Participant Info

First Name
Anna
Last Name
Spydell
Country
United States
State
IN Indiana
Affiliation
Sewanee, University of the South
Website URL
annaspydell.com
Keywords
British literature, Romantic literature, Victorian literature, Edwardian literature, fin de siècle, Pre-Raphaelite, gothic literature, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Anne Brontë, decadence, Oscar Wilde, queerness, feminism, Olive Schreiner, South Africa, Boer Wars, William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
spydellanna@gmail.com
PhD
other credentials

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

Anna Spydell is a literary historian specializing in Romantic and Victorian artists and writers. A graduate of the Humanities program at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College, she was a recipient of the Saint Mother Theodore Guerin scholarship. In 2017 she became a MA candidate at the Sewanee School of Letters at the University of the South, and was awarded a William Peterfield Trent scholarship. That same year, she joined the nonfiction department of BookPage Magazine, reviewing books on history, nature, and culture. In 2018 she was awarded the Women Writers’ Fellowship by the Portland Film Festival, and in 2020 Broadview Press released a critical edition of suffragette Olive Schreiner’s Dreams, which she co-edited in collaboration with Dr. Barbara Black and Carly Newton Nations.

Her research focuses on the Gothic, the “other” Victorians with their visions of “other” worlds, and to intersections of the wild spaces of nature, of the heart, and of the long 19th century. She has lectured and presented on Schreiner; Mary Shelley; the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel murders; and masculinity in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. For the online resource Literary Encyclopedia, she contributed entries on the lives and work of Pre-Raphaelite artists Edward Burne-Jones and Julia Margaret Cameron. Anna has been a speaker for the London Nineteenth Century Studies Seminar Graduate Strand (LNCSS), the Victorian Popular Fiction Association (VPFA)’s Third Sex Reading Group, and has been featured on the Plath & Co podcast. She is presently working on her Master’s thesis, an examination of Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, and her conceptualization of “coffin love.”

Recent Publications
Media Coverage
Country Focus
United Kingdom
Expertise by Geography
Africa, England, United Kingdom, United States
Expertise by Chronology
18th century, 19th century, Early Modern
Expertise by Topic
Art & Architectural History, Book History, Colonialism, Environment, Gender, Libraries & Archives, Literary History, Material Culture, Museums, Women