Dr Adelene Buckland studied English at the Universities of Birmingham and Oxford, before becoming a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge.

Her first monograph, Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013) won the Marc-Auguste Pictet Prize for the History of Science, was shortlisted for the British Society for Literature and Science annual book prize, and was awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2013 Sonya Rudikoff prize for best book in Victorian studies, awarded by the North American Victorian Studies Association.

She began teaching at King's in September 2012, and is currently working on a monograph entitled Baby Machines: Or, How to Hold Your Infant in the Electromechanical Age.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Nineteenth-century literature, technology and science
• The nineteenth-century novel
• Nineteenth-century environmental and reproductive discourses

For more details, please see my full research profile.

Teaching

I teach a variety of modules in the nineteenth century, on topics ranging from literature and science to technology and reproduction, the grotesque, and nineteenth-century travel writing. I am always keen to hear from students working in these areas.

Expertise and public engagement

In 2018, I guest curated an exhibition with the Charles Dickens Museum entitled Charles Dickens: Man of Science. Promoting the exhibition, I gave interviews to Inside Science and The Today Programme for BBC Radio 4, to London Live, The Guardian, The Observer, and a range of other outlets. In 2015, I appeared as a talking head in the National Geographic documentary Map of Hell, filming on geological uses of the imagery of hell on top of Mount Vesuvius, and on hellish metaphors in writings about the fin-de-siecle East End.

Selected publications

• Baby Machines: Or, How to Hold Your Infant in the Mechanical Age (under consideration with the University of Chicago University Press)
• 'Women geologists 1780-1840: Re-reading Charlotte Murchison’, Handbook of the Historiography of the Earth and Environmental Sciences, ed. by Elena Aronova, David Sepkoski and Marco Tamborini (Springer, 2023)
• Raw Materials, ed. and with an introduction by Adelene Buckland, vol one. of Victorian Material Culture, 6 vols. ed. by Vicky Mills and Tatiana Kontou (Routledge, 2022)
• Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History, ed. by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020)
• Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (University of Chicago Press, 2013)