School of English, University of Leeds | staff pages

Francis O'Gorman
Professor of Victorian Literature and Head of School
email: f.j.o'gorman@leeds.ac.uk
tel: +44(0) 113 343 4798
fax: +44(0) 113 343 4774
room: 5.01.03

Professor Francis O'Gorman MA, DPhil Oxford; FRHistS

For a list of publications since 2001 click here
For a full list of publications click here (pdf)

Research Interests

Welcome to my homepage. I am glad to hear about prospective research proposals in any of the areas/periods in which I have worked that sound fresh and interesting. My research covers, so far, many areas of Victorian literature and some writers in the twentieth/twenty-first century. I am also interested in Coleridge and Wordsworth.

My publications give the best indication of what I enjoy reading.  I have just submitted the ms of my book Victorian Literature and the Unbounded Life to Manchester University Press, which I started thinking about, I reckon, in 1984.  My edited collection of essays The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture was published in January 2010.  Recent other activity includes essays and chapters on Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson, the value of the humanities, Salley Vickers, Ruskin.  I am working on a new project now on worry, which includes discussion of Modernist writing.

I am co-editing a new edition of Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children and editing a new edition of Ruskin’s Praeterita, both for OUP.  I am also editing Margaret Oliphant’s The Makers of Venice for which I have a British Academy Small Research Grant in 2010.

I am interested in Russian fiction from the nineteenth century.  And I have written on Balzac, Flaubert, Mallarmé, Zola, and Marcel Proust.

 I was an advisory editor (for Victorian poetry) for The Oxford Companion to English Literature, edited by Dinah Birch (2009) and am a Companion of the Guild of St George (this is the organization that Ruskin set up in the mid-1870s and which still exists for educational purposes).  From April 2007 until April 2010, I am a Visiting Professor at the Ruskin Centre of the University of Lancaster. I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and serve on the editorial boards of the Journal of Victorian Culture and Victorian Review, and read proposals and mss for a wide variety of presses and periodicals in Europe and US.

Recent Activities include:

Recent and forthcoming invited papers/lectures (reverse chronological order)

Late Victorian Poetry and Democracy’, University of Hull English seminar, December 2007.
‘Tennyson and Morse Code’, University of Edinburgh English Department visiting speaker series, 2 November 2007.
Co-Chair, Victorian section at the International Association of University Professors of English annual conference, 6-10 August 2007, Lund, Sweden.
‘Emily Brontë and the Problem of Not Having a Personality’, University of Chester, public lecture, 24 January 2007
‘Victorian Poetics and Magic’, King’s College London seminar, 4 December 2006.
‘Ruskin and Fame’, Ruskin Centre Research Seminar, University of Lancaster, 2 November 2006.
Opening plenary panel speaker on Victorian Cultures in Conflict, British Association of Victorian Studies Annual Conference, University of Liverpool, 7-9 September 2006.
Università di Bologna/Università di Urbino Giornata su Sherlock Holmes, Pesaro (Italy), 10 June 2006: ‘Holmes and Victorian media’.
University of Sunderland, Literary Lunchtimes seminar, 10 May 2006 ‘Browning’s Magic’.
University of Central England, research seminar, 22 March 2006, ‘Henry James and Venice’.
University of St Andrews, Scotland: visiting speaker, 22 February 2006, ‘Browning and the Dead’.
‘Bringing the Body Back from the Dead: From Romantic to Modern’, public lecture series on Flesh and Blood: The Body and the Arts, University of Durham, 28 November 2005.
15 September 2005, ‘Ruskin, Venice, and Ghosts’ at the University of Malta, Institute for Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations.

Recent academic reviews include pieces for The Times Literary Supplement, Music & Letters, The Review of English Studies, Dickens Quarterly, and Biography.

I am currently an external examiner for the Universities of Oxford (English BA), the MA in Ruskin at the University of Lancaster, and the Nineteenth-century MA at the University of York.

Teaching

I convene the Victorian MA and the core module of that programme and continue to supervise graduate students.

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The background of the photograph is the west door of S.Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice, November 2006.