Prof Rebecca Stott
| Job Title | Contact | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Professor Literature & Creative Writing |
Tel: +44 (0)1603 59 2133 |
Arts Building 1.48 |
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Biography
Rebecca Stott is both a novelist and an academic. As an academic she has published widely in the Victorian period including a book called The Fabrication of the Victorian Femme Fatale, a collection of essays on Tennyson and articles on Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, H.D., Virginia Woolf, Carlyle and aspects of Victorian science and Victorian poetry. For the last few years her academic work has become focused on the interface between literature and science, particularly constructions of the 'natural' in Victorian writing. She published a partial biography of Darwin in 2003 called Darwin and the Barnacle, (Faber). She is currently finishing a book on the history of evolutionary ideas before Darwin. This book entitled Speculators: Poets and Philosophers of Evolution, is a study of European intellectual migration in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It asks how these ideas mutated as they moved across geographical boundaries, in and out of different European languages and migrated between different literary and philosophical genres.
She is an affiliated scholar at the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science Department at Cambridge, a Fellow for the Royal Society of the Arts and a regular contributor to (and occasional presenter for) BBC Radio programmes.
Career
Rebecca came to UEA in 2007 having taught previously in the English departments of Anglia Ruskin (Cambridge), Leeds and York. She completed her MA and PhD at York University. She grew up in Brighton.
In the spring of 2007 Rebecca published a historical thriller called Ghostwalk which is published in the US (Random House) and the UK (Weidenfeld and Nicolson) and is being translated into 14 different languages. It was shortlisted for the Jelf Group First novel Award and the Author's Club First Novel Award. Set both in contemporary and seventeenth-century Cambridge it weaves together fiction and non-fiction and explores the conventions of form as well as the conventions and limitations of historical writing.
Website
Key Research Interests
I have just finished a second novel, The Coral Thief, an adventure/ coming of age/ heist story set in Paris in 1815 which weaves together as a kind of 'braided history' early evolutionary theory, the ideas of Rousseau, and the last years of Napoleon. This will be published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in August 2009; Random House in Sept 2009 and will be translated into 8 languages for European publishers. I am now completing an academic monograph on the early history of evolutionary ideas called Speculators: Poets and Philosophers of Evolution. This is commissioned for Chicago University Press for delivery at the end of 2009 and is half completed. I have also contracted to write a third novel, Cremorne Rain, for delivery in 2011, a novel set in late nineteenth-century London. This is based on already existing material. I am completing a lecture called Darwin in the Literary World for the Darwin Lecture Series which will be published as an essay in a collection in 2010 by CUP. A further essay on Darwinism in contemporary poetry has been commissioned by George Levine for a collection of essays called Secular Enchantments to be published in 2010.
My area of expertise is creative writing, the nineteenth century novel, the Gothic, nineteenth-century poetry, literature and science.
I supervise students working on the critical-creative PhD or on aspects of nineteenth-century literature.
Publications
- Rebecca Stott, 2004, Darwin and the Barnacle, Faber and Faber,
- Rebecca Stott, 2003, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Longmans,
- Rebecca Stott, 2007, Ghostwalk, Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
- Rebecca Stott, 2004, Oyster (Animal), Reaktion Books,
- Rebecca Stott, 2003, Theatre of Glass: The Woman who Brought the Sea to the City, Short Books, (ISBN: 1904095364).
- Rebecca Stott / Peter Chapman, 2001, Grammar and Writing, 582382416, (ISBN: 582382416).
- Rebecca Stott / Simon Avery, 2001, Writing with Style, Longmans, (ISBN: 582382424).
- Rebecca Stott / Tony Young and Cordelia Bryan, 2001, Speaking Your Mind, Longmans, (ISBN: 582382432).
- Rebecca Stott /Anna Snaith and Rick Rylance, Anna Snaith and Rick Rylance (ed), 2001, Making Your Case: a Practical Guide to Essay Writing, Longmans, (ISBN: 582382440).
External Activities and Indicators of Esteem
- Affiliated scholar at the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science Department at Cambridge
- Fellow for the Royal Society of the Arts
Key Responsibilities
Professor Stott is the course convenor for the BA in English Literature and Creative Writing.