Professor Rosemary Ashton FBA

English Language and Literature
Fellow type
UK Fellow
Year elected
2000
Subjects
History, Literature

Summary

Rosemary Ashton is Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at UCL and an Honorary Fellow of UCL.  She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and was awarded an OBE in 1999 for services to comparative literature.  Her research area is 19th-century literary, intellectual, and cultural history. She is the author of four critical biographies: George Henry Lewes (1991), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1996), George Eliot (1996), and Thomas and Jane Carlyle (2002).  Two of her books belong to the field of Anglo-German relations: The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800-1860 (1980) and Little Germany: Exile and Asylum in Victorian England (1986).

Three books on Victorian culture followed: 142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London (2006); Victorian Bloomsbury (2012), which resulted from a larger research project directed by Professor Ashton between 2008 and 2011, the Leverhulme-funded UCL Bloomsbury Project, which details the founding of innovative educational and medical institutions in Bloomsbury from 1800 to 1904; and One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858 (2017). She has made frequent contributions to radio, especially Radio 4's In Our Time (on Romanticism, Wordsworth, the Faust legend, Anglo-Germanism in the 19th century, Dickens, and George Eliot – most recently on Middlemarch, 2018), and has participated in television programmes on George Eliot for BBC2 and BBC4.  She is involved in planning and contributing to a number of events to take place in 2019 to celebrate the bicentenary of George Eliot's birth.

10-Minute Talks: Choosing a title – George Eliot and "The Mill on the Floss"

28 Apr 2021 Professor Rosemary Ashton FBA

In this talk Rosemary Ashton discusses George Eliot's 'The Mill on the Floss' in the wider context of novel writing and title choosing.

Current post

Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature and Honorary Fellow, University College London; Senior Research Fellow

Past appointments

University College London Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature and Honorary Fellow, University College London

2013 -

School of Advanced Study, University of London Senior Research Fellow, School of Advanced Study, University of London

2013 -

University College London Quain Professor of English Language and Literature

2002 -

University College London Professor of English

1991 -

University College London Lecturer and from 1986 Reader in English

1974 - 1991

Publications

Little Germany: exile and asylum in Victorian England

Rosemary Ashton - Published in 1986 by Oxford University Press

Second edition published 1989.

George Eliot: a life

Rosemary Ashton - Published in 1996

Thomas and Jane Carlyle: portrait of a marriage

Rosemary Ashton - Published in 2002 by Pimlico

142 Strand: A radical address in Victorian London

Rosemary Ashton - Published in 2006 by Penguin

Victorian Bloomsbury

Rosemary Ashton - Published in 2012 by Yale University Press

Other Fellows of the British Academy

Professor Edna Longley FBA

English Language and Literature Irish Literature in English England Ireland Scotland Wales

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Professor Charlotte Brunsdon FBA

London in film and television; the British audio-visual landscape; television and cinema as objects of study

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Professor Barak Kushner FBA

Barak Kushner was educated at Brandeis University and Princeton University in the United States. He is currently Professor of East Asian history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Corpus Christi College.

Barak-Kushner-FBA

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