-70.
• 'Virginia Stephen in George Duckworth’s Family Album', Australasian Victorian Studies Journal 5 (1999), 13-34 (with Victoria Burrows).
• ‘Evelyn De Morgan, Vernon Lee and Assimilation from Without’, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies NS 14 (Spring, 2005), 75-90.
• ‘A Visual Field: Michael Field and the Gaze’, Victorian Literature and Culture 34 (2006), 553-571.
• ‘”Mirror visions” and “dissolving views”: Vernon Lee and Patrick Geddes’ Outlook Tower’ (with Nick Burton), Nineteenth-Century Contexts 28, 2 (2006), 145-60.
• ‘The Morals of Genealogy: An Adventure’, Raritan (Spring, 2008), 115-132.
• ‘Introduction’, Minds, Bodies, Machines: Essays in the Cultural and Intellectual History of Technologies, ed Deirdre Coleman and Hilary Fraser. Nineteen: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (www.19.bbk.ac.uk) 8 (October 2008) 1-11 (with Deirdre Coleman).
• ‘Women and the Art of Fiction’. Yearbook of English Studies 40, 1 and 40, 2 (2010), pp. 61-82
• ‘”Always Reminding us of the Body”: J A Symonds on the Fine Arts’. [Re]Reading John Addington Symonds, English Studies. (forthcoming, April 2013).
• ‘Art for the Nation: Sir Charles Eastlake at the National Gallery’. Victorian Literature and Culture (forthcoming, Autumn 2012).

Book Chapters

• ‘Truth to Nature: Science, Religion, and the Pre-Raphaelites’. The Critical Spirit and the Will to Believe: The Victorian Crisis of Faith, ed. David Jasper and T.R.Wright. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press,1989, pp.53-68.
• '"Love's Citadel Unmann'd": Victorian Women's Love Poetry'. Constructing Gender: Feminism and Literary Studies, ed. Hilary Fraser and R.S.White. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press,1994, pp.132-56.
• 'Victorian Poetry and Historicism'. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp.114-36.
• 'Ruskin, Italy, and the Past'. Britain and Italy from Romanticism to Modernism, ed. Martin McLaughlin. Oxford: Legenda and Modern Humanities Research Association, 2000, pp.87-106.
• ‘The Religious Poetry of Michael Field’. Athena’s Shuttle: Myth, Religion, Ideology from Romanticism to Modernism, ed. Franco Marucci and Emma Sdegno. Milan: Cisalpino, 2000, pp.127-142.
• ‘Vernon Lee: England, Italy and Identity Politics’. Britannia, Italia, Germania: Taste and Travel in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Carol Richardson and Graham Smith. Edinburgh: VARIE, 2001, pp.175-191.
• ‘The Professionalisation of Women’s Writing: Extending the Canon’. Women and Literature in Britain, 1800-1900, ed. Joanne Shattock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 233-52 (with Judith Johnston).
• 'The Feminist Theology of Florence Nightingale'. Reinventing Christianity: Nineteenth-Century Contexts, ed. Linda Woodhead. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001, pp.199-210 (with Victoria Burrows).
• ‘The Victorian Novel and Religion’. The Blackwell Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Patrick Brantlinger and W.B. Thesing. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002, pp.101-18.
• ‘Interstitial Identities: Vernon Lee and the spaces in-between’. Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880-1930, ed. Marysa Demoor. Houndmills Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp.114-133.
• ‘Regarding the Eighteenth Century: Vernon Lee and Emilia Dilke Construct a Period’. The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century: Reassessing the Tradition, ed. Francis O’Gorman and Katherine Turner. London: Ashgate, 2004, pp.223-49.
• ‘Emilia Dilke’, The New DNB, ed. Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• ‘Writing a Female Renaissance: Victorian Women and the Past’, in Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance, ed. John E.Law and Lene Ostermark-Johansen. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005, pp.165-84.
• ’Art History’, Companion to Women’s Historical Writing, ed. Mary Spongberg, Barbara Caine and Ann Curthoys. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp.29-38.
• ‘Writing in the Margins and Reading Between the Lines in Vernon Lee’s Library’, ‘Dalla stanza accanto’: Vernon Lee e Firenze settant’ anni dopo, ed. Elisa Bizzotto and Serena Cenni. Florence: Consiglio Regionale della Toscana, 2006, pp.231-241.
• ‘Through the Looking Glass: Looking like a Woman in the Nineteenth Century’. Strange Sisters: Literature and Aesthetics in the Nineteenth Century, ed. J.B. Bullen. Oxford, Bern etc: Peter Lang, 2009, pp.189-209.
• ‘Writing the Past’.The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Literature 1830-1914, ed. Joanne Shattock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 108-26.
• Foreword to Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Culture, ed. Patrizia Di Bello and Luisa Calè. Houndmills, Basingsoke and New York: Palgrave, 2010, pp.ix-xv.
• ‘Periodicals and Reviewing’. The Cambridge History of English Literature, The Victorians, ed. Kate Flint. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp.36-76.
• ‘Vasari’s Lives and the Victorians’, Companion to Giorgio Vasari, ed. David Cast. Ashgate (forthcoming, 2013).
• ‘Art and the Literary’, The Oxford Handbook to Victorian Literary Culture, ed. Juliet John. Oxford: Oxford University Press (forthcoming, 2013).
• ‘Aesthetics, Visuality and Feelings in the Natural Theology of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Alice Meynell’, Form and Feeling in Modern Literature, ed. William Baker with Isobel Armstrong (forthcoming, 2013).