Profile

Biography

Trev Broughton studied as an undergraduate and postgraduate in the Department of English and Related Literature in the 1980s, before taking up a post in the University's newly formed Centre for Women's Studies in 1986. For nearly twenty years she contributed actively to the success of the Centre, teaching, chairing its various committees, and helping to develop its research culture. In that capacity she oversaw a great many Master's dissertations, as well as supervising or co-supervising doctoral work on, among other topics, late eighteenth-century female educators; the life and work of the Victorian scholar Frederick Furnivall; the 'Edwardian Lady' Edith Holden; modernist drama; contemporary women's poetry; contemporary Irish women's writing; bisexual/textual theorising; aging and gender in contemporary visual culture.

The Centre's interdisciplinary environment encouraged her to pursue a number of innovations in teaching, supported by the University's Teaching Innovation and Development Fund. These included the development of writing workshops for students struggling with writer's block (with Caroline Hall of the University's Counselling Service), and new ways of teaching 'whiteness' as a racialized identity and of using auto/photography as a method of teaching and learning (both with Ann Kaloski).

Trev's doctoral work focused on Victorian autobiography, and in her early career she published essays on the Life writing of Harriet Martineau, Anny Thackeray Ritchie, Margaret Oliphant and Annie Besant, Leslie Stephen and James Anthony Froude. Her monograph on the subject, Men of Letters, Writing Lives, was published by Routledge in 1998. During that time she also co-edited The Governess (with Ruth Symes, Sutton 1997), The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter (with Joseph Bristow, Longman 1997) and Women's Lives/Women's Times (with Linda Anderson, SUNY Press 1997), as well as publishing on various aspects of feminist pedagogy and curriculum.

Research

Current projects

Trev's current research projects revolve around two main topics and their inter-relation: cultures of Life-writing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, and the contemporaneous formation of class, gender and national identities.

She has recently edited a multi-volume collection of critical essays on Auto/biography for the Routledge series Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (2007), and (with Helen Rogers) Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century (2007), an interdisciplinary collection of essays about the experience and representation of fatherhood in the Victorian era.

She is now working on British Indian life writing (and obituary), and on letters, correspondence and their relations to gender in the nineteenth century.

Supervision

Trev is currently (co-)supervising higher degree work on ageing, gender and narratives of travel; on the work of Yvonne Vera; on contemporary Chinese women's self-representations, and on Georgiana Fullerton and her circle.

She is keen to resume her early specialisation as a Victorianist, and she would welcome applications from candidates interested in nineteenth-century literature and culture, particularly in the field of non-fiction prose. She is particularly interested in the representation of masculinities and fatherhood in the Victorian period.

Publications

Selected publications

• Men of Letters, Writing Lives: Masculinity and Literary Auto/Biography in the Late Victorian Period (London: Routledge, 1999).
• 'Auto/biography and the actual course of things' in Tess Cosslett et al. (eds) Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods (London: Routledge 2000) pp. 241-6.
• With Laura Potts 'Dissonant Voices: the teacher's "personal" in Women's Studies', Gender and Education 13 4 (2001) 373-85.
• 'Studying the Study: Gender and the Scene of Authorship in the Writings of Leslie Stephen, Margaret Oliphant and Anne Thackeray Ritchie' in Frédéric Regard (ed.) Mapping the Self: Space, Identity, Discourse in British Auto/Biography (Lyon: St Etienne,2003), pp. 247-68.
• 'Henry Reeve' for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).
• 'Promoting a life: Patronage, Masculinity and Philip Meadows Taylor's The Story of My Life' in David Amigoni (ed.) Life Writing and Victorian Culture (Forthcoming: Ashgate 2006).
• Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century (Palgrave, 2007)
• Trev Lynn Broughton (ed.) Autobiography (4 vols) Routledge Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies Series.