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
-
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
-
My research expertise lies in Victorian life-writing. As a critic and textual editor, I am fascinated by the literary experimentation required when representing lives that defy social demands for silence or invisibility. To this end, my work explores the work and legacies of radical and transgressive figures, particularly women writers and “queer” artists from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I am currently completing a monograph on radical form in Victorian auto/biography for Edinburgh University Press.
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 I will collect together, for the very first time, Forster’s public short stories, his private stories unpublished in his lifetime on account of their explicit homosexual context, and his unfinished prose fragments.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 on 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.
I am a regular essayist and reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement.
- Publications
-
Books
Edited books
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
- View this article in WRRO
- Competing Life Narratives: Portraits of Vita Sackville-West. Life Writing, 8(3), 287-300. View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
Chapters
- 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
- View this article in WRRO
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.
- Randi Saloman, Virginia Woolf's Essayism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 192pp. ISBN: 9780748646487.. Modernist Cultures, 9(2), 314-316.
- Sex, Lies and Autobiography: The Ethics of Confession by James O’Rourke. Victorian Review, 34(2), 250-252.
Website content
- View this article in WRRO
Scholarly editions
- The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition. Palgrave Macmillan.
- Research group
-
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; and Holocaust memoirs.
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; and dialect in Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction.
I welcome PhD applications related to any of the following broad research areas: Victorian and modernist life-writing, Victorian gender and sexuality, textual editing, John Addington Symonds, E.M. Forster, and the Brontës.
- Teaching activities
-
I teach on a wide range of modules at undergraduate and postgraduate level. This varies each year, but will typically include:
- LIT2000 Genre
- LIT3101 Romantic and Victorian Prose
- LIT3065 The Brontës (convenor)
- LIT635 Confession (convenor)
- LIT665 Reimagining the 18th and 19th Centuries
I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and hold teaching qualifications in HE.