I took my BA, MPhil and DPhil at Oxford where I specialised in the romantic period, studying with Jonathan Wordsworth, Marilyn Butler, and Paul Hamilton. Awarded the John Knox fellowship to Harvard University in 1985, I went there to study and then to teach as a lecturer, before moving to Northwestern University, spending a total of ten years working in the US. I then returned to teach again at Oxford, before joining the Open University.
My research interests are based within the romantic period but extend backwards into the eighteenth century and forwards into the nineteenth. They include the novel and narrative verse, with an emphasis on Scott; women’s writing; travel-writing; literary tourism; romantic literary biography; the book in the romantic period; and the production of literary heritage sites and associated rituals of commemoration. My publications are connected by an interest in the transformation and adaptation of literary texts within visual and material culture, whether in public arenas (the stage, history-painting, film, literary house museums) or in more private spaces (literary souvenirs, parlour amusements, abridgements for children and so on).
My first book, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790-1825 (OUP, 1994), examined the way the letter was represented in the novel, charted the demise of the sentimental epistolary novel due to the cultural pressures of the 1790s, and related the emergence of the regional, historical, and national tale in the 1810s to this crisis in earlier novelistic forms. Its survey takes in writers from the period as diverse as Hays, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Inchbald, Opie, Wiliams, Smith, West, Austen, Edgeworth, Owenson, Scott, Maturin, Byron, and Hazlitt, amongst others. More recently I have been writing on epistolary fiction for the new Oxford History of the Novel.
My second book, England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (OUP, 2002, co-authored with Michael Dobson) developed a growing conviction of the importance of historical fiction by Sir Walter Scott and others before and after him to the production of national identity into a history of the representation of Elizabeth I from her death to the present. It explored representation of the Queen across a wide variety of media, including historical painting, the stage, and film, and was selected by Choice as one of the year’s outstanding academic books.
More recently, I published The Literary Tourist: Readers & Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (Palgrave, 2006). Funded by the British Academy, this was the first history of the development of readers’ investment in places associated with authors and texts. It argues that literary tourism and literary landmarking was produced by, and in opposition to, nineteenth-century mass print culture. In 2009 I edited a related volume of essays entitled Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-century Culture.
My current full-length project, also funded by the British Academy, extends this work on literary tourism to the USA. Entitled Transatlantic Pilgrims, it deals with the nineteenth century construction of an Anglophone literary map spanning the Atlantic. Research for that has to date included the unusual experiences of sleeping in Mark Twain’s bed in Elmira, NY, and eating a slice of May Alcott’s birthday cake at Orchard House in Concord.
Shorter projects now in press include an extended essay on Sir Walter Scott’s use of Shakespeare for the series Great Shakespeareans ed. Adrian Poole and Peter Holland; a piece for Romantic Circles on Lady Frances Shelley as literary tourist; an essay on Scott’s afterlives for The Edinburgh Companion to Sir Walter Scott; the chapter dealing with epistolary fiction for The Oxford History of the Novel ed. Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien; and an essay on the Victorian experience of ‘Scott country’.
Recent speaking engagements have included invited lectures on Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake for the Edinburgh Scott Club and for The Association of Scottish Literary Studies in collaboration with the Loch Lomond & the Trossachs National Park Authority; an invited lecture on ‘The Literary Tourist’ for the Humanities Festival at the University of Lund in Sweden; interviewing Philip Pullman at the Oxford Literary Festival; a plenary for the Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschäft in Vienna on the history of dining in honour of Shakespeare’s birthday; a plenary on American travel-writers for the International Society for Travel-Writing conference in Lisbon; an invited lecture ‘Enlightenment Lives on location’ at King’s College London for their ‘Enlightenment Lives’ series; a visit to the University of Linköping, Sweden, to deliver a plenary entitled ‘Literary Landmarks and National Identities’ to their Humanities Festival; speaking at the RSC Winter School in Stratford-upon-Avon. Recent media appearances include slots on Woman’s Hour, a Time Team special on Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey, an ‘audio postcard’ from Poet’s Corner in conversation with Andrew Motion ahead of the Royal Wedding for Radio 4’s The Sunday Programme, and making a programme on Oxford’ literary sites for Radio 4’s Night Waves. The diary for 2011-12 includes speaking engagements at Chawton House to talk on ‘Jane Austen on the Tourist Trail’, a plenary at the ‘Exhibiting Literature’ conference at the University of Gottingen, an invitation to the University of Uppsala, and another to Cardiff.
I will also be continuing to act as convenor and chair of the Open University Romantic Period Seminar, hosted by the Institute of English Studies, London. This spring we are, in addition to hosting three exciting evening seminars, running a one-day symposium on The Romantic Book. Follow the link for more information.
At present I supervise a range of doctoral theses. My students are presently working on the representation of the American wars in contemporary fiction, on Charlotte Smith’s novels, and on the representation of family breakdown Elizabeth Inchbald’s plays. Prospective research students who wish to work on anything in the field of late eighteenth-century and Romantic studies broadly conceived, on historical fiction, on travel-literature, or on tourism, heritage and literature, are very welcome to contact me at n.j.watson@open.ac.uk.Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790-1825 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
(co-ed with Mary Favret) At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Materialist, and Feminist Criticism (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994).
‘Kemble, Scott, and the Mantle of the Bard’ in Jean Marsden ed. Appropriating Shakespeare (New York et.al.:Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994).
'Gloriana Victoriana: Victoria and the Cultural Memory of Elizabeth I', in Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich ed. Remaking Queen Victoria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.73-104.
(ed.) Sir Walter Scott, The Antiquary (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1999).
(With Michael Dobson), England's Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
(With Michael Dobson), 'Elizabethan Legacy' in Susan Doran ed., Elizabeth: The Exhibition at the National Maritime Museum (London: Chatto and Windus, 2003).
The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2006).
'Shakespeare on the Tourist Trail' in Robert Shaughnessy ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
(ed.) Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2009), with introduction and essay ‘Rambles in Literary London’ pp. 139-149.
‘Readers of Romantic Locality: Tourists, Loch Katrine, and The Lady of the Lake’ in Romantic Localities ed. Christoph Bode and Jacqueline Labbe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), pp.67-80.
‘Fandom mapped: Rousseau, Scott, and Byron on the itinerary of Lady Frances Shelley’, Romantic Circles, special edition ‘Romantic fandom’.
See also Open Research Online for further details of Nicola J Watson’s research publications.
Over the last few years I have been developing teaching material (print, video, audio, and digital) for the Open University on the late eighteenth-century and romantic period and on nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction. Most recently I have been involved in initiating and designing a new course in children’s literature and in designing and writing the new level 2 survey course due to launch next year. I have chaired a number of teams responsible for the development and management of courses in production and presentation. I am currently chair of the Research Steering Group, charged with developing the department’s research with an eye to REF 2013.
Email: nicola.watson@open.ac.uk
