Olivia Scarr
Thesis title: Cultivating Healthy Selfhood: Glasshouse Culture and the Victorian Body
Supervisors: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Research Interests
My DPhil research focuses on nineteenth-century indoor plant cultivation, examining how glasshouse culture and bodily health informed, created, and de/stabilised each other. It traces the emergence of urban-sanitary challenges alongside the popularisation of urban gardening, examining the imbrications and interconnections of objects and botanical, medical, and literary texts to explore how Victorians thought of and responded to their bodily health in relation to their domestic and natural environment.
Before my DPhil, I completed my schooling in Fine Arts after which I studied for a BA in Comparative Literature, followed by an MA in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Vienna, Austria.
My research interests broadly lie in the long nineteenth century and the relationship between literature and science, embodiment and (ab)natural environments, Victorian materialities, (urban) space and empire. I have an additional interest in postcolonial literatures of South(ern) Africa, where I have family and was partly raised and educated.
Conference papers
- ‘“Who loves a garden loves a greenhouse too”: Cowper, Eco (Un)Consciousness and Romantic Cultivations of Health and Self in Botanical Literatures’, British Association of Romantic Studies (BARS) ECR & PGR 2025 Conference, Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, 4.-5.09.2025
- ‘Wardian cases as (ab)natural spaces: cultivating climates under glass’, Fantastic Climates: Annual Conference of the German Association for Research of the Fantastic, University of Kassel, 5.-7.09.2024
- ‘Exzess(ive) Objekte: transgressive Materialitäten im Salon des viktorianischen Zeitalters’ (Excess(ive) Objects: transgressive Materialities in the Victorian parlour), SKK - 14th Student Congress of Comparative Literature, Freie Universität Berlin, 23.-25.05.2024
- ‘(Un)homely Cultivations: the botanical Other as the “Monstrous Feminine” in Short Fiction of the Fin de Siècle’, GIFCon - Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations, University of Glasgow, 15.-17.05.2024
Teaching
I have previously tutored at the University of Vienna’s English and African Studies Departments (Introduction to Anglophone Cultures and Societies, Literary and Cultural Theories and Concepts, Advanced Course African Literature).
Other Projects/Awards
- 2024 English Department Student Award for outstanding scholarly work in a master’s thesis, Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna
- 2024 Working Stipend for Literature awarded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture (for my writing project ‘Hunting Dogs’)
- 2022 Merit Scholarship awarded by the Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna
- 2019 'A Stranger at the Stormy Downs’, short story, WhynICHt Comparative Literature Magazine
- 2017 ‘A Thrush in Earnest’, short story, WhynICHt Comparative Literature Magazine
- 2016 ‘Rede an Hugo’, short story/essay, project „words_untitled“: artists reading texts in response to the renegotiation of European perspectives against the backdrop of the economic crisis, refugee crisis and burgeoning conservative politics
image (c) Valerie Eccli
