Amy Waterson
Thesis title: Unravelling Webs of Affinity: Science, Narrative, and Society in the Victorian Novel
PhD supervisors:
Background
Amy holds an MA in English Literature and an MSc in Literature and Society, both from the University of Edinburgh.
Responsibilities & affiliations
Amy has been a fiction reader for the James Tait Black award since 2019 and was the editor in chief for FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts between 2020 -2021 (issues 31 and 32). She is the 2021 winner of the Patrick Tolfree Essay prize, hosted by The Thomas Hardy Society.
She is a member of the British Association for Victorian Studies, the Société Française des Etudes Victoriennes et Edouardiennes, and The Thomas Hardy Society.
Amy is also involved with the Binks Hub; a new, interdisciplinary research hub which works with communities to promote participatory and artistic methods in academic research.
Undergraduate teaching
English Literature 1
English Literature 2
Literary Studies 1A
Research summary
Amy's PhD research examines how nineteenth-century realism was influenced by contemporary scientific developments, through the novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James.
Current research interests
Amy's research interests include the interplay between scientific thought and literary writing during the nineteenth century. She is currently interested in expanding her PhD research by exploring the relationship between realism and the scientific romance. Other topics of interest include depictions of space, place, and their relation to gender and class, representations of 'Otherness', literary forms (especially the Bildungsroman), late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century literary culture, and depictions of children and childhood. Amy is particularly interested in individual authors like George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Bernard Shaw, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Dickens.Past research interests
Literature of the American Counterculture (1837 - 1971)Conference details
Amy has presented research papers on Henry James's handling of subjectivity in What Maisie Knew, the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, and Thomas Hardy's use of Darwinian thought in his early fiction at conferences, nationally and internationally.
Participant
2022: British Association for Victorian Studies annual conference, University of Birmingham
Société Française des Etudes Victoriennes et Edouardiennes annual conference, Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès
2021: University of Stirling Postgraduate Conference, University of Stirling
2020: Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, University of Durham
2018: British Association for Victorian Studies, University of Exeter
Waterson, Amy. "The Shakeable Faith of Thomas Hardy: Poetic Instability and Darwinian Interventions in 'Hap'". The Hardy Society Journal 18. 1, 2022.
Waterson, Amy. Review of Children's Play in Literature: Investigating the Strengths and the Subversions of the Playing Child. Edited by Joyce E. Kelley. Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 25. 1, 2021. https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/AJVS/index