Natasha Bharucha

natasha.bharucha@chch.ox.ac.uk

Supervisor: Dr. Ushashi Dasgupta 

Research Interests: early nineteenth-century literature; the city; movement and the body; essays and periodicals; history of reading; women’s writing 

Doctoral Research: My thesis traces how writers for early nineteenth-century periodicals, such as The London Magazine, The Monthly Magazine, The Examiner, and La Belle Assemblée, think about movement through crowded cityscapes in different ways, particularly when detailing moments of physical and social contact. I aim to capture the complexity of moving through London, showing the myriad ways writers think about embodiment in the city. Some of the writers I consider for this project are William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, Caroline Bowles, Mary Russell Mitford, Pierce Egan, William Hone, and Charles Dickens, as well as the influences of the likes of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. My research is funded by the AHRC and Christ Church College. Although I focus on London in the nineteenth century, I am more broadly interested in the ways literature articulates urban experience.