Dr Lucy Powell

Biography

I am the Rankin Tutorial Fellow in literature of the long eighteenth century at Exeter College. I gained my PhD at UCL, from which my first monograph emerged: Prison and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Form and Reform, which was published with Cambridge University Press in October 2025. Before that, I held a Commonwealth Scholarship at McGill University in Montreal, where I studied for my Master’s degree, and I did my undergraduate studies at the University of Birmingham. Between 2015 and 2017, I was a teaching fellow in Restoration and eighteenth-century studies at UCL, and from 2021 to 2024, I held a Leverhulme early career fellowship at Trinity College and the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford.

When I returned to the UK after my Master’s degree, I worked as an arts journalist for The Times, writing for their theatre and culture pages, interviewing actors like Imelda Staunton and directors including Jan Fabre and Yukio Ninagawa, as well as reviewing new theatre every week. For the last ten years, I have been a New Generation Thinker for the BBC and the AHRC, making programmes across the BBC network on everything from a cultural history of dreams, to the art and science of silence. I recently appeared on Radio 4’s Opening Lines programme discussing Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and as a panelist on Radio 4’s Free Thinking show about the cultural history of solitude.

Research

My work focuses on the literature and material culture of the long eighteenth century. I’m interested in tracing patterns of sociality and interdependence in the culture of this period, which for a long time was understood to herald the birth of autonomous, introspective individuation. My first monograph, Prison and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Form and Reform, analysed the overwhelming preponderance of prisons in the novels of the period, and asked how these narratives influenced, and were influenced by, the prison reform movement. Unlike nineteenth-century penitentiaries, prisons of the eighteenth century were markedly social spaces. The state of being that no inmate seems able to access in an eighteenth-century English prison, is solitude. My new project explores the ways in which birds and feathered objects enabled British writers and artists to stage themselves in a global context. The eighteenth was the century in which the age-old mystery of migration was finally solved for Western science, and the bird accrued a potent set of expansive – perhaps even expansionist – associations as a result. Using poetry, art, novels and natural history, as well as material culture, this project aims to trace the ways in which curation and consumption intersect, and to illuminate the global networks that underwrote new forms of eighteenth-century selfhood.

Teaching

As the Rankin Fellow I teach undergraduates FHS papers 4 and 5, literature from 1660-1760 and from 1760-1830, and I also teach the epic link paper for CLENG students. For the Faculty, I have lectured on the novel in the eighteenth century, and on race, slavery and empire in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and I currently convene a paper 6 option on ecocriticism: “Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Literature and the Anthropocene” with Dr. Tess Somervell. I very much enjoy supervising dissertation students, and have previously taught FHS papers 4 and 5 at Trinity College, St. Hugh’s College and, most recently, Mansfield College, where I was a stipendiary lecturer in English.

Publications