Staff profile
Professor Fiona Robertson
Professor of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literature
MA, MPhil, DPhil (Oxon)

Affiliation | Room number | Telephone |
---|---|---|
Professor of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literature in the Department of English Studies | ||
Member of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies |
Biography
Fiona Robertson is Professor of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literature in the Department of English Studies. From 2018 to 2021 she was Deputy Executive Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.
She studied as an undergraduate and postgraduate at the University of Oxford, where she was a Junior Research Fellow and Lecturer before joining the Department of English Studies at Durham (1990-2004) as a Lecturer and Reader. She returned to Durham in 2016. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and an Honorary Fellow of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies. She served on the panels for English in the Research Assessment Exercise 2008 and the Research Excellence Framework 2014, and was a panellist for Creative and Performing Arts in the preparatory stages of the New Zealand PBRF Quality Evaluation 2018. Fellowships and awards include grants from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Leverhulme Trust, and the AHRC, and fellowships at Wolfson College, Oxford, the American Antiquarian Society, the Huntington Library, California, and the Newberry Library, Chicago. She is one of the editors of the Oxford University Press journal Notes & Queries and serves on the editorial boards of the scholarly journals Symbiosis and The Coat of Arms and of Durham University IMEMS Press (Boydell & Brewer).
Her main areas of research expertise are British and American writing, 1750 to 1850. She has published extensively on literature of the Romantic Period, especially Walter Scott, and on American historical fiction. Scholarly editions include selected works by Stephen Crane and a collection of writings by forty-four women writers, 1778-1838. Recent shorter works include two co-edited collections of new scholarship on the heraldic imagination and essays on Scottish Gothic and on 'Transatlantic Engagements' in the Romantic Period. She organised the public lecture series 'Horace Walpole and his Legacies:Tercentenary Lectures' in Durham in 2017, and co-organised the conferences 'Romantic Antiquarianism' (Georgian Group, London, 2016) and 'Visible Identities' (Society of Antiquaries, London, 2017). She leads a new research strand of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 'The Georgian North (1714-1830)'.
She has supervised successful PhD theses on a range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century topics, including women writers and aesthetics, Victorian medievalism, Robert Burns, Mary and Percy Shelley, S.T. Coleridge, treason law and theatre, professional women writers of the nineteenth century, Southern American literature, Christina Rossetti, Charles Dickens, and Wilkie Collins. She is happy to supervise PhD projects in any area of her research interests, especially projects on Walter Scott, Romantic antiquarianism, the relationships between literature, architecture, and design, and on topics relevant to 'The Georgian North (1714-1830)'.
Research interests
- 18th- and 19th-Century British and American Literature
- Romantic Poetry and Prose
- Traditions of Literary Romance
- Literature, Architecture, and Design 1750-1850
- Sir Walter Scott
- Romantic Antiquarianism
Research groups
- American Studies
- Editing, Bibliography and History of the Book
- Romantic and Pre-Romantic Studies
Esteem Indicators
- 2017: Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries:
- 2016: Honorary Fellow of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies:
Publications
Authored book
- Robertson, Fiona (2012). The Edinburgh Companion to Sir Walter Scott. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- Robertson, Fiona (2001). Women’s Writing, 1778-1838: An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Robertson, Fiona & Mellors, Anthony (1998). Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Robertson, Fiona (1994). Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Robertson, Fiona (1991). Walter Scott, The Bride of Lammermoor. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chapter in book
- Robertson, Fiona (2018). Transatlantic Engagements. In The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism. Duff, David Oxford: Oxford University Press. 723-738.
- Robertson, Fiona (2017). Gothic Scott. In The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Gothic. Davison, Carol & Germanà, Monica Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 102-114.
- Robertson, Fiona & Lindfield, Peter N. (2016). Introduction: Speaking of Arms. In Semy-de-Lys: Speaking of Arms, 1400-2016. Robertson, Fiona & Lindfield, Peter N. Emblems and Enigma: The Heraldic Imagination. 1-6.
- Robertson, Fiona (2014). Historical Fiction and the Fractured Atlantic. In Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770-1845. Fermanis, Porscha & Regan, John Oxford: Oxford University Press. 246-270.
- Robertson, Fiona (2014). Walter Scott and the American Historical Novel. In The American Novel to 1870. Kennedy, J. Gerald & Person, Leland Oxford: Oxford University Press. 107-123.
- Robertson, Fiona (2007). Walter Scott. In The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature. Manning, Susan Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 183-190.
- Robertson, Fiona (2004). Romance and the Romantic Novel: Sir Walter Scott. In A Companion to Romance. Saunders, Corinne Oxford: Blackwell. 287-304.
- Robertson, Fiona (2004). James Smith, Horace Smith. In The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 171-174, 185-186.
- Robertson, Fiona (1999). ’Novels’. In An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832. McCalman, Iain Oxford: Oxford University Press. 286-295.
- Robertson, Fiona (1998). Scott, Waverley. In A Companion to Romanticism. Wu, Duncan Oxford: Blackwell. 211-218.
- Robertson, Fiona (1998). Walter Scott. In Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide. O’Neill, Michael Oxford: Clarendon Press. 221-245.
- Robertson, Fiona (1997). Scott. In Lives of the Great Romantics by their Contemporaries. Mullan, John London: Pickering & Chatto. 3.
- Robertson, Fiona (1997). Keats’s New World: An Emigrant Poetry. In John Keats: Bicentenary Readings. O’Neill, Michael Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 27-47.
- Robertson, Fiona (1994). Thomas Campbell. In Nineteenth-Century British Literary Biographers. Serafin, Steven Detroit: Gale. 21-33.
- Robertson, Fiona (1993). Castle Spectres: Scott, Gothic Drama, and the Search for the Narrator. In Scott in Carnival. Alexander, J. H. & Hewitt, D. S. Aberdeen: Scottish Academic Press. 444-458.
- Robertson, Fiona (1992). ’Byron’, ‘Scott’, and L’Étendard Culturel: Le Romantisme’. In La Première Moitié du XIXe Siècle, Lettres Europeénes: Histoire de la Littérature Europeén. Benoit-Dusausoy, Annick & Fontaine, Guy Paris: Hachette. 554-563, 598-602.
Edited book
- Fiona Robertson & Peter N. Lindfield (2020). The Display of Heraldry: The Heraldic Imagination in Arts and Culture. Baldock: The Heraldry Society.
Journal Article
- Robertson, Fiona (2019). Allegories of the Heart. Studies in Scottish Literature 44(2): 133-141.
- Robertson, Fiona (2015). Walter Scott and the Restoration of Europe. The European English Messenger 24(1): 46-57.
- Robertson, Fiona (2013). Disfigurement and Disability: Walter Scott’s Bodies. Otranto 003.
- Robertson, Fiona (2013). Scott in 2013: New Scholarship and Old Connections. Bulletin of the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club
- Robertson, Fiona (1998). Scott’s Halting Fellow: The Body of Shakespeare in the Waverley Novels. Scott Newsletter 33: 2-13.
- Robertson, Fiona (1998). British Romantic Columbiads. Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 2: 1-23.
- Robertson, Fiona (1997). Of Speculation and Return: Scott's Jacobites, John Law, and the Company of the West. Scottish Literary Journal 24(1): 1-24.
- Robertson, Fiona (1996). Copied-Text: The New Edinburgh Waverleys. Review of English Studies 59-65.
Other (Print)
- Robertson, Fiona & Mellors, Anthony (2013). The Uncanny Stephen Crane.