Post-Doc, English and Related Literature
Thesis Title: A Profitable Undertaking: Charles Dickens and death commodity
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Professor John Bowen
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About
Having previously obtained degrees in English and Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (BA hons., MA, York), I have recently completed my doctorate at the University of York, with a thesis titled ‘A Profitable Undertaking: Death Commodification in the works of Charles Dickens’. My research explored the surprising economic entanglements to which corpses are prone and the discomforting proximity between death and the marketplace in Dickens’s work. The study traced these intersections from Dickens’s well-known hostility to death-based profiteering in the funeral and mourning industries, to the vexed questions of authorial profit arising from his (in)famous deathbed scenes. The thesis concluded by examining the partial rehabilitation of death commodification in Our Mutual Friend.
I have broader interests in Victorian material culture and afterlives, and am currently developing a new project that explores the transatlantic commodification of death, charting the complex and fascinating parallels between English and American death cultures, the latter distinctively shaped by the legacies of slavery and the Civil War. The study will place Dickens and Hardy alongside American writers such as Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe, in addition to considering the periodical press.
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