Lucy Whitehead

I am currently in the final year of an AHRC-funded PhD at Cardiff University and the University of Exeter. I completed my BA in English Literature at Cambridge University, and my MSt in English (1780-1900) at Oxford University. Titled ‘The Lives of Charles Dickens: A Metabiography 1870-present’, my doctoral thesis investigates the origins and development of Dickens biographies. My essay 'Restless Dickens: A Victorian Life in Motion, 1872-1927' won the Journal of Victorian Culture Graduate Essay Prize in 2019.

For the 150th anniversary of Dickens's death on 9 June 2020, I am part of a BBC Radio 3 panel exploring Dickens's legacy for the programme 'Free Thinking'. In 2019 I was co-organiser of Dickens Day, the UK's leading annual Dickens studies conference, with the theme of 'Dickens and Bodies'.

My research has been enriched by two AHRC-funded placements working with the major Dickens collections at the Huntington Library and the Charles Dickens Museum. I provided curatorial research towards the Dickens Museum’s winter exhibition 2018-19. From November 2019 to March 2020 I was on an AHRC-funded placement with the research team at the National Trust, exploring the intersections between life-writing, literary celebrity, material culture and the heritage industry as embedded in individual Trust properties and collections.

My wider research interests include theories of the archive, the history of the book, Victorian material and visual culture, late Victorian into modern, the history of sexuality, and the writings of Charlotte Brontë and Henry James.