2021-22

Dr Clara Dawson

Clara Dawson is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature Department at the University of Manchester. As a specialist in poetry of the long nineteenth century, her research has developed along two pathways: print culture and environmental humanities. Her early career focused on print culture and resulted in a monograph, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of Evaluation (Oxford University Press, 2020). It developed new methodologies for analysing poetry and periodicals, a significant development in a field dominated by archival theory and book history. Research published since her monograph has focused on the gift annual, an important and under-researched area of Romantic and Victorian print culture. Her new research project, which she is working on while at Trinity, is on avian poetics in the period of the Industrial Revolution. It takes an interdisciplinary approach and is based in the field of environmental humanities (she is co-hosted by the Centre for Environmental Humanities at Trinity). The project combines poetry, natural history, and conservation science. She has recently edited a special cluster of articles on 'Poetry and Birds Through the Ages', forthcoming with Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Literature, 2022.