Dr. Alison Chapman, FRSC
Position
Contact
Credentials
MA (Oxford), PhD (Glasgow)
Area of expertise
Nineteenth-century literature and culture, Victorian poetry, women's writing, Anglo-Italian studies, Digital Humanities.
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 (), 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).
Books
Alison Chapman. Networking the Nation: British and American Poetry and Italy, 1840-1870. Oxford University Press, 2015.
Alison Chapman and Caley Ehnes (eds). Victorian Periodical Poetry, a special issue of Victorian Poetry. 54: 2 (Spring 2014).
Alison Chapman and Joanna Meacock. A Rossetti Family Chronology. Palgrave, 2007.
Alison Chapman (ed.). Victorian Women Poets. Boydell and Brewer, 2003.
Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler (eds). Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Artists and Writers in Italy. Manchester University Press, 2003.
Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler (eds). British and Irish Expatriate Writers in Italy, a special issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies. 39: 2 (April 2003).
Alison Chapman, Richard Cronin and Antony H. Harrison (eds.). A Companion to Victorian Poetry. Blackwell, 2002.
Alison Chapman. The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
Articles and chapters
“The Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project,” Victorians Institute Journal, vol. 5, 2023, pp. 186-201 (forthcoming).
“Filler Poems: Poetry, Victorian Periodicals, and the Forms of Seriality,” Victorian Verse: the Poetics of Everyday Life, ed. Lee Behlman and Olivia Loksing Moy, Springer, 2023, pp. 41-61.
“Unsettling the Poetess at Scale,” Unsettling the Victorian Poetess, special issue of Victorian Review, vol. 48, issue 2, Fall 2022, pp. 190-94.
“Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Poetry: Mise-en-Page and the Visual Rhythms of Seriality,” The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Visual Arts, ed. Maureen McCue and Sophie Thomas, Edinburgh University Press, 2022, pp. 450-70.
“Afterword: Victorian Salons and Forms of Victorian Sociability,” Victorian Salons, special issue of Victorian Poetry, vol. 60, no. 2, Summer 2022, pp. 263-71.
“Locating Scottish Cosmopolitanism in the Digital Archive,” Scottish Cosmopolitanism, special issue of Studies in Scottish Literature, Spring 2022, .
“Placing Tennyson, Tennyson’s Place: Memory, Elegy, and Geography in ‘Frater Ave atque Vale,’” Victorian Poetry, vol. 59, no. 2, Summer 2021, pp. 243-58.
“Victorian Poetry.” The Routledge Companion of Victorian Literature, ed. Dennis Dennisoff and Talia Schaffer. Taylor and Francis/Routledge, 2020.
“Creativity.” The History of British Women’s Writing, 1830-1880, ed. Lucy Hartley. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
“Transatlanticism, Transnationality, and Cosmopolitanism.” The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing, ed. Linda K. Hughes. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
“The Matter of Form: Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Poetry and the Periodical Press.” The Edinburgh Companion to Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Culture, and the Arts, ed. Josephine M. Guy. Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
“The Aura of Place: Poetic Form and the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.” Travel Writing, Visual Culture, and Form, 1760-1900, ed. Mary Henes and Brian H. Murray. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
“Transatlantic Mediations: Teaching Victorian Poetry in the New Print Media.” Teaching Transatlanticism: Resources for Teaching Anglo-American Nineteenth-Century Print Culture, ed. Linda K. Hughes and Sarah R. Robbins. Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
“Digital Studies.” Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, es. Dino Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes. Wiley-Blackwell, 2015
“Virtual Victorian Poetry.” Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies, ed. Veronica Rose Alfano and Andrew Stauffer. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
“Achieving Fame and Canonicity.” Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Literature, 1830-1890, ed. Linda Peterson. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
“Internationalising the Sonnet: Toru Dutt’s ‘Sonnet—Baugmaree.’” Victorian Literature and Culture, 42.3 (2014).
“Robert Browning and the Keepsake: Memory, Memorialisation, and the Future of Poetry.” Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature 124 (Fall 2013).
“Poetry, Network, Nation: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Expatriate Women’s Poetry." Victorian Studies 55.2 (Winter 2013).
“On Il Risorgimento.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino F. Felluga. 2012. Extension of the peer-reviewed journal Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web.
“Robert Browning’s Homesickness.” Victorian Poetry 50.4 (Winter 2012).
“European Exchanges.” The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1830-1914, ed. Joanne Shattock. Cambridge University Press, 2010.