Dr Michelle Witen
I am the Junior Professor of English and Irish Literature and the Director of the EUF Centre for Irish Studies at the Europa-Universität Flensburg. Before taking up these positions in the northernmost city in Germany in 2019, I worked at the University of Basel as a Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow. I also obtained my DPhil from the University of Oxford with a thesis on Joyce and musical structure, and I completed my MA and BA at the University of Western Ontario in (the Canadian) London, Ontario.
One of my main research interests is the interplay between music and literature, and this fascination extends particularly into the Victorian and Modernist periods. This is also a very personal topic for me, as I am a trained opera singer. Relatedly, my first monograph, James Joyce and Absolute Music (Bloomsbury 2018) appeared in paperback in 2019, and examines Joyce’s incorporation of musical structure across his opus alongside 19th-century debates regarding absolute vs program music. It was the first full length study to assess the musical aspect of the National Library of Ireland’s 2002 manuscript acquisition, wherein Joyce details his fugal creative process and musical knowledge. I have also published and given papers/talks on T. S. Eliot, George Du Maurier, Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Bernard Shaw, Elizabeth Bowen, and other (non-fugue) aspects of James Joyce and music.
My other research interests (and concomitant publications) include the Ladybird books and Brexit spoof literature, Stage Irishness in Darby O’Gill and the Little People, hysteria and Frankenstein, the relationship between Victorian caricatures in Punch and Dracula, and the theoretical framework of the nonhuman. For the latter, I co-edited the special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly on “Joyce and the Nonhuman” (with Katherine Ebury, 2021), co-authored the forthcoming chapter, “Live Flowers and Fabulous Monsters: Non-Human Life and Extinction in Through the Looking-Glass” (with Paul Fagan) for Through the Looking-Glass: A Companion (ed. Franziska Kohlt and Justine Houyaux), and contributed a forthcoming chapter on music and the nonhuman for Finnegans Wake: Human and Nonhuman Histories (ed. Richard Barlow and Paul Fagan). I am also the co-editor of the recently published Modernism in Wonderland: Legacies of Lewis Carroll (with John Morgenstern, Bloomsbury 2024) and Shakespeare and Space: Theatrical Explorations of the Spatial Paradigm (with Ina Habermann, Palgrave 2016).
A more complete list of my research and publications can be found here: https://www.uni-flensburg.de?30702
During my semester at Merton, I will be working on my second monograph, Vice, Scandal, and ‘News’ in the Victorian Periodical. This project focuses on the ways in which Thomas de Quincey, Wilkie Collins, A. C. Doyle, L. T. Meade, and Bram Stoker incorporate nineteenth-century newspapers and periodical culture into their works. You will definitely find me in the Bodleian, intently reading issues of The Strand Magazine, The Woman at Home, and newspaper reportage of the Opium Wars!
