Dr Sally Bushell

PhD Supervision Interests

I am interested in receiving proposals from doctoral students in two main areas. My recent research has been concerned with place, space and poetry/ poetics - largely, but not exclusively, in relation to Romantic literature and the Lakes, so I would welcome studies in this area. I am also very interested in the study of textual process and the draft materials which precede the published work. I would therefore welcome projects on textual criticism, genetic criticism and the study of manuscripts for nineteenth or twentieth century literature where relevant. I have a secondary interest in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. More traditionally I am able to supervise projects on Romantic writers, particularly Wordsworth.

Current Teaching

My research specialism is in Nineteenth Century Literature (Romantic and Victorian) with particular interests in poetry and textual process.  For second year students I I convene the British Romanticism core course which runs for 22 weeks right across the year. In the third year I teach a number of specialist half unit courses drawing on my research expertise, including: "Victorian Popular Fiction" and "Where do Poems Come from?" At graduate level I teach on the MA in Romantic and Victorian Studies with a module called  "On Location in the Lakes". I also supervise PhD projects on Romanticism, textual criticism and space and place in poetry.

Profile

Dr Sally Bushell PhD (Queens' College, Cambridge), BA (London), MA (York), MA (Lancaster), PGCE (Cambridge), is Reader in British Romanticism, Director of Research (2011-2013) and co-director of the Wordsworth Centre. Major publications are: Re-Reading The Excursion (Ashgate, 2002); The Excursion ([co-edited] Cornell University Press, 2007); and Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson and Dickinson (University Press of Virginia, 2009). She has undertaken a collaborative pilot project with The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, putting Wordsworth's manuscripts online for the first time. She is also General Editor (with Isobel Armstrong) of a new Reading Guides to Long Poems Series with Edinburgh University Press. 

Dr Bushell's second critical book,Text as Process: Exploring Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson and Emily Dickinson(2009), connects literary critical with text-critical and philosophical ideas about poetic creativity and composition and aims to open up manuscript material to more creative critical interpretation. It is concerned with defining new ways of responding to text as process, or the "coming into being" of the literary work and with opening up draft materials to a wider readership.

A second area of research interest concerns the relationship of place, space and poetry as embodied in the manuscript object. In 2007 Dr Bushell explored such ideas in her own research through an AHRC funded collaborative project with The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. This project is primarily concerned with putting the manuscripts online in an accessible form. Click here for more details.  Current research is on literary mapping, exploring the relationship between reading and mapping in fictional works and between visual and verbal meaning in literature.

Recent and Current postgraduate students:

Loren Cafferty, "Wordsworth and the Development of Moral Poetry." (MA by Research 2002-3).

David Cooper, "Norman Nicholson and the Poetics of Place and Space" (PhD. 2004-07).

Zoe Bolton, "Travel and Textuality: Representations of Place from Gray to Byron" (PhD 2005-09).

Andrew King, "Romantic Collections: Parts into Whole" (PhD 2008-2013)

Gordon Bottomley "Editing Joanna Hutchinson's Letters" (PhD 2011-)

Kate Ingle, "Personal Cartographies in Wordsworth, Lamb and Blake" (PhD 2012-)