Dr Helena Ifill
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Dr Helena Ifill
Lecturer
- About
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Biography
Helena Ifill received her PhD in English Literature from the University of Sheffield (where she also took an MA in Nineteenth-Century Studies) in 2009. She taught at the University of Sheffield from 2010-2019 before taking up a lectureship at the University of Aberdeen in 2019. Her research centres on Victorian popular fiction and the Gothic, especially in connection with issues of gender, science and medicine.
Dr Ifill is an active member of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association, and has co-organised the annual conference for the last five years. She is also co-series-editor for the Edward Everett Root series, Key Popular Women Writers, and New Paths in Victorian Popular Fiction and Culture, and is the Associate Editor of Victorian Popular Fictions.
- Research
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Research Overview
My research centres on Victorian popular fiction, especially sensation fiction and the Gothic. I am particularly interested in how these genres engage with issues concerning gender, science and medicine. My monograph, Creating Character: Theories of Nature and Nurture in Victorian Sensation Fiction, explored how the novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins respond and contribute to nineteenth-century debates about identity formation and free will. I have also published work on vampire fiction and Victorian stories of mesmerism.
Current Research
I am currently working on two projects. One concerns the representation of doctors and patients in nineteenth-century Female Gothic texts. The other is a study of the Victorian popular author and journal editor, Charlotte Riddell, part of which has resulted in an article on the representation of professional female authors in Victorian Britain.
- Teaching
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Teaching Responsibilities
I am Programme Co-Ordinator for the MLitt in Literatures, Environments and Places
- Publications
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Sensation and the City: Charlotte Riddell’s George Geith and the Emergence of the Sensation Genre
Victoriographies, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 221-242Contributions to Journals: ArticlesUncanny Stories for Canny Readers: the Explained Supernatural, the Villainous Doctor and Reader Expectations in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Short Gothic Fiction
Women's Writing, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 131-152Contributions to Journals: ArticlesMaking Space: Key Popular Women Writers Then and Now
Victorian Popular Fictions, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 4-32Contributions to Journals: Articles‘The Sensation of a Moment’: Speed, Stillness, and Victorian London in Wilkie Collins’s Basil
Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination. Evans, A., Kramer, K. (eds.). Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 68-86, 19 pagesChapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters- [ONLINE] DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55961-8
- [ONLINE] Palgrave website
Sensation Fiction
Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Entries for Encyclopedias and Dictionaries- [ONLINE] DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_18-1
The Female Professional as Orphan in Charlotte Riddell’s A Struggle for Fame
Victoriographies, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 129-146Contributions to Journals: Articles- [ONLINE] DOI: https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2019.0338
- [ONLINE] Deposit in Whiterose repository
Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897): Negotiating Anxieties of Genre and Gender at the Fin de Siècle
Victorian Popular Fictions, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 80-100Contributions to Journals: ArticlesCreating character: Theories of nature and nurture in Victorian sensation fiction
Manchester University Press, Manchester, [England]. 232 pagesBooks and Reports: BooksCollins, William Wilkie
Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Entries for Encyclopedias and DictionariesJordan Kistler, Arthur O’Shaughnessy, A Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum (review)
Contributions to Specialist Publications: Reviews of Books, Films and ArticlesSecrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction
Wilkie Collins Journal, vol. 14Contributions to Journals: Reviews of Books, Films and ArticlesReview of 'Aestheticism and the Marriage Market in Victorian Popular Fiction: The Art of Female Beauty', Kirby-Jane Hallum
CerclesContributions to Journals: Reviews of Books, Films and ArticlesMesmeric Clairvoyance in Mid-Victorian Literature: Eliot, Bulwer-Lytton, and MacDonald
Supernatural Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 118-132Contributions to Journals: Articles‘Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations (review)’
The Gaskell Journal, vol. 29, pp. 118-20Contributions to Journals: Reviews of Books, Films and ArticlesWilkie Collins’s Monomaniacs in Basil, No Name, and Man and Wife
Wilkie Collins Journal, vol. 12Contributions to Journals: Articles‘“Sweeter and Lovelier than Ever”: Rereading Lucy’
Telegraph for Garlic. Ounoughi, S. (ed.). Red Rattle Books, pp. 27-39Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters- [ONLINE] Publisher's website
Review of 'Cathrine O. Frank, Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture in England 1837-1925'
Victoriographies, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 88-89Contributions to Journals: Reviews of Books, Films and Articles- [ONLINE] DOI: https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2012.0076
Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print:: "Belgravia" and Sensationalism (review)
Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 99-101Contributions to Journals: Reviews of Books, Films and Articles- [ONLINE] DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/vpr.2011.0000
The Citizen's Body: Desire, Health, and the Social in Victorian England (review)
Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 293-294Contributions to Journals: Reviews of Books, Films and Articles- [ONLINE] DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/vpr.0.0081
Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life (review)
Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 418-420Contributions to Journals: Reviews of Books, Films and Articles- [ONLINE] https://www.jstor.org/stable/27760246
- [ONLINE] DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/vpr.0.0100
Fantastic and Sensational: Representing the Female Body: Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels. Laurence Talairach-Vielmas. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 188 pp. [Review]
Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, vol. 4, no. 3Contributions to Journals: Reviews of Books, Films and Articles‘“She ought to have been a great man. Nature makes these mistakes now and then”: Right Living in the Wrong Body in John Marchmont’s Legacy’
Working Papers: Working PapersJohn Glendening, The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels (review)
Contributions to Specialist Publications: Reviews of Books, Films and Articles