BARS/BAVS Nineteenth-Century Matters Fellowship 2024-2025 Awardee Announced

Nineteenth-Century Matters is an initiative jointly run by the British Association for Romantic Studies and the British Association for Victorian Studies. Now in its eighth year, it is aimed at postdoctoral researchers who have completed their PhD, but who are not currently employed in a full-time academic post. Nineteenth-Century Matters offers unaffiliated early career researchers a platform from which to pursue their research, while also organising an academic event on a theme related to nineteenth-century studies or a workshop focused on an aspect of professionalisation. 

BARS and BAVS are thrilled to announce that the Nineteenth-Century Matters Fellowship 2024-2025 has been awarded to Dr Amy Waterson. Dr Waterson will be affiliated with Royal Holloway, University of London until September 2025. 

Amy Waterson completed her doctoral studies earlier this year, graduating from the University of Edinburgh in July. Her PhD research examined how nineteenth-century realism was influenced by contemporary scientific developments, through the novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. She is in the early stages of expanding her thesis into a monograph, provisionally titled Altruism, Science, and Narrative in the Novel. As Nineteenth-Century Matters Fellow, she will organise a research event titled Nineteenth-Century Legacies.

Amy is current editor of the BAVS Newsletter. She has been a fiction reader for the James Tait Black award and was editor in chief for FORUM: The University of Edinburgh’s Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts between 2020 – 2021. She is a previous winner of the Patrick Tolfree essay prize, hosted by The Thomas Hardy Society. You can follow Amy on X at @ireadoldbooks.