Menu Close

Catherine Waters

Professor of Victorian literature and print culture, University of Kent

Cathy Waters (MA (Hons), DipEd Macquarie U, PhD USyd.) taught in Australia at the University of New England and the University of Sydney before coming to Kent in 2009. Her research interests are in Victorian literature and print culture, with a particular focus on the writing of Dickens, the journalism of George A Sala, and nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers.

She has written Dickens and the Politics of the Family (Cambridge University Press 1997; rpt 2005) and Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Ashgate 2008, winner of the 2009 Robert and Vineta Colby Prize by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals). Special Correspondence and the Newspaper Press in Victorian Print Culture, 1850-1886, based upon research from her AHRC-funded project investigating of the writing of the Victorian ‘special correspondent’ – ‘Journalism on the move: the special correspondent and Victorian print culture’ – is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan in 2019. With Ruth Brimacombe, she has curated an online exhibition from this project, Picturing the News: The Art of Victorian Graphic Journalism.

Supervision
Cathy would welcome research proposals in Victorian literature and culture, especially in the areas of fiction or journalism.

Professional
Catherine Waters is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Dickens Journals Online project and of Victorian Periodicals Review. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals.

Experience

  • 2009–2020
    Professor of Victorian Literature and Print Culture, University of Kent