Lisa C. Robertson

Lisa C. Robertson’s research focuses on the literature and culture of the long nineteenth century in Britain. In particular, she is interested in the literary representation of architecture and the built environment – especially the ways in which this representation is inflected by questions of politics, history, and identity.

Her first monograph, Home and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literary London (EUP, 2020), explores new designs for domestic buildings in Britain’s nineteenth-century metropolis and the ways that these spaces and their representations in literature give expression to shifts in both individual and collective understandings of gender, sexuality, and class.

She is, with Flore Janssen (Utrecht), editor of Margaret Harkness: Writing Social Engagement, 1880–1921 (MUP, 2019), which is the first collection to bring together scholarship on Harkness as an author, traveller, and activist. The research for this collection resulted in a related project, The Harkives: an open-access digital archive of resources by and about Margaret Harkness, developed with the purpose of encouraging research into her life and work.

She has published research in Women’s History Review, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, and the Princeton University Library Chronicle. A forthcoming article will appear in SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies.

Her current research project explores the prophetic mode in nineteenth-century prose, with particular attention the way it renders tensions between progressive and pessimistic visions of the future.

For ten years she has served on the Committee of the Literary London Society, most recently as Secretary. Since 2015 she has been an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK). She welcomes enquiries from potential graduate students interested in the literature and culture of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, particularly as it relates to themes of space and place or gender and sexuality.