Affiliated Research Scholars
Rebecca Stott
Research interests: The use of evolutionary ideas in literary texts; nineteenth-century marine zoology; Darwin's barnacle years; the popularisation of science.
Rebecca Stott is Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. As a result of working on recent history of science research projects she has developed close links with HPS. As a literary historian of the nineteenth century she has also published books on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tennyson and late nineteenth-century fiction.
Her first novel, Ghostwalk (Weidenfield & Nicholson, 2007), draws on Newton's early years in Cambridge to provide a framework for a literary historical thriller plot. The book explores questions about the history of and connections between alchemy, glassmaking, plague and optics in the seventeenth century.
The following is a selected list of her recent history of science publications:
- Oyster, Reaktion Press, 2004.
- Darwin and the Barnacle, Faber, 2003 and Norton, 2003.
- Theatres of Glass: The Woman who Brought the Sea to the City, Short Books Company, 2003.
- 'Darwin's Barnacles: Victorian Natural History and the Marine Grotesque' in Roger Luckhurst and Josephine McDonagh eds. Transactions and Encounters: Science and Literature in the 19th Century. Manchester University Press, 2002, pp.151-181.
- 'Through a Glass Darkly: Aquarium Colonies and Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Marine Monstrosity', Gothic Studies, vol 2, no 3 (2000), pp.305-327.
- 'Thomas Carlyle and the Crowd: Revolution, Geology and the Convulsive "Nature" of Time' in The Journal of Victorian Culture 4: 1 (Spring, 1999), pp.1-24.