Dr Adelene Buckland

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: Mothers and Love in the Electromechanical Age, 1840-1940.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• Nineteenth-century literature, technology and science
• Realisms, narrative form, and modes of description
• Nineteenth-century material culture
• The idea of the anthropocene, its roots in the nineteenth century, and its intersection with questions of race and gender
• The intertwined histories of technology and maternity

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 in Doughty Street in London, 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

• Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)
• "Inhabitants of the Same World": The Colonial History of Geological Time', Philological Quarterly 2 (2018), - part of a special issue on 'earth writing'
• Raw Materials, ed. and with an introduction by Adelene Buckland (London: Routledge, in press - April 2021)
• Time Travellers: Victorian Perspectives on the Past, ed. by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi, with an introduction by Adelene Buckland (in press, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, April 2020)
• 'Charles Dickens: Man of Science', Victorian Literature and Culture (in press, forthcoming 2020).