My personal website can be found at www.sophieratcliffe.com
My research interests include work on the history of reading, materiality and emotion. I am currently completing a monograph, based on research funded by the Leverhulme Trust, about children and libraries in the nineteenth century.
Creative critical practice is another research strand. My book The Lost Properties of Love was published in the UK in 2019, and the USA in 2024. You can read a review of it here.
Recent publications on nineteenth-century literature include articles on reading and selfhood, and a related piece on feeling, history and presence.
I also have a longstanding interest in what might be called the applied Medical Humanities - that is, the ways in which literature and medicine interact today. I have led a series of seminars for those who work in the health service, You can find out more about the seminars here.
Additional publications include P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters (2011), and On Sympathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
You may find me teaching and lecturing at undergraduate level on themes such as 19th century material culture, or postmodern emotion, and numerous authors including Dickens, Trollope, Browning, Joyce, Beckett, W. H. Auden, Geoffrey Hill, Martin Amis and Zadie Smith. I am interested in the intersections between literature and the visual arts, and in literature and pop music/disco. I have supervised doctorates in nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century literature, and co-teach a Paper 6 undergraduate option on Writing Lives.
