Charley Matthews
Thesis title: The Queer Woman Reader in the Nineteenth Century
English Literature (AHRC)
Year of study: 3
- English Literature
- School of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures
Contact details
- Email: s2058756@ed.ac.uk
PhD supervisor:
Background
Charley is pursuing their AHRC-funded PhD on nineteenth-century reading practices and queer book cultures. They have previously worked in the book trade (contemporary and antiquarian), and they currently teach undergraduate English Literature.
Qualifications
MSc Book History & Material Culture, University of Edinburgh, 2019
MA English Literature, Durham University, 2014
Responsibilities & affiliations
- Tutor for undergraduate course Literary Studies 1A
- Reader for the James Tait Black prize (biography category), 2021, 2022, and 2023
- Member of the LLC lifewriting reading group and research network
- Member of the Eighteenth Century Studies Society at the University of Stirling
- Member of SHARP
Undergraduate teaching
Tutor on Literary Studies 1A and 1B
Research summary
Charley is interested in recovering marginalised voices within book history. Their AHRC-funded PhD thesis aims to recover the reading practices of queer women and gender-nonconforming people from the nineteenth century, drawing on diaries, letters, and book reviews. They use both qualitative and quantitative data analysis to understand how private and social reading practices intersected with and influenced emerging queer identities and lived queer experiences in the nineteenth century. Their case studies include Anne Lister, Geraldine Jewsbury, and Mary Diana Dods/Walter Sholto Douglas.
Charley's research interests also include radical publishing histories, gothic fiction, reading practices and the development of the novel, and the digital humanities.
Affiliated research centres
Current project grants
AHRC/SGSAH Doctoral Training Programme, 2020-2024
SGSAH Engagement funding, awarded November 2022
Past project grants
Una Europa Digital Cultural Heritage workshop funding, 2022
SGSAH Research Showcase funding, 2022
Maggs Bros LRBS funding, 2021
Papers delivered
"Reading practices in the nineteenth century - a workshop," co-leader, SGSAH symposium, University of Glasgow, 2022
"Anne Lister's reading habits: a queer quantitative approach," Eighteenth Century Studies seminar series, University of Stirling, 2022
"Non-normative lives and the ethics of the private diary," Lifewriting seminar series, UoE, 2021
"Anne Lister, reading, and the creation of genderqueer knowledge," CHAPTER seminar series, IES London, 2021
"Mary Hays' Female Biography," Gender and the Book Trades, University of St Andrews, 2021
"The Queer Woman Reader," lightning talk at Moving Texts: SHARP 2021, online
"Ecofeminism and Thresholds of Disaster in Sylvia Townsend Warner's Kingdoms of Elfin," Threshold, Boundary, and Crossover in Fantasy, University of York, 2020
Matthews, C. (in press). “Mary Hays’ Female Biography (1803), the anthology, and reading as gendered labour in the early nineteenth century book trades.” Gender and the Book Trades. E. Watson and J. Farrell-Jobst (Eds.). Brill’s Library of the Written Word.
Matthews, C. (2022). “‘I feel the mind enlarging itself’: Anne Lister’s gendered reading practices.” Journal of Lesbian Studies, 26(4), 367-381.