Professor Ushashi Dasgupta
I spend most of my time thinking and writing about the nineteenth century, but my teaching takes me both further back and further forward in history: at Pembroke, I cover literatures in English from 1760 to the present day. I enjoy talking to my students about as wide a range of ideas, genres, and texts as possible, 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 am interested in the relationship between literature, space, place, and architecture -- in particular, the ways in which fiction articulates urban and domestic experience. I also work on theories of authorship, the development of the novel, and the global histories of reading.
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 think about the ways in which literary criticism and geography can intersect.
My new project 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 thinking and writing about the nineteenth century, but my teaching takes me both further back and further forward in history: at Pembroke, I cover literatures in English from 1760 to the present day. I enjoy talking to my students about as wide a range of ideas, genres, and texts as possible, 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 am interested in the relationship between literature, space, place, and architecture -- in particular, the ways in which fiction articulates urban and domestic experience. I also work on theories of authorship, the development of the novel, and the global histories of reading.
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 think about the ways in which literary criticism and geography can intersect.
My new project 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).