Dr Lucy Morse
College: College of Humanities
Discipline: English
Department: English
Research Centre/Unit: Centre for Victorian Studies
Lucy received her PhD in English with a specialisation in Victorian Studies and Environmental Humanities in January 2021. She was a Centre for Victorian Studies PGR Representative from September 2018 to December 2020, and she is currently an Instructor for the Approaches to Criticism, Advanced Critical Theory, and The Novel modules at Exeter.
Her doctoral thesis explores the radical awakening in the Gladstonian liberalism era to the increased striation, enclosure and privatisation of previously common and public environments. These environments were being subsumed into large estates in the country and spaces of industry in the metropolis. Her chapters examine the various forms of nomadism, transgressive noctambulism, street lecturing and wandering that became both the result of dispossessions and paradoxically the means of enacting radical resistance. These forms of rebellious wandering offered ways of defying the strictures and outright thefts of newly enclosed environments for the landed gentry and capitalist ventures both in the historical moment and in the novel’s frame.
Her current scholarship focuses on the literature and nonfiction prose of Thomas Hardy, William Morris and Charles Dickens. She has presented conference papers at NAVSA, BAVS and INCS. Lucy received an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship to research at the Huntington Library and an Ernest Walder Memorial Scholarship to study at Gladstone's Library. When their doors are open, she is often found reading in a corner of the Natural History Museum or the British Library in London.
