Professor Josephine McDonagh FBA
- Fellow type
- International Fellow
- Year elected
- 2025
- Honours
- FBA
Summary
Josephine McDonagh is Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Chair of the Development of the Novel in English and Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago, where she is also Director of the Nicholson Center for British Studies.
Before coming to Chicago in 2017, she held positions at Universities of Exeter, Birkbeck, Oxford, and King’s College London where she was Professor of English between 2007-2017.
Educated at University College Cardiff and the University of Southampton, McDonagh is the author of several monographs and editor of volumes of essays on a range of interdisciplinary topics, with a focus on nineteenth-century British literature, particularly Britain’s global and imperial relations.
Most recently she has interrogated the role of literature in settler colonisation, migration and emigration.
As the initiator of an international research network on commodity culture in the context of nineteenth-century colonialism, she brought scholars from around the world together to pursue enquiries into the material and print cultures of colonialism and their legacies.