Our staff
Dr Nick Freeman
Tel: +44 01509 222959
Role: Senior Lecturer in English
Email: N.Freeman@lboro.ac.uk
Room NN.0.12, Martin Hall Building, East Park
Publications
I have eclectic interests in Victorian and twentieth-century literature, cinema, art and urban studies. My first book, Conceiving the City: London, Literature and Art 1870-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2007) was an interdisciplinary examination of the ways in which writers, artists, and sociologists theorised London life at the end of the nineteenth century. Like much of my work, it reads canonical writers (such as Henry James) alongside their often unjustly neglected contemporaries (such as George Egerton) in questioning neat and orderly constructions of the past and challenging casual assumptions of worth and hierarchy.
Much of my research has focused on late-Victorian and Edwardian figures such as Arthur Symons, Algernon Swinburne, and Arthur Machen, and I teach a third year undergraduate module on Decadence. My new book, 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2011) examines familiar events such as the trials of Oscar Wilde alongside material from literature, politics, art history, crime, sport and meteorology to offer a cultural panorama of a tumultuous era strikingly reminiscent of our own. I do escape from the fin de siècle occasionally, and have published articles on twentieth century poetry, Gothic fiction, Paganism, film and TV, among other topics.
I am an enthusiastic and innovative teacher who was voted Loughborough NUS Lecturer of the Year in 2008. I teach on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules, but my work is chiefly focused in the period between 1837 and 1945. I have a strong interest in the Gothic and run undergraduate and postgraduate courses on supernatural fiction. I am currently supervising doctoral students working on the Gothic, Victorian literature, the First World War and literary relations in the fin de siècle. I welcome proposals from potential research students interested in any of these areas.