Staff profile

Research and Teaching

Fraser Riddell is Assistant Professor in English and Medical Humanities in the Department of English Studies and the Institute for Medical Humanities. He teaches literature in English from Shakespeare to the present day. His research is broadly focussed on questions of gender, sexuality and embodied experience in Victorian and early-twentieth century literature.

His first monograph, Music and the Queer Body in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. This takes as it focus works by John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, and draws upon the work of psychoanalytic, phenomenological and queer theorists to suggest new ways of understanding the significance of spatial, temporal and material encounters with music at the fin de siècle for the formation of non-normative subjectivities.

His other current project builds upon recent debates in Victorian studies on cognition and the senses, investigating the place of tactile sensory perception in nineteenth-century literature and culture. The project examines a range of literary, medical and scientific discourses, looking at works by authors such as Lafcadio Hearn, Thomas Hardy, and Richard Jefferies.

Other recent and current research has included work on: post-Victorian cultures of decadence; late-Victorian theories of translation, drawing upon research on embodied cognition; the relationship between aesthetics and ‘attention’ in British object relations psychology (particularly Marion Milner and Donald Winnicott).

A number of articles and book reviews are published or forthcoming in Victorian Literature and Culture, Journal of Victorian Culture, Victorian Review, and Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism.

His room number is Room 002, Hallgarth House.

Before arriving at the Department of English Studies in 2019, Dr Riddell was Departmental Lecturer in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, where he taught at Trinity College. He has also taught Comparative Literature in the School of Modern Languages at the University of St Andrews. He completed his doctoral studies at Durham University, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Northern Bridge DTP). Prior to commencing his career in Higher Education, he worked as a solicitor in the City of London and (briefly) as an intern in the Houses of Parliament.

Research Interests

• Victorian literature
• Music and literature
• Theories of embodiment and the senses
• Medical humanities
• Queer theory
• History of sexuality
• Psychoanalysis
• Decadence and aestheticism

Book review

• Riddell, F. (in press). Review of Kristin Mahoney, Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family. Studies in Walter Pater and aestheticism, 8,
• Riddell, F. (2023). Review of Sarah Green, Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence. Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 45(5), 513-515. https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2275347
• Riddell, F. (2022). Gripping Words: Sensing the World Beyond the Page in Victorian Literature. The Senses and Society, 17(3), 359-361. https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2022.2122256
• Riddell, F. (2021). Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self by Dustin Friedman. Studies in Walter Pater and aestheticism,
• Riddell, F. (2020). Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History, by Pamela M. Gilbert. The Review of English Studies, 71(300), https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgz139
• Riddell, F. (2019). Decadence and the Senses, ed. by Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé
• Riddell, F. (2019). The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature by Benjamin Morgan. Studies in Walter Pater and aestheticism, 3,
• Riddell, F. (2019). Victorian Pain by Rachel Ablow. Victorian Review, 44(1), 149-150. https://doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2018.0016
• Riddell, F. (2019). Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism, by Nathan Waddell. Modernism/modernity, 26(4), 909-911. https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2019.0070
• Riddell, F. (2018). Top Notes from the Perfumed Fin de Siècle. Journal of Victorian Culture, 23(4), https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcy030
• Riddell, F. (2018). Francis O'Gorman, Forgetfulness: Making the Modern Culture of Amnesia. Victoriographies, 8(2), 218-220. https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2018.0311

Chapter in book

• Riddell, F. (in press). Vernon Lee’s ‘A Wicked Voice’ (1890): Music and Queerness in Decadent Fiction. In Reading Texts in Music and Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century. Boydell & Brewer
• Riddell, F. (2023). Queer Pastoral Soundscapes and the Idyllic Voice: Vernon Lee, A. Mary F. Robinson and Lady Archibald Campbell. In T. Hughes, & E. Merkling (Eds.), The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature: Subject, Ecology, Form. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003327998-7
• Riddell, F. (2021). Hearing: Bodies Resounding in Decadent Literature. In J. Desmarais, & D. Weir (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Decadence (507-524). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190066956.013.25
• Riddell, F. (2021). ‘Now—For a Breath I Tarry’: Breath, Desire and Queer Materialism at the Fin de Siècle. In C. Saunders, D. Fuller, & J. Macnaughton (Eds.), The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine: Classical to Contemporary (345-365). (1). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74443-4_17

Journal Article

• Riddell, F. (2024). “Glued together, gushing”: Sticking with John Addington Symonds. Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures, 2(1), 134-144. https://doi.org/10.1353/cusp.2024.a920149
• Riddell, F. (2024). Sounding Out the History of Homosexuality. The Lancet, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736%2824%2900251-4
• Riddell, F. (2023). Vernon Lee's 'Aristocratic Pastorals: Notes from London' (1885) - An Introduction and Translation. Studies in Walter Pater and aestheticism, 7, 73-86
• Riddell, F. (2023). 'Musical under the touch of the Universe': Aesthetic Liberalism, Music, and Vernon Lee's Essayistic Art of Resonance. Volupté (London), 5(2), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.25602/gold.v.v5i2.1663.g1776
• Riddell, F. (2020). Queer Music in the Queen's Hall: Teleny and Decadent Musical Geographies at the Fin de Siecle. Journal of Victorian Culture, 25(4), 593-608. https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcaa016
• Riddell, F. (2020). Disembodied Vocal Innocence: John Addington Symonds, the Victorian Chorister, and Queer Musical Consumption. Victorian Literature and Culture, 48(3), 485-517. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150319000020

Monograph

• Riddell, F. (2022). Music and the Queer Body in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108989541

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• Riddell, F. (2016). Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'Flaheertie Wills (1854-1900). [Digital]