Professor Ruth Robbins

Ruth Robbins is Professor in English Literature and Director of Research for the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. She has a wide range of research interests which span the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Ruth's research interests centred originally on the late-Victorian period in English literature, especially the literature of Decadence, including the writings of Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and Vernon Lee - her book Pater to Forster, 1873-1924 (2003) deals with literature written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century period, and the edited collection Victorian Gothic considers that same period from the perspective of its supernatural and ghostly tales. Her most recent monograph, Oscar Wilde (2011) revisits her interests in the fin de siècle; additionally she is co-author of a book on the British Short Story (with Emma Liggins and Andrew Maunder, 2010). She also has research interests in literary theory, particularly post-structuralist theories and a wide range of feminist positions; her first book, Literary Feminisms, was published in 2000, and she edited, with Julian Wolfreys, two collections of essays concerned with the works of Jacques Derrida. Ruth also has interests in autobiographical writing. Her monograph Subjectivity was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2005. She has also published on women and the medical profession (Medical Advice for Women, 1830-1914 for Routledge, an anthology of nineteenth-century texts on the subject, was published by Routledge in 2009). Her most recent book-length publication is the edited collection (with Christopher Webster) Through the Pages: The Leeds Library at 250, which draws together local historians, library staff and local poets and fiction writers to celebrate the history of this Leeds landmark.

Ruth has experience of research supervision and is keen to work with students on any of the areas of her research interests, i.e. nineteenth-century literature; feminism and poststructuralism; autobiography; and women and the medical profession in the nineteenth-century; Victorian and early modernist literature more generally; contemporary women's writing.

Ruth currently leads the Creative Criticism module on the MA in English and Nineteenth-Century Contexts - a module that appears on the undergraduate English programmes. She also teaches Watching the Detectives (English and History), and The Gothic (a third-year option for all the English programmes, and contributes to Literatures of Romanticism (2nd year module for all the English programmes).