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Dr Jane Darcy
Email: j.darcy@ucl.ac.uk
External phone: 020 7679 3124
Internal phone: 33124
Jane Darcy is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. She was an undergraduate at Somerville College Oxford, after which she taught in schools for many years. Jane recently completed her PhD at King’s College London on the interaction of medical and literary constructions of melancholy in biographical writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her interests include eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century literature, especially literature of the Romantic period; literature and medicine, and biographical and autobiographical writing. She has written on Samuel Johnson, Robert Burns, William Cowper, Coleridge and the Carlyles. Jane has a particular interest in melancholy and is co-organizer with Professor Matthew Bell (of King’s College London) of an international conference on religious melancholy to be held at King’s in May 2011.
Her new project is on the John Murray Archive housed in the National Library of Scotland. She is exploring the influence the Murray publishing house had on literary reputation and celebrity in the Romantic period. Famously, John Murray published Jane Austen, Byron and Coleridge amongst many others.
Before taking up her Postdoctoral Fellowship, Jane had a temporary
lectureship in Romanticism at King’s where she convened an MA module on
Life-writing 1700-1850 and an undergraduate module on Romanticism,
Revolution and Representation.
Publications
Book
Her book, Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640-1816 is forthcoming with Palgrave in April 2012.
She is co-editing with Professor Matthew Bell a volume entitled Religious Melancholy: Concepts, Practices, Cultures, also for Palgrave.
Articles:
‘Contesting Literary Biography in the Romantic Period: the Foreshadowing of Psychological Biography’, in Literature Compass, 5/2, March 2008, pp. 292-309, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00517.x.
‘Religious Melancholy in the Romantic period: William Cowper as Test Case’, Romanticism, Vol. 15, No. 2, November 2009, pp. 144-155.
‘The Medical Background to Currie’s Account of the Life of Burns’, European Romantic Review, Vol. 20, No. 4, November 2009, pp. 513-527.
Reviews:
Jane has reviewed a number of books for Review of English Studies, Romanticism, and the Keats-Shelley Review.
