Professor Patricia Pulham
About
Biography
Patricia Pulham is Professor of Victorian Literature and currently President of the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS). At Surrey, Patricia is Head of the School of Arts, Humanities and Creative Industries. She completed her doctorate at Queen Mary, University of London in 2001, and taught at Brunel, Goldsmiths, Birkbeck and QMUL, where she was Lecturer in Poetry from 2002-03. In 2004, she was appointed to a lectureship in English literature at the University of Portsmouth. She joined the University of Surrey in 2017, having previously held a Readership and a series of research leadership roles at Portsmouth, including Director of the university's Centre for Studies in Literature. Patricia is an elected member of the Academia Europea; a member of the AHRC PRC and the UKRI FLF PRC; and sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, Victoriographies, and Volupté.
She has supervised several PhD students to completion and has examined numerous PhD theses in the UK and abroad. She welcomes enquiries from prospective PhD students wishing to study in any of the following areas: decadence, aestheticism, Victorian literature and visual cultures, late-Victorian Gothic, spiritualism, or neo-Victorian fiction.
Her latest book, The Sculptural body in Victorian literature: Encrypted Sexualities (2020) was published by Edinburgh University Press in their Critical Studies in Victorian Culture series and republished in paperback in 2022.
Areas of specialism
University roles and responsibilities
- Head of School
ResearchResearch interests
Nineteenth-century literature and culture, Decadence, Aestheticism, Victorian literature and visual cultures, late-Victorian Gothic, spiritualism, and neo-Victorianism.
Research interests
Nineteenth-century literature and culture, Decadence, Aestheticism, Victorian literature and visual cultures, late-Victorian Gothic, spiritualism, and neo-Victorianism.
Publications
Selected Publications
Authored Books:
- The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities (Edinburgh University Press, 2020; 2022).
- Dickens and the Victorian City, co-authored with Bran Beaven (Tricorn Books, 2012).
- Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales, (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2008).
Edited Volumes:
- Vernon Lee, Decadence and Interart Aestheticism (Journal Special Issue; co-authored), Volupté: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadent Studies 5:2 (January 2023).
- Tracing the Victorians: Material Uses of the Past in Neo-Victorianism (Journal Special Issue; co-authored), Victoriographies 9.3 (2019).
- Spiritualism in Literature (vol. 2) in Patricia Pulham et al, Spiritualism, 1840–1930 (4 vols.), Victorian Concepts series (London; New York: Routledge, 2014).
- Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past, co-edited with Rosario Arias, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
- Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales, co-edited with Catherine Maxwell, (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006).
- Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, co-edited with Catherine Maxwell, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Journal Articles:
- ‘Orientalist Aestheticism: Vernon Lee, Carlo Gozzi, and the Venetian Fairy Comedy’ in Vernon Lee, Decadence and Interart Aestheticism (Journal Special Issue; co-authored by Patricia Pulham and Sally Blackburn-Daniels), Volupté: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadent Studies 5:2 (January 2023): 63-81.
- ‘Fantasmas vistos y no vistos: espiritualismo y ocultismo en la ficción de Violet Tweedale’, in Género, heterodoxia y traducción: difusión del ocultismo en España y el ámbito europeo (1850-1920), ed. Rosario Arias et al (Reichenberger, 2023), pp. 9-26.
- ‘Traces of Wilde: Fact and Fiction in Dorian: An Imitation and The Picture of John Gray’, Victoriographies 9.3 (2019): 218-315.
- ‘Occultism and the homme fatal in Robert Smythe Hichens’s Flames: A London Phantasy’, Volupté: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadent Studies 1:2 (Winter 2018): 97-115.
- ‘A. C. Swinburne’s “birchen pen”: Epistolary Sadomasochism in Love’s Cross-Currents: A Year’s Letters, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 50: 3 (Sept. 2017): 141-157.
- ‘Marmoreal Sisterhoods: Women writing Sculpture in the Nineteenth Century’, 19:Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (2016), 22, DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.763.
Book Chapters
- ‘A “palimpsest of dimly familiar signatures and arabesques”: Art, Time, and the Artist in Neo-Decadent Fiction’ in Kostas Boyiopoulos and Jo Thorne, eds. Neo-Victorian Decadence (Leiden: Brill), forthcoming, 2024, 22 pp.
- ‘Channelling the Past: Arthur & George and the Neo-Victorian Uncanny’ in Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle: Multimedia Afterlives, eds. Catherine Wynne and Sabine Vanacker (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 155-168.
- ‘Neo-Victorian Gothic and Spectral Sexuality in Colm Toíbín’s The Master’ in Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century, eds. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2012), pp. 147-166.
- ‘New Pygmalions: Idealism and Disillusionment in William Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris and Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown’ in The Legacies of Romanticism: Literature, Aesthetics, Landscape (Routledge Studies in Romanticism), eds. Carmen Casaliggi and Paul March Russell (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 101-116,