Dr Rosie Whitcombe

I am an MHRA Postdoctoral Research Associate working in the School of English on the forthcoming CUP edition of the collected works of Ann Radcliffe. I studied for my BA and MA at the University of Sheffield, before taking a PhD at Birmingham City University. I am an Associate Fellow of the HEA. I was awarded a STEAM scholarship from Birmingham City University to undertake my doctoral research into the letters of John Keats. My thesis examines Keats’s letters within an historical and literary critical framework and studies the cultures and forms of letter writing in the long-eighteenth century. I am particularly interested in Keats’s epistolary negotiation of death and grief and how he uses the letter to merge (often literally in a material sense) verse and prose to achieve new meaning. My essay, ‘Connection, Consolation, and the Power of Distance in the Letters of John Keats’, won the 2020 Keats-Shelley Essay Prize and was published in the spring 2021 issue of The Keats-Shelley Review. Alongside Professor Dawn Hadley (University of York) and Dr Vicky Crewe (University of Sheffield), I am co-editor of The Life and Adventures of Harvey Teasdale, The Converted Clown and Man-Monkey, with his Remarkable Conversion in Wakefield Prison. The text is a rare example of nineteenth-century working-class autobiography.