Dr. Alison Chapman

Dr. Alison Chapman studied at the Universities of Oxford and Glasgow, and before her appointment at UVic in 2005 she taught at the Universities of Sheffield Hallam, Dundee, and Glasgow. She specialises in nineteenth-century literature and culture (especially Victorian poetry, women’s writing, Anglo-Italian studies, transnationalism), periodical studies and book history, as well as digital studies. Awards for her research include the UVic Faculty of Humanities Research Excellence Award, the Scottish Studies Award, and the Boydston Award (from the Association for Documentary Editing). She is the recipient of grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Academy, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom, as well as fellowships from the Armstrong Browning Library and Princeton University Library. At UVic she recently served as the English Department Graduate Adviser and the University Grants Crafter, and was an elected Faculty Senator. Dr. Chapman is currently on the editorial board of the Cambridge University Press series Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, and also serves on the boards of the academic journals Victorian Poetry, Victorian Review, and Victorians Institute Studies. She was the Wolff lecturer and keynote speaker at the July 2023 annual conference of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals in Caen, France, and in September 2023 was elected to the Society’s Board of Directors (2023-2025).

Her most recent monograph, Networking the Nation: British and American Women Poets and Italy, 1840-1870 (Oxford University Press 2015), was widely reviewed as a major intervention in transnational women’s poetry and feminist literary criticism. In her Times Literary Supplement review, Rohan Maitzen states that the book “refines, deepens, complicates [. . .] the important task begun by pioneering feminist researchers of the late twentieth century.” In Victorian Studies, Annemarie Drury calls the study an “smart and meticulous. [. . .] an exceptionally rich study for anyone interested in the cosmopolitanism and political commitments of Victorian poetry or the development of British and American women’s writing.” Clare Broom Saunders assesses Networking the Nation as “a rich, intricate, and absorbing study, which combines scholarly rigour with admirable readability, and is a valuable resource for any reader interested in women’s writing and politics in the mid-nineteenth century” (Notes & Queries), and Flavia Alaya writes that it is “a colorful, humanized, feminized, collaborative weaving of an extraordinary Italian/Anglo-Italian history” (Choice).

Work in progress includes the digital project Digital Victorian Periodical Project (https://dvpp.uvic.ca), funded by two SSHRC Insight Grants (2018-2023 and 2023-2028), and a monograph on Victorian poetry, form, and place. Forthcoming publications include the edited collection of essays Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1870s (Cambridge University Press). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (class of 2023).