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Dr Juliette Atkinson
Email: juliette.atkinson@ucl.ac.uk
External phone: 020 7679 3146
Internal phone: 33146
Education and Experience
Juliette Atkinson was educated at UCL (B.A. Hons) and Oxford (M.St, ‘1900-Present’). In 2008, she completed a PhD on Victorian life-writing, funded by a UCL Graduate School Research Scholarship; from 2009 she worked as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL, before becoming a lecturer in 2012.
Research
Juliette is currently finishing a study on Anglo-French literary relations during the nineteenth century. The monograph takes issue with the portrayal of the Victorians as insular and prudish readers, and explores the extensive ties built between French and English writers, readers, and publishing industries. The research was funded by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2009-2012). The Bibliographical Society of America awarded a chapter from this research a New Scholars Award in 2012.
Her first book, Victorian Biography Reconsidered: a Study of Nineteenth-Century ‘Hidden’ Lives, was published by OUP in 2010. The book considers the lives of obscure or minor individuals who form the subjects of Victorian biographers working against the contemporary fascination with ‘Great Men’. Working-class biographies, ‘failed’ lives, the representation of female subjects, attempted recoveries of neglected Romantic artists, and the lesser luminaries of the Dictionary of National Biography are all given close analysis. The book contributes to the department’s ‘Life Stories’ research strand.
Selected Publications
Book
Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-Century ‘Hidden’ Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Edited Book
Bloom’s Classic Critical Views: George Eliot (New York: Facts on File, 2009).
Articles
‘The London Library and the circulation of French fiction in the 1840s’, Information & Culture: A Journal of History (formerly Libraries and the Cultural Record), vol. 48.4 (November/December 2013).
‘George Eliot’s Reception to 1900’, ‘George Eliot’s Reception 1900-1970’, and ‘George Eliot’s Reception 1970-Present’, in George Eliot in Context, ed. Margaret Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
‘Alexander the Great’: Dumas’s invasion of early-Victorian England’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 106, no. 4 (December 2012), pp. 417-47.
‘William Jeffs, Bookseller and Publisher of French Literature’, The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, vol. 13, no. 3 (September 2012), pp. 257-78.
‘Fin-de-siècle Female Biographers and the Reconsideration of Popular Women Writers’, in Writing Women of the Fin de Siècle: Authors of Change, ed. Adrienne Gavin and Carolyn Oulton (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 111-23.
‘Mary Robinson’, in Encyclopedia of Literary Romanticism, ed. Andrew Maunder (New York: Facts on File, 2010).
‘“Poor sons of Adam in general, in this sad age of cobwebs”: Biography as social criticism in Thomas Carlyle’s The Life of John Sterling’. In Life Writing: The State of the Art and The Spirit of the Age, ed. Meg Jensen and Jane Jordan (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), pp. 2-11.
Reviews
Juliette has reviewed for the TLS, Review of English Studies, Notes and Queries, History, and the George Eliot Review, amongst others.
