- Nineteenth-century medievalism
- Nineteenth-century women’s poetry, especially Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
- Nineteenth-century women travel writers in Europe
- Connections between art and literature in the long nineteenth century, particularly book illustration.
My research focuses on literature, history, art, and culture from 1780 to 1918. Central to this is my work on medievalism in the long nineteenth century, particularly the ways in which women writers and artists use medieval literature, history, and contexts to facilitate socio-political commentary. This was the focus of my first book Women Writers and Nineteenth Century Medievalism (2009) and continues to motivate much of my writing, including my chapter 'Women Writers and the Medieval' for The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism (2020).
My main current project is Medievalism 1830-1918: Politics, Literature, and Society, a book on the widespread political uses of Anglo-Saxonism and medievalism throughout the nineteenth century to the end of the First World War. This book demonstrates how pervasive and significant medievalism was to political discussion throughout the period - across all parties and all social classes – and, crucially, continues to highlight the importance of medievalism as an empowering discourse for women’s political comment.
I am also working extensively on the Irish born, Scottish artist Phoebe Anna Traquair, especially on her illustrated editions of Dante, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Tennyson. Her illustrations elucidate the continuities and connections between the work of William Blake and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and, together with her remarkable public artworks such as her mural paintings, they also show her engagement in contemporary theological questions, and in environmental issues.
I continue my research focus on the work of Louisa Stuart Costello (1799-1870), who was a poet, travel-writer, translator, medievalist, historian, novelist, and visual artist. My book Louisa Stuart Costello: A 19th Century Writing Life (2015) sought to offer an introduction to and overview of her life and work, and to make some of her texts more easily available for students and academics, and my next project on Costello will focus on her role as a scholar of medieval French literature and language. Costello’s extensive travel writing in the first half of the nineteenth century led to my interest in this field, which led to the publication of Women, Travel Writing, and Truth (2014).
You can find a full list of my publications on the right of this page.
Literature in English, 1760-1830; Literature in English, 1830-1910; Literature in English, 1910-present; and a range of FHS Paper 7 dissertation options in the long-nineteenth century.
MSt. dissertation supervisor for a range of topics in nineteenth-century literature; particularly interested to work with graduate students on medievalism, women's poetry, the Brontës, and the Gothic.
Clare is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Recent Invited Talks
International Tennyson Society Annual Lecture 2024, ‘Women illustrating Tennyson in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’. Lincoln, 22 June 2024.
The Pre-Raphaelite Society lecture, ‘Phoebe Anna Traquair’s Visionary Medievalism’, Birmingham, 10th February 2024.
“The inescapable lure of the medieval: politics, pictures, and poetics in the long nineteenth century”. Georgetown University, 26 September 2023
“Phoebe Anna Traquair, Dante, and William Blake: 'all the unapproachable beauty in nature's details'”, A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment series. Georgetown University (online), 14 March 2023.
“Visionary medievalism in the nineteenth century: William Blake, Phoebe Anna Traquair, and EBB's Sonnets from the Portuguese”. University of Lincoln, 2 February 2023.
Selected Conference papers
'Women learning the Middle Ages in the Long Nineteenth Century', International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, 7-10 July 2025.
“Wild glances of the poetical faculty”: Blake’s afterlives in illustrations for EBB's Sonnets, Global Blake: Afterlives in Art, Literature and Music, University of Lincoln (online),11-13 January 2022.
'EBB's negotiations with William Blake's “excess”', Measure and Excess: INCS International Conference, University of Roma, Rome. 13-15 June 2018.
'“Now thy living wreath is won': Corinne and the woman poet in Hemans”, 'L.E.L', and 'EBB', Reputations, Legacies, Futures: Jane Austen, Germaine de Staël and their contemporaries, 1817-2017, Chawton House Library, Hampshire, 13-15 July 2017.
'“I am of Florence”: women's literary networks in Florence in the nineteenth century, NAVSA/AVSA 2017, Florence, 17-20 May 2017.
'“a strange and, I think, dangerous composition”: Aurora Leigh and the perils of history', Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Legacies of Aurora Leigh: literature, politics, society, University of Westminster, 15 October 2016.
'“I am an esquire”: Charlotte Brontë's medievalism', Charlotte Brontë: A Bicentennial Celebration of her Life and Works, Chawton House Library, 13-14 May 2016.
'Victoria, Alfred, and Arthur: medievalism and empire in nineteenth century culture', International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, 8 July 2014.
https://www.bfriars.ox.ac.uk/people/clare-broome-saunders/
