Broome Saunders, Dr Clare

Job Title: Research Fellow
College: Wolfson
Subject/ Period: 19th Century

Email address: clare.broomesaunders@wolfson.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

Clare Broome Saunders works mainly on nineteenth-century poetry, and is particularly interested in women writers whose work spans the boundaries of Romanticism and Victorianism, such as Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She is also interested in the development of nineteenth-century medievalism: her recent book, Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, considers the ways in which women poets, biographers, and historians used medieval motifs and settings to enable them to comment on controversial contemporary issues during the socio-political and religious upheaval of their age.

Dr Broome Saunders is currently producing a critical study of Louisa Stuart Costello (1799-1870) - who worked as poet, travel-writer, translator, medievalist, historian, novelist, and visual artist - and an edition of selections from her work. 

Recent Publications: 

Forthcoming. ‘The individual traveller vs. the guidebook: Louisa Stuart Costello’s Venice.’ Studies in Travel Writing, Special Issue: Travel Writing and Italy (Summer 2012)                                          

Editor, The Soldier's Orphan: A Tale, by Mrs Costello. (Chawton House Library: Women's Novels). Pickering and Chatto, December 2010.

Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism. New York. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

'"Judge no more what ladies do": Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Active Medievalism, the Female Troubadour, and Joan of Arc', Victorian Poetry, EBB Special Edition, 45 (Winter 2006).

Other Information:

Travel Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Seminar Series

Clare is co-convenor of 'Travel Cultures: An Oxford Interdisciplinary Seminar Series', with Dr Simon Cooke (Wolfson) and Dr Tom Wright (St. Edmund Hall). For seminar schedules, and details of the inaugural conference Travel and Truth (16-18 September 2011, Wolfson), please see http://travelcultures.weebly.com/

Recent Conference Papers

'"Lady Traveller" or "Learned Female": Louisa Stuart Costello and the "individual" traveller in the 1840s', Travel in the Nineteenth Century: Narratives, Histories and Collections, University of Lincoln, 13-15 July 2011.

'Incarcerating the Sane: The Asylum and Female Powerlessness in Nineteenth-Century Gothic and Sensation Fiction', Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the 19th Century, All Saints House, Birmingham, 13th May 2011.

 'Queen Victoria and the Poetic, Political and Pictorial Uses of Medievalism'. Poetry. Politics and Pictures in the Nineteenth Century, University of Sheffield, 26-27 March 2010.

'Mrs Costello's The Soldier's Orphan and the Gothic Inheritance'. Women and Gothic, Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, 23 January 2010.

'Medievalism, contradiction and Victorian women writers'. BAVS-NAVSA 2009, Churchill College, University of Cambridge, 13-15 July 2009.

'Interpreting "Elaine" and "Guinevere": illustrations for Tennyson's poems in the early twentieth century'. Tennyson's Futures, University of Oxford, 27-28 March 2009.

'"Venice has not been wanting in female learning among its other distinctions, to render it illustrious": Louisa Stuart Costello, Venice, and the scholarly travel writer'. Ruskin, Venice, and 19th Century Cultural Travel, Venice, 25– 27 September 2008.

'"Though females are forbidden to interfere in politics": war, medievalism, and the Romantic woman writer'. Romanticism and War, University of Oxford, 28-29 September 2007.

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