Dr Serena Trowbridge
Reader in Victorian Literature
School of English
- Email:
- serena.trowbridge@bcu.ac.uk
- Phone:
- 0121 331 6235
Dr. Serena Trowbridge read English and Art History at King's College London, followed by an MA in textual studies at the University of Birmingham. Her PhD, entitled 'Christina Rossetti's Fractured Gothic', was completed at Birmingham City University in 2010, supervised by Professor Fiona Robertson. Her monograph Christina Rossetti's Gothic was published by Bloomsbury in 2013.
Serena is Reader in Victorian Literature. Her research interests include Gothic, graveyard poetry, Pre-Raphaelitism in art and literature, lunatic asylums, ecocriticism and eighteenth and nineteenth century literature generally. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
She is Associate Director of Research for the School of English, with responsibility for researcher education and career development, and impact for REF2021. Serena supervises PhDs on topics including Walter Bagehot, Swinburne and weather poetry. She is an experienced external examiner for doctoral work.
Serena was Editor of the Review of the Pre-Raphaelite Society 2004-2017 and is now Vice-President of the Pre-Raphaelite Society and Senior Vice-President of the Birmingham & Midland Institute.
Current Activity
I am in the final stages of preparing an edition of the juvenilia of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Evelyn de Morgan, to be published with Victorian Secrets in 2021, supported by the De Morgan Foundation.
Areas of Expertise
- Pre-Raphaelitism in art and literature
- Victorian and contemporary poetry
- Women’s writing
- Environmental writing
- Victorian institutions
Qualifications
- BA (Hons) English Literature with Art History, King's College London
- MA Textual Studies, University of Birmingham
- PhD, Birmingham City University
- Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
Memberships
- Senior Vice-President and chair of trustees at the Birmingham & Midland Institute.
- Vice-President of the Pre-Raphaelite Society.
- Companion of the Guild of St George.
- Member of the British Association of Victorian Studies, the British Association of Romantic Studies, the Charlotte Mary Yonge Fellowship, the Mary Webb Society, the Housman Society, the William Morris Society and the Ruskin Society.
Teaching
- The Gothic
- The Victorians
- Psychology in Victorian Literature
Research
- Poetry, particularly of the nineteenth century
- Graveyard poetry
- Gothic literature
- Pre-Raphaelitism in art and literature
- Ruskin
- Eco-criticism
Postgraduate Supervision
I am currently supervising a number of PhDs, with topics including Swinburne, poetry and weather, and Walter Bagehot.
Publications
Monographs
My Ladys Soul: The Poetry of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall (Victorian Secrets 2018)
Christina Rossetti’s Gothic, monograph (Bloomsbury 2013)
Book chapters
Invited chapter, The Gothic in Victorian Poetry’ in The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Gothic, ed. Dale Townshend (CUP 2020)
Invited chapter, ‘Elizabeth Siddall: Pre-Raphaelitism, Poetry, Prosody’, in Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics ed. Heather Bozant Witcher and Amy Kahrmann Huseby (Palgrave 2020)
‘Elizabeth Siddall’ in The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, ed. Lisa Scholl (Palgrave 2020)
Invited chapter, ‘Gender and Space in Pre-Raphaelite paintings of “The Eve of St Agnes”’, pp. 17-28 in Poetry and Painting: Pre-Raphaelitism, ed. Sophia Andres and Brian Donnelly (Peter Lang 2018)
Invited chapter, ‘“Truth to Nature”: The Pleasures and Dangers of the Environment in Christina Rossetti’s Poetry’, pp. 63-78 in Victorian Writers and the Environment, ed. Ronald D. Morrison and Lawrence W. Mazzeno (Routledge 2017)
‘Past, Present and Future in the Gothic Graveyard’, pp. 21-33 in The Gothic and Death, ed. Carol M. Davison (Manchester UP 2017)
‘“The Wordless Secrets of Death’s Deep”: Christina Rossetti’s Gothic’, pp. 161-172 in Women and Gothic, ed. Maria Purves (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2014)
“A Silent Heart”: Christina Rossetti’s “Monna Innominata” as a Reconstruction of Dante’s Beatrice’, pp. 77-96 in Dante in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Professor Nick Havely (University of York), Peter Lang Ltd, 2011
Journal articles
‘Emotional Similes: Christina Rossetti’s Appropriation of Caroline Norton’, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 28 (Spring 2019)
‘“The very sky and sea-line of her soul’: Nature, destruction and desire in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems’, Victoriographies, Summer 2020 (also co-editor, with Dinah Roe)
Edited collections
Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century, edited collection with Thomas Knowles (Pickering & Chatto 2014)
Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities, edited collection with Amelia Yeates (Ashgate 2014)
Acts of Memory: The Victorians and Beyond, edited collection with Ryan Barnett (Cambridge Scholars Press 2010)
Keynote addresses and invited Public lectures
Invited speaker for ‘John Ruskin, Art Education and Social Change’, Conference at the National Gallery, London, September 2019
Public lectures relating to My Ladys Soul: Wightwick Manor (January 2019), The Ashmolean Museum (March 2019), Kelmscott Manor (April 2019), Penzance Literary Festival (July 2019), Red House (November 2019), National Portrait Gallery (November 2019), various bookshop events
Invited speaker on Siddall for University of Birmingham’s Nineteenth-Century series, March 2019
Keynote speaker for ‘Walpole and his Legacies’ colloquium, University of Durham, May 2017
Keynote speaker for the Pre-Raphaelite Society’s Founder’s Day, October 2016
Invited speaker for the Birmingham Midland Institute’s lecture series, 2016 and 2017
Organiser of a series of public lectures at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery as part of the Reading Art project, April 2016
Guest lecture for St Saviour’s Church, Hitchin, on Christina Rossetti’s Tractarian poetry, September 2016
Invited speaker for BCU Mental Health conference, April 2016
Keynote speaker for the Charlotte Yonge Fellowship’s AGM in November 2014
Invited speaker on Pre-Raphaelite Art and Poetry, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery public lecture, June 2014
Guest lecture for the Pre-Raphaelite Society on Christina Rossetti, January 2014
Invited speaker for the Ruskin Seminar series at Lancaster University in 2010
Funding awarded
In 2018 I organised (with Sarah Wood) a series of events to celebrate the Frankenstein bicentennial, which was awarded £23k funding by the Vice-Chancellor.
In 2016 I was awarded an AHRC Cultural Engagement fund to build on my existing partnership with Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery.
In May 2015, with the support of funding from the Faculty, I organised an exhibition of student artwork on the theme of Gothic which was held at the Library of Birmingham, alongside a one-day interdisciplinary event of talks relating to Gothic.
In 2013 I was awarded funding by the Higher Education Academy to produce a website which provides a pedagogical tool for undergraduates studying literary theory, and which is actively used in teaching and undergraduate research internationally: The Virtual Theorist
I was awarded a 2-week postgraduate scholarship at Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden, in 2008, to research Rossetti’s theology, and a further week for research on the graveyard poets in 2013
Conferences organised
Organiser and speaker for ‘Pre-Raphaelite Women’ public day-school, Birmingham & Midland Institute, November 2018
I was a member of the conference organisation committee for a large international conference on Costume Culture and Dress, organised by the ADM Faculty at BCU, taking place in May 2017 and again in June 2019
I am an active part of the committee of the Midlands Interdisciplinary Victorian Studies Seminars (MIVSS), which organises conferences and seminars in the Midlands. As a result of this, I organised a day of invited speakers and discussion on teaching and interdisciplinarity, in June 2011, and another on Victorian Gothic in June 2015. My most recent event was on Victorians and the Environment in April 2017 at BCU.
The Reading Art conference funded by AHRC Cultural Engagement fund took place at BMAG in 2016.
Cultural Cross-currents between Russia and Britain in the Nineteenth Century (co-organised with Birmingham City University and Tomsk State University), international interdisciplinary conference for around 45 attendees in July 2013
Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century, an international interdisciplinary conference for around 60 attendees held at the former Birmingham Lunatic Asylum, May 2011
Victorian Memories, Birmingham City University, international postgraduate conference for around 35 attendees, September 2007
Selected recent conference papers
‘Elizabeth Siddall: Poetics, Prosody and Painting’, Pre-Raphaelite Sisters conference, December 2019
‘“Her Mother was a dancer at the Opera”: how society women’s clothing in fiction reflects the rise and fall of Romantic ballet in the nineteenth century’, Costume, Culture and Dress conference, BCU, June 2019
‘there is still time to change ourselves’: Contemporary fictional responses to climate change, Mediating Climate Change conference, University of Leeds, July 2017
‘Faded Silk’ or ‘Fresh Splendour’: Tennyson’s construction of female identity through dress in ‘Geraint and Enid’, Culture, Costume and Dress conference, BCU, May 2017
Sympathetic ‘voices from the trees’? Trees and woods in Elizabeth Siddall’s poetry, The Memory of Trees conference, University of Liverpool, April 2017
‘He feeds upon her face’: Metaphors of consumption in the life and work of Elizabeth Siddall, British Association of Victorian Studies annual conference, University of Cardiff, September 2016
‘Each in his narrow cell’: Graveyard locations and the Poetry of Mortality, BARS ‘Romantic Locations’ conference, Grasmere, March 2014
‘My Lady’s Soul’: The Poetry of Elizabeth Siddal, Pre-Raphaelitism: Past, Present and Future, Oxford Brookes and the Ashmolean, September 2013
‘By the Blue Tapers Trembling Light’: Graveyard Poetry and the Gothic, Gothic Cultures conference, St Mary’s University College, Strawberry Hill, March 2013
Media Work
Links and Social Media
- Culture and Anarchy blog
- Reading Art blog
- The Virtual Theorist - a resource for studying literary theory (Editor)
- Twitter: @serena_t
- BCU Academia