Speaker: Hilary Fraser

Hilary Fraser’s interest in the intersections between literature, theology and aesthetics began with her doctoral studies at Oxford, which eventuated in her first book, Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1986). By the time it appeared, she had moved to the University of Western Australia, where she taught in the English Department, and published books on The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (Blackwell, 1992) and English Prose of the Nineteenth Century (with Daniel Brown, Longman’s, 1997). She returned to the UK in 2000 to take up, first, a Visiting Fellowship at Clare Hall Cambridge, and subsequently the position of Dean of Arts and Humanities at Canterbury Christ Church University. She was Professeur Invité at the University of Avignon in 2000-2001 and became Adjunct Professor of the Ruskin Programme at Lancaster University. In October 2002 she moved to Birkbeck to take up the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth-Century Studies. She is Director of Birkbeck’s Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, and founding editor of its online journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century.

Her research interests have changed over the years — her most recent book is Gender and the Victorian Periodical (with Judith Johnston and Stephanie Green, Cambridge University Press, 2003), and she is currently working on an AHRC-funded project on Gender, History, Visuality: Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century — but she has maintained an interest in literature and religion. She has for example published “The Religious Poetry of Michael Field”, in Athena’s Shuttle: Myth, Religion, Ideology from Romanticism to Modernism, ed. Franco Marucci and Emma Sdegno (2000), “The Feminist Theology of Florence Nightingale”, in Reinventing Christianity: Nineteenth-Century Contexts, ed. Linda Woodhead (2001), and “The Victorian Novel and Religion” in The Blackwell Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Patrick Brantlinger and W.B. Thesing (2002).

Click here for Professor Fraser's web site.