Deborah Russell

Profile

Biography

Deborah Russell joined the Department of English and Related Literature in 2015, having spent three years as a Lecturer at Queen's University Belfast. This was a return to York, where she did her AHRC-funded PhD in the Department and the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies. 

Deborah’s research centres on Romantic-period Gothic fiction and theatre, with particular interests in women’s writing, national identity, adaptation, and silence. She co-organises a collaborative network, the Gothic Women Project, and is currently editing two Gothic novels: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1831 version) for Oxford World’s Classics and Ann Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ann Radcliffe. She teaches widely across the curriculum, especially on eighteenth-century and Romantic-period modules. She is a Fellow of Advance HE and a recipient of the Vice-Chancellor’s Teaching Award. 

Research

Overview

Deborah is a member of the interdisciplinary Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. Her research interests focus on Romantic-period Gothic, with a particular emphasis on women’s writing. 

Her publications include articles on authors such as Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith, as well as surveys of Gothic romance and the early Gothic novel in Britain. Her first monograph, provisionally entitled Domestic Gothic, focuses on discourses of national identity in women’s Gothic fiction. She has been commissioned to edit Ann Radcliffe’s first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, for the new Cambridge University Press edition of the works of this preeminent Gothic novelist (series eds. Michael Gamer and Angela Wright). She will also edit Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1831) for the Oxford World’s Classics series. Aided by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship from the Huntington Library and a Visiting Fellowship from Yale University’s Lewis Walpole Library, she has begun the research for her second book, which will examine dynamics of silence and the politics of adaptation in Romantic-period theatre. 

Deborah co-organises the Gothic Women Project, a collaborative endeavour that is devoted to celebrating the work of undervalued and understudied women writers. The project is supported by the British Association of Romantic Studies.

Supervision

Deborah welcomes enquiries about supervision from potential research students with interests in Gothic fiction, Gothic drama, eighteenth-century women’s writing, Romantic-period women’s writing, silence and spectacle, and/or narratives of national identity.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Deborah teaches across the curriculum, particularly on modules that focus on the eighteenth century and Romantic period. From 2018-21, she was the Department’s Director of Undergraduate Teaching. She convenes the cohort-wide first-year module 'Approaches to Literature I: Writing Modernity' and offers an Advanced Option Module on ‘The Villains of Romantic Gothic’.

Postgraduate

Deborah contributes to the team-taught core modules for the MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies and the MA in Literature of the Romantic Period, as well as the option module ‘Wollstonecraft to Austen: Femininity and Literary Culture’. She offers an MA option module on ‘Gothic Bodies’.

Deborah was awarded the Vice-Chancellor’s Teaching Award in 2021.