Dr Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi
Research Interests
My main research interests are in mid-Victorian women's writing, especially the work of George Eliot, nineteenth-century feeling, the nature of artistic labour and the history of authorship.
I am currently working towards completing a monograph on George Eliot, the literary market-place and sympathy. Taking Eliot's quest for a kind of art capable of extending sympathy as a product of response to a burgeoning print and visual culture, my book explores the gap between her redefinition of female authorship and popular constructions of her authorial image. While her reviews and fiction are well-known, I focus on her translations and the majority of her poetry, which show her fascination with the Romantic ideal of the solitary artist and the possibilities/problems attached to it. In March 2010, I received a British Academy small grant to do research in the Eliot Vault at Yale University so as to complete this project.
The attention I have given to George Eliot's critically-neglected poetry is most evident in a special issue I am editing for George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, with the title George Eliot and the Poetics of Disbelief (September 2011 forthcoming). My interest in women's experimentation with poetic form and feeling has developed into a concern with the centrality of solitude to Victorian poetics, which forms part of a longer scheme of research into female literary networks and the urban and provincial spaces in which they operated. Beyond the gendered nature of my research, I have a growing interest in medical humanities, most represented in the conference on poetry and melancholia I am co-organising at Stirling University.
Whereas some of my most recent work focuses on Victorian poetry, I have maintained my interest in print and material culture. Published work on nineteenth-and-twentieth-century authorship includes the collection Authorship in Context: From the Theoretical to the Material (Palgrave, 2007), and a long special issue, published in three instalments, on the American culture-industry of image-making for the European Journal of American Culture (2005). Recently I have been working towards completing two projects on the aesthetics and economics of female artistic labour, which have extended my work on the literary market-place into related art-industries.
More precisely, ‘What is a Woman to Do?' A Reader on Women, Work, and Art c.1830-1890 (Peter Lang, 2010) is an anthology of primary material which tries to redefine and enhance our understanding of women's relationship to work by foregrounding the connections and distinctions between those artistic milieux regarded as high culture (painting, sculpture, literature) and those classed as ‘art industry'-such as pottery-painting, art needlework, or engraving. Artistry and Industry: Crafting the Woman Professional (work in progress) is a collection of essays which focuses the question of Victorian women and work on the gendered divide between amateurism and professionalism.
I would be interested in supervising dissertations in the above-mentioned areas.
