Gillian Russell

Profile

Biography

Gillian Russell is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature, joining the Department in 2018 from the University of Melbourne.  She was trained at the Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Cambridge before moving to Australia in the late 1980s.  Her main research interests are in British and Irish literature and culture of the period 1730-1830, focusing on theatre history, gender, sociability, war studies, and print culture.  She has held a number of grants for research from the Australian Research Council, including a ARC Professorial Fellowship between 2010-15. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.  

Research

Overview

Gillian Russell is author of The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics and Culture, 1793-1815 (Oxford, 1995), Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture 1770-1840 (Cambridge, 2002), co-edited with Clara Tuite, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge, 2007), and Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture (Palgrave, 2015), co-edited with Neil Ramsey.  A monograph entitled The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century: Print, Sociability and the Cultures of Collecting is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.  Current research projects include studies of Regency ‘Flash’ culture in Britain, Ireland, and Australia, Charles Lamb’s sociability, and political ephemera in Britain and Ireland. 

Gillian has supervised many PhDs in a range of fields with topics including:

• '‘The Future Arrives Late’: Queering the Ladies of Llangollen'
• 'The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780-1835'
• 'The Politics of Songs in Eighteenth Century Britain'
• 'Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction 1851-1911'