The Belcher Visiting Fellowship in Victorian Studies
The Belcher Visiting Fellowship in Victorian Studies was established through a legacy left to the College by the renowned Pugin scholar, Dr Margaret Belcher, who read English at St Hugh’s in the late 1950s. It is open to academics from any discipline who have obtained their doctorate, and are working in the broad field of Victorian Studies. Previous holders of the Visiting Fellowship include distinguished historians, art historians, and literary scholars. The position is fixed-term, and is offered for a period of no longer than 12 months. It is awarded annually by open competition.
The Fellowship carries no salary and Belcher Fellows are not employees of the College, although they have full dining rights and office space at St Hugh’s, as well as generous expense allowances. The Fellowship is therefore usually held by an academic on paid research leave from another institution. It is sometimes possible to help with the costs of a teaching buyout for the successful candidate.
We anticipate that the Belcher Fellowship will next be advertised in November 2026, for the 2027/28 academic year.
Dr Margaret Belcher (Credit: The Pugin Society/Michael Fisher)
Belcher Fellow 2025/26
Lucy Hartley, Belcher Visiting Fellow in Victorian Studies
Lucy Hartley is Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She was born and educated in the United Kingdom, and received a BA (Hons) from the University of Oxford and a D.Phil. from the University of York. After teaching at the University of Southampton for eleven years, she joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 2006.
She specializes in nineteenth-century literature and culture, and her work contributes to both the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Britain and the broad interdisciplinary project of understanding the social transformations of modernity. She is the author of two monographs, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (2001/2006), and Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Art and the Politics of Public Life (2017/2019), and the editor of The History of British Women’s Writing 1830-1880 (2018). She is currently working on two projects. On Commercial Street, E1. Henrietta Barnett and the War on Poverty is a sociobiography, which narrates the life of a remarkable woman campaigning for the poor and the life of a remarkable social movement against poverty during a transitional period in British culture. 1884 At the Whitechapel Exhibition is a digital gallery, in partnership with the Whitechapel Gallery, which will reconstruct and reimagine the visual experience of the 1884 Whitechapel Fine Art Loan Exhibition.
Previous Belcher Fellows
Professor Ruth Livesey (2024)
Ruth Livesey is Professor of 19th Century Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway University of London. For more information please click here.
Dr Joanna Hofer-Robinson (2024)
Joanna Hofer-Robinson is a Lecturer in the English and Comparative Literary Studies Department at the University of Warwick. For more information please click here.
Dr Kate Nichols (2023/24)
Kate Nichols is Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Birmingham. For more information please click here.
Professor Pamela K. Gilbert (2023)
Pamela K. Gilbert is the Albert Brick Professor of English at the University of Florida. For more information please click here.
Dr Oindrila Ghosh (2022/23)
Oindrila Ghosh is Associate Professor of English at Diamond Harbour Women’s University. For more information please click here.
Professor Sharon Aronofsky Weltman (2022/23)
Sharon Aronofsky Weltman is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Texas Christian University. For more information please click here.
Professor Jessica R. Valdez (2022).
Jessica R. Valdez is Assistant Professor of Nineteenth-Century British Literature at Louisiana State University. For more information please click here.
Professor Mark Turner (2021)
Mark Turner is Professor of Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature at King’s College London. For more information please click here.
Professor Martin Hewitt (2020/23)
Martin Hewitt, the inaugural Belcher Fellow, is a historian of Britain and its culture in the nineteenth century. For more information please click here.
