Staff profile
Dr Fraser Riddell
Associate Professor in Literary Medical Humanities
| Affiliation | Telephone |
|---|---|
| Associate Professor in Literary Medical Humanities in the Department of English Studies | +44 (0) 191 33 42585 |
Biography
Research and Teaching
Fraser Riddell is Associate Professor in English and Medical Humanities in the Department of English Studies and the Institute for Medical Humanities. He teaches literature in English from Shakespeare to the present day. His research is broadly focussed on questions of gender, sexuality and embodied experience in Victorian and early-twentieth century literature.
At the Institute for Medical Humanities, he co-leads the Affective Experience Lab, part of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities.
His other current project builds upon recent debates in Victorian studies on cognition, the senses, and neurodiversity to investigate the place of tactile sensory perception in nineteenth-century literature and culture. The project examines a range of literary, medical and scientific discourses, looking at works by authors such as Lafcadio Hearn, Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies and Charlotte Mew.
His first monograph, Music and the Queer Body in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle, was published open access by Cambridge University Press in 2022. This takes as it focus works by John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, and draws upon the work of psychoanalytic, phenomenological and queer theorists to suggest new ways of understanding the significance of spatial, temporal and material encounters with music at the fin de siècle for the formation of non-normative subjectivities.
He recently co-edited Charlotte Mew: Poetics, Bodies, Ecologies (with Francesca Bratton and Megan Girdwood) for Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture.
A number of articles and chapters are published or forthcoming in Victorian Literature and Culture, Journal of Victorian Culture, Victorian Review, and Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism.
He is currently accepting applications from potential PhD students, and would be delighted to support projects that engage with any aspect of his research interests. Recent supervisory projects have included theses on the Fallen Woman in Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy and George Eliot, and commerce and colonialism in the East Asian novels of Joseph Conrad.
His room number is Room 002, Hallgarth House.
For 2024/25, his office hour is Wednesday 0900-1000. Please get in touch for a Zoom link.
Before arriving at the Department of English Studies in 2019, Dr Riddell was Departmental Lecturer in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, where he taught at Trinity College. He has also taught Comparative Literature in the School of Modern Languages at the University of St Andrews. He completed his doctoral studies at Durham University, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Northern Bridge DTP).
Alongside his scholarly work on literature and music, he is also a keen amateur musician. He sings regularly with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus.
Research Interests
- Victorian literature
- Music and literature
- Theories of embodiment and the senses
- Medical humanities
- Queer theory
- History of sexuality
- Psychoanalysis
- Decadence and aestheticism
Publications
Book review
- Riddell, F. (in press). Review of Kristin Mahoney, Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family. Studies in Walter Pater and aestheticism, 8,
- Riddell, F. (online). Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self by Dustin Friedman. Studies in Walter Pater and aestheticism,
- Riddell, F. (2023). Review of Sarah Green, Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence. Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 45(5), 513-515. https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2275347
- Riddell, F. (2022). Gripping Words: Sensing the World Beyond the Page in Victorian Literature. The Senses and Society, 17(3), 359-361. https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2022.2122256
- Riddell, F. (2020). Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History, by Pamela M. Gilbert. The Review of English Studies, 71(300), https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgz139
- Riddell, F. (2019). Victorian Pain by Rachel Ablow. Victorian Review, 44(1), 149-150. https://doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2018.0016
- Riddell, F. (2019). Decadence and the Senses, ed. by Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé
- Riddell, F. (2019). Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism, by Nathan Waddell. Modernism/modernity, 26(4), 909-911. https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2019.0070
- Riddell, F. (2019). The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature by Benjamin Morgan. Studies in Walter Pater and aestheticism, 3,
- Riddell, F. (2018). Francis O'Gorman, Forgetfulness: Making the Modern Culture of Amnesia. Victoriographies, 8(2), 218-220. https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2018.0311
- Riddell, F. (2018). Top Notes from the Perfumed Fin de Siècle. Journal of Victorian Culture, 23(4), https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcy030
Chapter in book
- Riddell, F. (in press). Masculinity and the Labouring Body. In M. Dubois (Ed.), Gerard Manley Hopkins in Context (193-201). Cambridge University Press
- Riddell, F. Vernon Lee’s ‘A Wicked Voice’ (1890): Music and Queerness in Decadent Fiction. In P. Weliver, & K. Ellis (Eds.), Reading Texts in Music and Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century. Boydell & Brewer
- Riddell, F., Girdwood, M., & Bratton, F. (2024). Introduction: ‘The best living woman poet’. In F. Bratton, M. Girdwood, & F. Riddell (Eds.), Charlotte Mew: Poetics, Bodies, Ecologies (1-21). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-62542-8_1
- Riddell, F. (2023). Queer Pastoral Soundscapes and the Idyllic Voice: Vernon Lee, A. Mary F. Robinson and Lady Archibald Campbell. In T. Hughes, & E. Merkling (Eds.), The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature: Subject, Ecology, Form. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003327998-7
- Riddell, F. (2021). Hearing: Bodies Resounding in Decadent Literature. In J. Desmarais, & D. Weir (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Decadence (507-524). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190066956.013.25
- Riddell, F. (2021). ‘Now—For a Breath I Tarry’: Breath, Desire and Queer Materialism at the Fin de Siècle. In C. Saunders, D. Fuller, & J. Macnaughton (Eds.), The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine: Classical to Contemporary (345-365). (1). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74443-4_17
Edited book
Journal Article
- Riddell, F. (in press). The Manuscript of Vernon Lee’s ‘A Wicked Voice’ (1890): A Critical Introduction and Transcription. Studies in Walter Pater and aestheticism, 9,
- Riddell, F. (2024). Sounding out the history of homosexuality. The Lancet, 403(10431), 1016-1017. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736%2824%2900251-4
- Riddell, F. (2024). “Glued together, gushing”: Sticking with John Addington Symonds. Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures, 2(1), 134-144. https://doi.org/10.1353/cusp.2024.a920149
- Riddell, F. (2023). Vernon Lee's 'Aristocratic Pastorals: Notes from London' (1885) - An Introduction and Translation. Studies in Walter Pater and aestheticism, 7, 73-86
- Riddell, F. (2023). 'Musical under the touch of the Universe': Aesthetic Liberalism, Music, and Vernon Lee's Essayistic Art of Resonance. Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, 5(2), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.25602/gold.v.v5i2.1663.g1776
- Riddell, F. (2020). Queer Music in the Queen's Hall: Teleny and Decadent Musical Geographies at the Fin de Siecle. Journal of Victorian Culture, 25(4), 593-608. https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcaa016
- Riddell, F. (2020). Disembodied Vocal Innocence: John Addington Symonds, the Victorian Chorister, and Queer Musical Consumption. Victorian Literature and Culture, 48(3), 485-517. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150319000020
Monograph
Other (Digital/Visual Media)