My research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century literature, with particular emphasis on the relationships between literary culture and media, technologies, and infrastructures of communication.

Email: k.koehler@bangor.ac.uk

Phone: (0124838)2113

Location: Room 303, New Arts Building, College Road, Bangor University, LL57 2DG

I welcome PhD proposals in the following subject areas: Victorian literature and culture; Neo-Victorian literature; letters in literature and epistolary writing; media, networks, and technologies of communication in literature; infrastructure and literature; the life and work of Thomas Hardy.

My research focuses on the role and representation of infrastructure in nineteenth-century writing. In particular, I'm interested in the relationship between discourses of development and nineteenth-century ideas about education and national development. In the past, my research has concentrated on the significance of communication media and technology in Victorian literature. I have further research interests in the cultural history of sexual knowledge, in literary constructions of privacy from the Romantic period to the present, and in contemporary responses to and reinventions of the Victorian period. I would be pleased to supervise postgraduate research related to any of these subjects.

I hold an MA (Hons) in English and French (2011) and a PhD in Victorian Literature (2015) from the University of St Andrews. I joined Bangor University in 2016 as a lecturer in nineteenth-century British literature, having previously taught at St Andrews and for the Scottish Universities' International Summer School based at Edinburgh University.

I'm currently the principal editor of a four-volume source book on nineteenth-century communication culture, forthcoming with Routledge in 2025. Nineteenth-Century Communications: A Documentary History, 1780-1918 seeks to help researchers navigate the overwhelming wealth of materials related to the development of communications and their political, economic, social, and cultural impacts. This research is supported by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust with a small grant.

I also recently co-edited, alongside Dr Gregory Tate (St Andrews University) a special issue of the journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth-Century on 'Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages'. The issue will appear early in 2025 and represents the culmination of the AHRC-funded research network Victorian Literary Languages.

I am working on a book on the way in which nineteenth-century popular verse cultures responded to - and helped to shape - the experience of living in a networked world.

Building on my interest in communications, my research also explores the infrastructures (especially roads and bridges) that underpinned the increasingly faster transmission of messages. In particular, I have been working on the cultural reception in Welsh and English of the two bridges over the Menai. This research forms the beginning of a new project that takes a four nations approach to exploring the connections between the nineteenth-century bildungsroman and other discourses of development.

My first monograph, Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication, was published by Palgrave in 2016. Related research on epistolary elements of novels and stories by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Anthony Trollope has been published in Brontë Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture and Victorian Review, as well as in edited collections.

I have also written on the ways in which the plots and narrative form of literary texts refract changing attitudes toward sexual knowledge during the Victorian period. An essay about the significance of handwriting in Victorian fiction, periodicals, and graphology manuals has appeared in an edited collection about Judgement in the Victorian Age.

I would welcome PhD proposals in the following subject areas: Victorian literature and culture; Neo-Victorian literature; letters in literature and epistolary writing; media, networks, and technologies of communication in literature; infrastructure and literature; the life and work of Thomas Hardy. If you are a prospective doctoral researcher and not sure whether your project fits my expertise, please don't hesitate to contact me to discuss your proposal.