Dr David McAllister

Overview

Biography

David joined Birkbeck in 2011 having previously taught at the universities of Newcastle and York. He also held a postdoctoral fellowship with the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group, as part of their Leverhulme-funded project Past versus Present: Abandoning the Past in an Age of Progress. 

David is currently Head of Education and Student Experience in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. He holds faculty-wide oversight of quality assurance, and programme approval and validation, across multiple Schools and disciplines, including scrutiny of new programme proposals and periodic review.

His interdisciplinary research spans the long nineteenth century, with a particular focus on medical humanities, histories and technologies of ageing, representations of death and burial and their influence on shaping public spaces and medical discourse, Dickens's writing, histories of inter-generational justice (in other words, how did generations form, constitute themselves, and relate to each other during a period of rapid demographic transition in the nineteenth century?). He also has wider research interests in the gothic, the Victorian novel, Victorian educational theories, masculinities, and nineteenth-century intellectual history. He has published on a wide range of writers including Gaskell, Dickens, Wordsworth, Elizabeth Hamilton, Carlyle, Tennyson, William Godwin and Jeremy Bentham.

He is also the General Editor of the journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century , and is currently writing a book about Dickens's novelistic construction of midlife and its effect on his experiments in narrative. His most recent publications include the co-edited essay collection Graveyard Gothic (Manchester University Press, 2024), a chapter on emotional contagion in Mary Barton (the Routledge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell, Routledge, 2026) and an essay on the poetry of geologist and dinosaur hunter Giden Mantell, which can be found here: https://19.bbk.ac.uk/article/id/16888/

 

Highlights

• Graveyard Gothic, ed. Eric Parisot, David McAllister and Xavier Aldana Reyes (Manchester University Press, 2024). 

•  Imagining the Dead in British Literature and Culture, 1790-1848 (Palgrave, 2018)

  
  

• ‘Catching the Trick of Grief: Contagious Emotion and the Work of Mourning in Mary Barton’. In The Routledge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (Routledge, 2026).

Office hours

I don't have any fixed office hours, but I'm always happy to hear from current, former, or prospective students so please email me to arrange an appointment.

Administrative responsibilities

• Head of Education and Student Experience
• Chair of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Education Committee
• Member of the Faculty Executive Committee
• Member of Birkbeck Education and Student Experience Committee
• Member of Academic Board
• Member of College Programmes Committee

ORCID

0000-0001-7599-8862

Research

Research interests

• The Victorian novel
• Medical Humanities
• Charles Dickens
• Death, burial, hauntings
• The cultural construction of ageing, longevity, and the life course
• Victorian speculative fiction
• cemetery and graveyard history
• the literary culture of the first half of the nineteenth century
• Health technologies

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

Supervisions within Birkbeck:

5

I've recently supervised to completion doctorates on a range of topics, including queer spiritualism, steampunk and the city, rural Victorian mourning practices, and religious conceptions of the spiritual body. I am happy to consider enquiries from potential doctoral students on topics relating to any aspect of nineteenth-century literature and culture, including, but not limited to my current and past research interests: Dickens, Wordsworth, death culture, ageing, vagrancy, etc etc.

Please do contact me at d.mcallister@bbk.ac.uk if you would like an informal discussion about your ideas for a PhD.

Current doctoral researchers

• SHANI CADWALLENDER

  Nature of supervision:

  JOINT PRINCIPAL SUPERVISOR, Oct 2021

  Title of thesis:

  Trees Revisited: Exploring the Nature of Identity in Arboreal Poetry.

Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

• CLAIRE COCK-STARKEY

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Oct 2020

  Title of thesis:

  The Folklore of Death and Dying in Nineteenth Century England

  Awarded:

  2026

• AVERY CURRAN

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2022

  Title of thesis:

  'Hysteric, hybrid half-and-halfs': queerness in nineteenth-century British and American spiritualism

  Awarded:

  2026

• HELENA ESSER

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2017

  Awarded:

  2020

• JEN MORIARTY

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2016

  Title of thesis:

  Spiritual Bodies, Material Minds: Identity and Embodiment in the Mid-Victorian Afterlife

  Awarded:

  2023

Teaching

I'm not currently teaching as I have taken on a substantial role in Faculty management.

Publications

Business and community

I have media training.

Outreach