Professor Ushashi Dasgupta
I spend most of my time writing about the nineteenth century, but my teaching gives me plenty of space to stretch: at Pembroke, I cover literatures in English from 1760 to the present day. I enjoy talking with my students about a wide range of ideas, genres, and texts, including materials from all over the world.
I work with First Year undergraduates on two ‘period’ papers: Prelims Papers 3 (Literature in English, 1830-1910) and 4 (Literature in English, 1910-Present). I also teach the First Year ‘Approaches to Literature’ paper, which introduces key methodological questions and debates in our field. Undergraduates in their Second Year take FHS Paper 5 (Literature in English, 1760-1830) with me. I supervise Finals dissertations related to my areas of interest.
At the English Faculty, I offer an MSt course on the literature of the city in the long nineteenth century, and give lectures on a broad range of topics: on literature and space, detective fiction, canonicity, nineteenth-century world literature, Austen, and the construction of literary character.
My research centres around nineteenth-century fiction. I have two main areas of interest. The first is the relationship between literature, space, place, and architecture. I also work on the novel – its nature, development, and possibilities – and the global histories of reading. I was a trustee of the Dickens Society from 2021 to 2024 and serve on the editorial board of Dickens Quarterly. Much of my thinking brings me back to Dickens in some way or other.
I am fascinated by the ability of fiction to articulate urban and domestic experience. My first book, “Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World”, was published in 2020 by Oxford University Press. It explores the significance of tenancy in the literary imagination: drawing on Dickens’s novels and journalism, it reveals how rented spaces (such as lodgings and boarding-houses) might complicate our understanding of the cosy Victorian home.
I continue to ask what happens when literary criticism and geography intersect. I am currently working on a project about nineteenth-century housing disasters. With colleagues across English, Geography, and History departments at Oxford and beyond, I co-lead a research network on cultures of rent, which has received funding from the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). You can find out more about the Rent Cultures Network here: https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/rent-cultures-network.
My other project-in-progress asks what it means to feel at home in a book; it is about the practice of re-reading, from the nineteenth century to the present.
"Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World" (OUP, 2020).
Professor Ushashi Dasgupta
I spend most of my time writing about the nineteenth century, but my teaching gives me plenty of space to stretch: at Pembroke, I cover literatures in English from 1760 to the present day. I enjoy talking with my students about a wide range of ideas, genres, and texts, including materials from all over the world.
I work with First Year undergraduates on two ‘period’ papers: Prelims Papers 3 (Literature in English, 1830-1910) and 4 (Literature in English, 1910-Present). I also teach the First Year ‘Approaches to Literature’ paper, which introduces key methodological questions and debates in our field. Undergraduates in their Second Year take FHS Paper 5 (Literature in English, 1760-1830) with me. I supervise Finals dissertations related to my areas of interest.
At the English Faculty, I offer an MSt course on the literature of the city in the long nineteenth century, and give lectures on a broad range of topics: on literature and space, detective fiction, canonicity, nineteenth-century world literature, Austen, and the construction of literary character.
My research centres around nineteenth-century fiction. I have two main areas of interest. The first is the relationship between literature, space, place, and architecture. I also work on the novel – its nature, development, and possibilities – and the global histories of reading. I was a trustee of the Dickens Society from 2021 to 2024 and serve on the editorial board of Dickens Quarterly. Much of my thinking brings me back to Dickens in some way or other.
I am fascinated by the ability of fiction to articulate urban and domestic experience. My first book, “Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World”, was published in 2020 by Oxford University Press. It explores the significance of tenancy in the literary imagination: drawing on Dickens’s novels and journalism, it reveals how rented spaces (such as lodgings and boarding-houses) might complicate our understanding of the cosy Victorian home.
I continue to ask what happens when literary criticism and geography intersect. I am currently working on a project about nineteenth-century housing disasters. With colleagues across English, Geography, and History departments at Oxford and beyond, I co-lead a research network on cultures of rent, which has received funding from the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). You can find out more about the Rent Cultures Network here: https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/rent-cultures-network.
My other project-in-progress asks what it means to feel at home in a book; it is about the practice of re-reading, from the nineteenth century to the present.
"Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World" (OUP, 2020).