Clare Pettitt taught for 17 years at King’s College London, and before that in Leeds, Oxford, and Newnham College, Cambridge. In January 2022 she moved to the Grace 2 Chair in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University. Clare has published numerous articles on nineteenth-century subjects and has a particular interest in print culture, technology and media forms.

Her books include Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (Oxford University Press, 2004) and ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’: Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers and Empire (Harvard University Press, 2007). Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press, 2020) won the NAVSA Book Prize [North American Victorian Studies Association] and the EsPrit Prize [European Society for Periodical Studies]. Serial Revolutions 1848: Writing, Politics, Form (Oxford University Press) came out in 2022.

Clare is a General Editor of the Cambridge University Press ‘Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture’ monograph series, and an editor of the journal Cambridge Quarterly. From 2016-2018, she was the Director of the London Arts and Humanities Partnership, a doctoral consortium of eight London universities. In 2022, she was Mercator Visiting Professor at Humboldt University Berlin and Robert Lehman Visiting Professor at Villa I Tatti near Florence, Harvard University’s Research Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies.