Louisa Yates | University of Chester

As well as her role as Visiting Lecturer in English at the University of Chester, Louisa Yates is Director of Collections and Research at Gladstone’s Library. She is a frequent speaker at conferences on the subjects of literature, literary digitisation, and the significance of public engagement. She regularly judges for literary prizes, interviews writers, poets and authors and is Festival Director of Gladfest, hailed in the Huffington Post as ‘a great small literary festival’.

Louisa was previously an Associate Tutor at Edge Hill University, and completed her PhD on the relationship between neo-Victorian fiction and critical theories in 2011 at the University of Chester, where she was a Gladstone Fellow.

She is currently involved in the Victorian Lives and Letters Consortium – a collaboration between U.S. universities and U.K institutions that seeks to make the papers of Victorian figures accessible to the public – and the Gladstone Centre for Victorian Studies (in collaboration with the University of Liverpool). Louisa’s research interests cover the novel since 1860, women’s writing, critical theory and the figure of the child in neo-Victorian fiction.

Louisa currently teaches on the MRes at Chester’s Institute of Gender Studies, where she is Module Leader for ‘EN7 002 Consensus and Debate’. She also delivers postgraduate modules in the English Department.

Since 2008, Louisa has taught or lectured on the following undergraduate modules at the University of Chester:

‘Approaches to Literature’,
‘Studying Literature’,
‘Criticism and Theory’,
‘The Gothic’,
‘Research Methods’,
‘Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture’
‘Language and Gender’.

Louisa has also delivered seminars on the following postgraduate modules:

‘Nineteenth-Century Literature’, ‘Nineteenth-Century Culture’, ‘Online Resources’, ‘The Sensational Nineteenth Century’ (MA Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture);
‘Online Resources’, ‘Novel Histories: Past, Present, Future’ (MA Creative and Critical Writing).

Louisa is currently working on a book-length project on the neo-Victorian work of the novelist Sarah Waters, as well as a collaborative research project investigating the successes of public engagement partnerships between universities and independent cultural institutions.

Until 2021, Louisa is a lead contributor on ‘Digital Gladstone’, a three-year Carnegie-funded project which is digitising the archive of Victorian Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone. Since 2019 she has been a Director of the Victorian Lives and Letters Consortium, a group of scholars, teachers, programmers, librarians, students, and enthusiasts devoted to creating interactive digital archives of Victorian-era life writing.

She maintains a number of research collaborations with academics at the Universities of Liverpool and Salford. These relate to Victorian Studies and independent library/HEI collaboration respectively.

She has reviewed for academic journals such as the Carlyle Studies Annual and MLA as well as The Times Higher Education.

Co-author, with Deborah Wynne, Victorian Manufactured Objects (Forthcoming 2020, Routledge).

‘Reader, I [shagged/beat/whipped/f****d/rewrote] him: the Sexual and Financial Afterlives of Jane Eyre’, Charlotte Bronte: Legacies and Afterlives, ed. Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 258-79.

‘Review: Jane Welsh and Her Victorian World; A Story of Love, Work, Friendship and Marriage, Carlyle Studies Annual, 32 (2017), 181-90.

‘“My Dress is Not a Yes”: Coalitions of Resistance in SlutWalk and the Fictions of Sarah Waters’, Sarah Waters and Contemporary Feminisms, ed. Adele Jones and Claire O’Callaghan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 173-91.

‘Nothing in moderation: Louisa Yates on EM Delafield’s Consequences’, Slightly Foxed, 2015.

‘The Figure of the Child in Queer neo-Victorian Families’, Neo-Victorian Families: Gender, Sexual and Cultural Politics, ed. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), pp. 93-117.

‘“But it’s only a novel, Dorian”: neo-Victorian Fiction and the Process of Re-Vision’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 2:2 (Winter 2009-10), 186-211.

BA (Hons) (Liverpool)
MA English (Cardiff)
PhD (Chester)

Dr Louisa Yates