Professor Rebecca N Mitchell

• MA, PhD (UC Santa Barbara): Comparative Literature, with fields in 19C British Literature, 19C French Literature, and Art History
• BA (South Florida): Honors Degree in Liberal Studies in Comparative Literature (Cum Laude)
• Senior Fellow, Higher Education Academy

I received my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I studied nineteenth-century British and French literature and art history. I stayed on at UCSB as a 3-year post-doctoral lecturer before moving to the University of Texas-Pan American in 2006, where I ultimately served as Associate Professor of English and Vice Provost Fellow. In January 2015, I took up my current position at the University of Birmingham.

I teach British literature of the long nineteenth century at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

I am willing to supervise PhD projects related to Victorian literature and culture, especially print history, text/image interface, Oscar Wilde, George Meredith, George Eliot, empathy and affect studies, and fashion. I am also affiliated with the Sexuality and Gender Studies Programme and welcome related projects.

Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My scholarship focuses on Victorian literature and culture broadly defined, and I’m especially intrigued by the study and depiction of the creative process, the self/other relationship, and the textual/visual interface; these interests also drive my work in textual editing. 

My varied research interests reflect my interdisciplinary background in literary studies and art history. My first monograph, Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference (Victorian Critical Interventions, Ohio State University Press, 2011), drew on Levinasian notions of alterity to argue - against the grain of many other studies on empathy in the Victorian novel - that works by Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, and Whistler teach fellow feeling by exposing the limits of human intersubjectivity.

As an experienced textual editor, I view manuscripts both as artefacts of the creative process and as examples par excellence of the textual/visual interface. My co-edited anniversary edition of George Meredith’s Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside (Yale UP, 2012) shines new light on Meredith’s masterful sonnet series - itself an astonishing articulation of the difficulty of intersubjectivity - by returning it to its original context.  More recently, my editorial efforts have turned to Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery (Yale UP, 2015), co-written with Joseph Bristow (UCLA), includes a critical edition of Wilde’s “Chatterton” notebook and his previously-unpublished notes on Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1881 Ballads and Sonnets. The study reveals that Wilde’s research on the young Chatterton informs his deepest engagements with Romanticism, plagiarism, and forgery. Bristow and I have also published on Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying” (having located a fair copy manuscript that had been missing from the scholarly record for over fifty years). Along with Yvonne Ivory (U of South Carolina), we will edit the final volumes of the OET Complete Works of Oscar Wilde for Oxford University Press, a project supported by an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship for 2016-2017.

In addition to numerous articles on nineteenth-century fiction and poetry, I have also published extensively on Victorian fashion, including articles on Aesthetic Dress and Victorian Fancy Dress culture (in Fashion Theory), the crinoline (in BRANCH), and mourning attire (in Victorian Literature and Culture), and a book chapter on the Victorian sartorial antecedents to steampunk (in Drawing on the Victorians). Fashioning the Victorians: A Critical Sourcebook, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in Spring 2018.

I am also co-editor of Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism.

• Head of Department of English Literature
• Co-Editor, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism
• Advisory Board, COVE (Central Online Victorian Educator)
• Editorial Board, Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace series, Routledge