Biography
My research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century British literature, especially in the contexts of colonialism, imperial expansion, and the migration of people across the world. I range across authors, genres and print forms, and explore questions about the complex kinds of work that literature can perform. How and when do literary texts intersect with works in, for instance, history, the law or political economy? I’m interested in what happens when literary texts move from one continent to another, or across time, often in fragmented forms; and, on a smaller scale, in the various ways that ideas and motifs in literature jump from one text to another, recombined and refracted in the company of others. I have written books about Thomas De Quincey and George Eliot, a study of ideas about child murder in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and most recently a book on literature and migration; and edited volumes on gender politics, 19th-century science and literature, Charles Dickens and the French Revolution, and on nineteenth-century colonial commodity cultures.
My current work clusters around two themes. The first is migration. The first of two migration-related projects is an edited volume (with Hadji Bakara and Charlotte Sussman), the Oxford Handbook of Literature and Migration. When completed, the volume will have around 50 essays, dealing with literature and migration in all historical periods from ancient times to the present, and from all parts of the globe. It will set new agenda for this growing sub-field. The other migration project is on child migrants. This lies at the confluence of two well-known yet seemingly discrete historical narratives of early nineteenth-century Britain and its empire: the emergence of new notions of childhood, and the history of international migration. Significant numbers of children in this period were migrants, sent on perilous journeys across oceans and continents. Records of slave markets and indenture contracts evidence the high numbers of Black and Asian children forcibly removed; while British under-fourteens frequently accounted for over half the passengers on emigration ships to colonial settlements. Destitute and abandoned, children could end up as solitary travelers in a hostile world. How, I ask, did this new mobility impact on nineteenth-century conceptions of childhood in transnational and imperial contexts?
My work on migration – and especially child migration – is provoked by the treatment of migrants across the world today. The concern to bridge past and present is also evident in a second area of my research, on the commodity culture of the British colonial world. This explores the many - sometimes deadly - effects of global commodities in the past and present. I have been involved in an international research network exploring the transformations of local cultures in the nineteenth century, especially in the global south, in the light of colonial commodity exchange, and my work on De Quincey has led me to consider the importance of opium as a global commodity, whose associated technologies of cultivation, communication, economic exchange (often illicit), military power, and individual and national freedoms, shaped social life in regions across the world. Commodities also provided writers and artists like De Quincey with a radical new sensorium which refashioned elements of western cultural production. My work explores the multiple ways in which commodities shaped literary cultures of the nineteenth century, and their legacies which persist in the contemporary world.
I am a participant in the International Research Network on Postcolonial Print Cultures, https://irn-postcolonial-print-cultures.org/
Since 2021, I am the Director of the Nicholson Center for British Studies, the University’s focal point for the multidisciplinary study of all things to do with the British Isles and any of Britain’s former colonies. The Nicholson Center is devoted to supporting new work on these regions, and for the critical study of the history and legacies of colonialism.
In 2025 I was elected as an International Fellow of the British Academy.
Selected Publications
- Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815 – 1876 (Oxford, 2021)
- Child Murder and British Culture, 1720-1900 (Cambridge, 2003)
- George Eliot (Northcote House Press/British Council, 1997)
- De Quincey's Disciplines (Clarendon Press, 1994)
- Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World (ed. with Supriya Chaudhuri, Brian Murray and Rajeswari Sunderrajan) (Routledge, 2017)
- Nineteeth-Century Radical Traditions (ed. with Joseph Bristow) (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016)
- Charles Dickens and the French Revolution (ed. with Colin Jones and Jon Mee) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
- “Can Migrants Be Seen? Some Representations of Migration in Contemporary Art, Film and Literature”, in The Question of Aesthetics, ed. George Levine. Oxford University Press, in press.
- “Introduction: Literature and Migration”, Josephine McDonagh and Jonathan Sachs, Modern Philology, vol. 118, no. 2 (November, 2020): 204-212.
- “The Nineteenth-Century Opium Complex: From Thomas Love Peacock to Sherlock Holmes”, Josephine McDonagh and Briony Wickes, Literature & History, Vol. 29, 1 (2020), 3–18
- “Hospitality in Silas Marner and Daniel Deronda,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (online) 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. (29) (2020).
- 'A Genealogy of the Village,' in Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World (Routledge, 2017)
- 'Women Writers and the Provincial Novel: Cranford and the Culture of Annuals,' in Lucy Hartley ed., Palgrave History of British Women's Writing: Volume 6, 1830-1880. In press. Palgrave, 2017
- 'Rethinking Provincialism in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Our Village to Villette,' Victorian Studies 55.3 (Spring 2013): 399-424
