Professor Pauline Nestor
PhD (Oxford), MA (Oxford), BA, Hons (University of Melbourne)
Pauline Nestor curriculum vitae [
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I am engaged full-time in my current positions as Associate Dean - Research in the Faculty, and Academic Adviser in the Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research). I won't be taking on any graduates in the immediate future.
Biography
I was educated in Australia and England. After a BA (Hons) at Melbourne University, I attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and completed my Masters and Doctorate degrees in nineteenth-century English literature and culture. My books include George Eliot (Palgrave, 2002), Charlotte Bronte (Women Writers) (Macmillan, 1987), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992) and Female Friendships and Communities (Clarendon, 1985). I am also the editor of the Penguin Classics Wuthering Heights (2003) and the New Casebooks Villette (Macmillan, 1992).
Research interests
Nineteenth-century English women writers
I have written extensively on nineteenth-century English women writers, especially George Eliot, the Brontes and Elizabeth Gaskell. My research is informed by feminist and psychoanalytic theory and all my work analyses literary texts within the context of the rich cultural life of Victorian England. In particular, I have explored the new possibilities for women’s friendship and travel in mid-nineteenth century England and, more recently, the ethical dimension of George Eliot’s fiction.
I am currently working on a project (supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant) which combines literary analysis with cultural history to provide a new perspective on the development of the nineteenth-century novel and modern notions of subjectivity. My research examines women novelists’ contribution to the development of the modern idea of self against a historical context in which both scientific advances in representation (photography, mirrors, optical devices, etc) and changes to the material culture (such as the democratization of print and the introduction of the Penny Post) led to an obsession with representing the self. Simultaneously, contemporary debates on psychology, feminism, abolitionism and self-help crucially informed conceptions of female autonomy and identity – all combining to produce a wholly new set of possibilities for female self-representation.