Lisa Robertson

Co-Director, Honours and Majors

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 on the collegiate writing of Amy Levy in English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920; on spatial practice at Westfield College, one of the earliest residential colleges for women in Britain, in Women’s History Review; and a forthcoming essay in the Princeton University Library Chronicle examines the significance of college verse at Evelyn College, a short-lived but significant women’s college at Princeton.

One strand of her current research returns to this interest in collegiate culture and considers the ways that unconventional generic forms such as student verse and autofiction offered new modes of expression with respect to dissident gender and sexual identities. Another strand explores the political and intellectual significance of formal experimentation – particularly the defamiliarization of the everyday – in feminist utopian fiction in the four decades around the turn of the twentieth century.

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 twentieth-century Britain, particularly as it relates to themes of space and place or gender and sexuality.