Sophie Coulombeau

Profile

Biography

Sophie's critical expertise is in literature and culture of the long eighteenth century. Her research interests include naming and identity, reading practices, women's writings, manuscript culture, cultures of collection, the evolution of the novel, and the lives and writings of the Burney family and their circles. She carried out postgraduate study at the University of Pennsylvania (Thouron Fellowship) and then the University of York. She then spent five years as a Lecturer at Cardiff University before returning to York in 2019. She is author of Reading With The Burneys: Patronage, Paratext, and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2024) co-editor of Mary Hamilton and her Networks: Gender, Sociability, Manuscript, 1740-1850  (Wiley, 2025), and editor of New Perspectives on the Burney Family (Duke University Press, 2018), and has published articles and chapters in Eighteenth-Century Life, the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Persuasions, The New Rambler, Nineteenth-Century Prose, the Huntington Library Quarterly, and Historical Fiction Now. She is General Editor of the Burney Journal, and was Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded collaborative research project 'Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers', a collaboration between the Universities of Manchester, York and Vigo, which was based at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library. 

Sophie is also a creative writer of prose fiction and autofiction. In 2012 she won the Arts Council England Next Great Novelist Award with her debut novel Rites (Route Publishing), and she has recently completed a new novel about motherhood, monstrosity, and memory which has been supported with funding from the Society of Authors and Arts Council England and was shortlisted for the Northern Writers Awards. She has also published several short stories, and had creative non-fiction commissioned for BBC radio. 

Research

Overview

Sophie's critical expertise is in literature and culture of the long eighteenth century. Her core interests are: women's writing, especially the novel; naming and identity; reading practices; cultures of collection; correspondence networks; and life-writing. In recent years, her research in these areas has addressed the talented and influential Burney family - particularly the novelist and diarist Frances Burney (1752-1840) and her brother, the critic and collector Charles Burney (1757-1817) – and their circles. Her most recent publication is Reading With the Burneys: Patronage, Paratext, and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2024). She has also edited a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life called 'New Perspectives on the Burney Family'. 

Between 2019 and 2023 Sophie was Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project 'Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers', based at the John Rylands Library. She managed the Reading Practices strand of the project, which aimed to investigate how the Mary Hamilton archive might alter scholarly understanding of eighteenth and nineteenth century patterns of textual circulation, reception and response. Her research on that topic, and others, has been published in Mary Hamilton and her Networks: Gender, Sociability, Manuscript, 1740-1850 (a special issue of Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 48 (4), December 2025.) In 2022 the team published their open access digital edition The Mary Hamilton Papers (c.1740-c.1850). This open access resource presents 3000 items of life writing (diaries, letters and manuscript books) as high-resolution images, metadata, and transcribed text with an editorial gloss. Sophie also manages a public engagement programme associated with the project called '#MeToo in the Georgian Court', which includes the BBC radio feature A Powerful Crush? and a set of open access teaching materials designed to support A-level students.

Sophie has published articles addressing Frances Burney's scientific sociability, Elizabeth Montagu's fictive kinship, the personal name as unit of surveillance in the writing of William Godwin and Jeremy Bentham, the death writing of Hester Thrale Piozzi, Jane Austen's composition process, and the referential name in historical fiction (with particular reference to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy). Her research has been supported by competitive fellowships from the Huntington Library, the Lewis Walpole Library, the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, McGill University and the John Rylands Library, among others. Sophie is also a writer of fiction and autofiction: her debut novel Rites won the Arts Council England Next Great Novelist Award and was described by Philip Pullman as "terrific", while her creative-critical essay about motherhood and mobility, Walking Matilda, was aired on BBC Radio 3 in 2021 and featured in Writers on Walks, an audio anthology published by Penguin, in 2023.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Sophie currently teaches on the second-year undergraduate modules Creative Writing: Contemporary Practice and Inventing Britain 1700-1830. In the past, she has contributed to undergraduate modules including Jane Austen, The Business of Books, Adventures in the Archive, and Writing Now. She contributes to the MA modules Romantic Texts and Contexts, Wollstonecraft to Austen: Femininity and Literary Culture, Critical Approaches to the Creative Industries, and Grasping the Nettle: A Prose Fiction Workshop.

Sophie supervises dissertations at undergraduate and taught postgraduate level. She has supervised or co-supervised doctoral projects addressing, among other things; the literary influences of Hester Thrale Piozzi; form in the diaries of Anne Lister; a previously unknown Burney family archive; the 'mental health novel' and the York Retreat; mourning and materiality in eighteenth-century women's poetry; the satirical novel of metamorphosis; and creative-critical approaches to recovering the life of the forgotten artist KItty Swan.. She runs a training session for the department's community of doctoral researchers called 'Working with Manuscripts'. She is an active member of the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Writers at York group.

External activities

Overview