Briony Wickes

My principal research interests lie in British expansionism, Victorian literature, human-animal relationships, settler colonial culture, critical theory, and material culture in the long nineteenth century.

My current research project argues that animal bodies are integral to the conceptual and material work of nineteenth-century settler colonisation. Using Victorian mass migrations to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada during 1830-1900 as a historical framework to contextualise my research, a period that saw five and half million Britons emigrate overseas, the project examines the place of animals in Victorian expansionist culture through an interrogation of the literary forms, genres, and narratives that register and mediate human-animal encounters and conceptions of the nonhuman body. 

Drawing from a range of Victorian novels that substantially engage with nineteenth-century settler colonialism and human-animal relations in this period, I read work by writers such as Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Charles Reade, R.M. Ballantyne, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mayne Reid, G.W.H. Kingston, and H.G. Wells, in order to interrogate the numerous ways that animals impact and contribute to the imaginative representation and material creation of settler colonial communities.

I am an AHRC funded PhD candidate based at King's College London and supported by the London Arts and Humanities Research Partnership.

Before coming to King's, I completed my BA in English Literature with first class honours in 2012 and an MA in English Literature with Victorian Studies with distinction in 2013 at the University of Exeter. 

I am an active participant in the London Nineteenth-Century Studies group, co-organising the London Nineteenth-Century Studies Postgraduate Research Conference last year. I am also engaged in departmental activies, as a member of the International Nineteenth-Century Studies Partnership between King's College London and the University of North Carolina, co-organising trips to the UNC Chapel Hill campus, a London-based conference, and an ongoing series of virtual seminars between the two institutions on current methodological trends in our field. Last year, I was also fortunate enough to be a part of the Global Domes 2015 cohort, a summer scholarship programme with the University of Notre Dame. 

I have been an editor and continue to contribute to the LAHP supported creative academic journal, The Still Point Journal, and I currently peer-review for Victorian Network.