Alison O'Byrne

Profile

Biography

I joined the Department of English and Related Literature in 2008, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2017. I have wide-ranging interests in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and culture.

Research

Overview

My research focuses on representations of the city in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with particular interests in mobility, travel, and tourism. My monograph, The Art of Walking in London: Representing the Eighteenth-Century City, 1700-1830 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2025, as was my co-edited collection (with James Watt), Discovering Britain and Ireland in the Romantic Period: Grand Tours. I have co-edited (with Jon Stobart) a Roundtable in the Journal  of Victorian Culture on John Tallis’s London Street Views (1838-1840) and have edited a Special Issue of The London Journal on London Scenes.

Other publications include:

• “Public Improvement as ‘National Ornament’: Commerce, Culture, and Patriotism in London and Edinburgh” in The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts (2023) 
• “Visual and Literary Representations” in A Cultural History of Shopping in the Age of Enlightenment (2022) 
• “‘Everlasting Memorials’: Urban Improvement and the Shadow of Ruin in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London” in the Eighteenth-Century Life Special Issue “Spaces of Enlightenment” (2021)
• “‘Unceasing Bustle and Traffic’: Print Culture and Metropolitan Spaces in the 1830s” in the Yearbook of English Studies volume Writing in the Age of William IV (2018) 
• “London and Urban Culture in Eighteenth-Century Literature” in Literature Compass (2018) 
• “The Spectator and the Rise of the Modern Metropole” in The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature (2014)
• “The Art of Walking in London: Representing Urban Pedestrianism in Early Nineteenth-Century London” in the Romanticism Special Issue “Re-imagining the City” (2008)

Supervision

I welcome enquiries from research students interested in topics exploring the long eighteenth century, particularly those interested in urban culture, travel, and the built environment. Recently supervised and co-supervised topics include: 

“Excavating the City: The Gothic Impulses of George W. M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London and The Mysteries of the Court of London” (PhD)

“Relax into Laughter: Jane Austen’s Emma and the Sentimental Novel” (MA by Research)

“Poetry and Industrialism in Liverpool, Sheffield, and Manchester, 1770-1842” (PhD)

“Essay-Periodicals and Literary Novelty, 1700-1760: Print, Politics, and Professionalization” (PhD)

“Romantic Modernity and Urban Nostalgia in Early Nineteenth-Century London” (PhD)

Teaching

Undergraduate

I teach eighteenth-century and Romantic-period literature across our degrees. At undergraduate level, I contribute to our second-year Intermediate Option Module Inventing Britain, 1700-1830 and I offer a third-year Advanced Option Module on Jane Austen.

Postgraduate

At postgraduate level, I contribute teaching and research supervision to MA programmes in the Department of English and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies.