Dr Amber Regis
School of English
Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature
+44 114 222 8469
Full contact details
School of English
Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7RA
- Profile
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I joined the School of English in September 2012, having previously taught across the arts and humanities at several institutions including Chester, Keele, Liverpool John Moores and the Open University.
I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in January 2018.
- Research interests
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My research expertise lies in Victorian life-writing and non-fiction prose. As a critic and textual editor, I’m fascinated by defiant acts of literary experimentation in response to social demands for silence or invisibility. To this end, I explore the lives, work and legacies of transgressive figures, particularly women writers and “queer” artists from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I am a leading expert on the life and work of John Addington Symonds, and in 2016 I published the first complete edition of his Memoirs. This unique text records Symonds’s experience as a homosexual man living subject to nineteenth-century social mores and legal repression, and its publication enabled new “queer” histories of our Victorian past. My next editorial project will be E.M. Forster’s Shorter Fiction for Cambridge University Press (as part of the Cambridge Edition of the Fiction of E.M. Forster). I will collect together, for the very first time, Forster’s public short stories, his private stories unpublished in his lifetime on account of their explicit homosexual context, and his unfinished prose fragments.
I am also a Brontë scholar and in 2017 I co-edited (with Deborah Wynne) a field-defining study of Charlotte Brontë’s cultural legacies. This book also contained my original research into Brontë portraiture and biographical stage plays. I am in the early stages of a new research project exploring the Brontës’ prefatory writings, and I am co-editing The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts with Deborah Wynne for Edinburgh University Press (and to which I will contribute a chapter on ‘Charlotte Brontë’s queer theatre’).
I am a regular essayist and reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement.
- Publications
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Books
- (Re)Reading John Addington Symonds, a special issue of English Studies.
Edited books
- Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
- (Re) Reading John Addington Symonds..
- (Re) Reading John Addington Symonds..
Journal articles
- Interpreting Emily: ekphrasis and allusion in Charlotte Brontë's 'Editor's Preface' to Wuthering Heights. Brontë Studies, 45(2), 168-182. View this article in WRRO
- Introduction: (Re)Reading John Addington Symonds (1840-93). English Studies, 94(2), 131-136. View this article in WRRO
- Late style and speaking out: J A Symonds's In the Key of Blue. English Studies, 94(2), 206-231. View this article in WRRO
- Early career Victorianists and social media: impact, audience and online identities. Journal of Victorian Culture, 17(3), 355-362. View this article in WRRO
- Miss Havisham's Dress: Materialising Dickens in Film Adaptations of Great Expectations. Neo-Victorian Studies, 5(2), 35-58. View this article in WRRO
- Competing Life Narratives: Portraits of Vita Sackville-West. Life Writing, 8(3), 287-300. View this article in WRRO
- The colony, the carpenter's shop, and the making of the queer "man of letters": hybridity, art and sexuality in J A Symonds's writing. Etudes Anglaises, 61(3), 300-310. View this article in WRRO
Chapters
- Un/making the Victorians: literary biography, 1880-1930 In Bradford R (Ed.), A Companion to Literary Biography (pp. 63-86). Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. View this article in WRRO
- Introduction In Regis AK (Ed.), The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds (pp. 1-56). London: Palgrave Macmillan. View this article in WRRO
- Virginia Woolf, Genre-Bending and Feminist Life-Writing: A Room of One's Own In Bruce S & Smits K (Ed.), Feminist Moments: Reading Feminist Texts (pp. 115-122). London: Bloomsbury Academic.
- Perfomance anxiety and costume drama: lesbian sex on the BBC In Aston J, Glyn B & Johnson B (Ed.), Television, Sex and Society: Analysing Contemporary Representations (pp. 137-150). London: Continuum View this article in WRRO
- "But something betwixt and between": Roger Fry and the contradictions of biography In Ryan D & Bolaki S (Ed.), Contradictory Woolf: Selected Papers from the Twenty-First Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (pp. 82-87). Clemson: Clemson University Press.
- "From all this diversity ... not a riot of confusion but a richer unity": The limits of self representation in Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography In Burrells A, Ellis S, Parsons D & Simpson K (Ed.), Woolfian Boundaries: Selected Papers from the Sixteenth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (pp. 8-14). Clemson: Clemson University Press.
Book reviews
- The Life and Adventures of Harvey Teasdale, The Converted Clown and Man Monkey, with His Remarkable Conversion in Wakefield Prison. Life Writing, 17(1), 125-128.
- CARRINGTON'S LETTERS Her art, her loves, her friendships Edited by Anne Chisholm. TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT(6029), 12-12.
- THE ILLUSTRATED LETTERS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF. TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT(5992), 31-31.
- CHEAP MODERNISM Expanding markets, publishers' series and the avant-garde. TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT(5967), 30-30.
- LIVING IN SQUARES, LOVING IN TRIANGLES The Lives and loves of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT(5863), 17-17.
- LIFE IN SQUARES. TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT(5863), 17-17.
- BEHIND THE MASK The life of Vita Sackville-West. TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT(5844), 12-13.
- THE DISINHERITED A story of family, love and betrayal. TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT(5844), 12-13.
- Soft-focus tangles. TLS - The Times Literary Supplement(5863), 17.
- VIRGINIA WOOLF AND MUSIC. TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT(5819), 27-27.
- Randi Saloman, Virginia Woolf's Essayism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 192pp. ISBN: 9780748646487.. Modernist Cultures, 9(2), 314-316.
- THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP MEMOIR CLUB. TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT(5807), 27-27.
- WOMEN'S UNIVERSITY FICTION, 1880-1945. TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT(5801), 27-27.
- THE LONDON SCENE Introduced by Hermione Lee. TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT(5790), 26-26.
- THE YEARS The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf. TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT(5769), 14-15.
- CHARLESTON AND MONK'S HOUSE The intimate house museums of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT(5769), 14-15.
- IN THE HOLLOW OF THE WAVE Virginia Woolf and Modernist uses of nature. TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT(5769), 14-15.
- VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE THEATER. TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT(5769), 14-15.
- THE PUBLIC LIVES OF CHARLOTTE AND MARIE STOPES. TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT(5767), 30-30.
- ANGELS OF MODERNISM Religion, culture, aesthetics 1910-1960. TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT(5709), 26-26.
- CRITICAL CHILDREN The use of childhood in ten great novels. TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT(5677), 27-27.
- Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-Century 'Hidden' Lives. JOURNAL OF VICTORIAN CULTURE, 17(1), 108-112.
- Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. JOURNAL OF VICTORIAN CULTURE, 17(1), 108-112.
- Sex, Lies and Autobiography: The Ethics of Confession by James O’Rourke. Victorian Review, 34(2), 250-252.
Website content
- Slow, Swift Grief.
- (Re)Presenting the Archive. View this article in WRRO
Scholarly editions
- The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition. Palgrave Macmillan.
- (Re)Reading John Addington Symonds, a special issue of English Studies.
- Research group
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I have been involved with supervising PhD theses on topics including: servants’ letters and life-writing; Gothic thresholds in the Brontës; Sherlock Holmes and the non-human; nineteenth-century Switzerland; Holocaust memoirs; women and archives; and the diary of Anne Lister.
I have examined PhDs on: the juvenilia of the Brontë and Rossetti families; First World War life-writing; protest in the work of G.W.M. Reynolds; dialect in Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction; the history of the ‘freak show’; and Victorian women writers’ manuscript revisions.
I welcome PhD applications related to any of the following broad research areas: Victorian and modernist life-writing and/or non-fiction prose, Victorian gender and sexuality, textual editing, John Addington Symonds, E.M. Forster, and the Brontës.
- Teaching activities
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I teach on a wide range of modules at undergraduate and postgraduate level. This varies each year, but will typically include:
- Romanticism to Modernism
- The Brontës (convenor)
- Middlemarch (convenor)
- Confession (convenor)
- Reimagining the 18th and 19th Centuries
- Victorian Bodies
I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and I hold teaching qualifications in HE and a Senate Award for Learning and Teaching.