Russell, Shannon
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Institutional profile
Shannon Russell was born in Canada, lived in the United Kingdom for eleven years, and moved to Italy over twenty years ago. She did her BA in English Literature, with a Philosophy minor, at the University of Western Ontario, her MA at Dalhousie University, and her DPhil at Oxford University. Upon completion of her doctorate at Oxford she was awarded a Post-doctoral Fellowship and taught there for a number of years. While she loves to read and teach poetry, she has maintained a consistent fascination with the novel, completing her undergraduate thesis on Virginia Woolf, her Master’s thesis on Jane Austen, and her doctoral work on Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, and Elizabeth Gaskell.
The libraries of Oxford opened her eyes to the importance of history and historical processes, particularly those related to race, class, and gender, which continue to be the focus of her research in Victorian literature. She believes that the Victorians are closer to us than we assume, and that they have much to teach us about ourselves. She has published on a range of eighteenth and nineteenth century writers and has edited novels by Thomas Hardy and Elizabeth Hamilton. She has also done work on the American writers Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers. She is currently writing a book for Routledge Press on Charles Dickens and Frederick Douglass. In this project, she considers how Dickens reimagines Douglass’s famous autobiography to tell a woman’s story in his novel Dombey and Son. She published preliminary work on this project in the Dickens Quarterly (March 2021).