Professor Andrew King BA, PGCE, MA, MA, PhD

Service

• REF Panel D (Humanities) Lead in annual University-wide internal research assessment exercises (“GREAT”) 2016 -
• REF Panel D (Humanities) representative on (university) REF2021 Working Party 2016-
• Research Group Lead for Literature and Drama Research 2012-2017
• REF Unit of Assessment (27) Lead for English Language and Literature 2018-
• Languages and Literature representative, Faculty Research Degrees Committee 2013- ; Deputy Chair of the Committee 2018-
• Member of University Archives Committee 2014-
• Member of University Professors and Readers Promotions Committee 2013-17
• Member of Faculty Research and Enterprise Committee 2015-2018
• Member of Faculty Ethics Committee 2015-2018
• Frequent examination chairings and internal PhD examinations

Current Undergraduate teaching

• 3^rd year core course: Literature and Publishing 1820-today (see video course on Detective Fiction under Videos, or here for the first video of the series)
• 2^nd year option: International Bestsellers
• Dissertations

PhD supervision

Current:

Orsolya Nagy: Absurdist theatre in the Czech Republic

Completions:

1. Ann Hale, Nineteenth-Century Legal Periodicals (2020)
2. Beth Gaskell, Nineteenth-Century Military Periodicals (2020)
3. Fiona Snailham, Eliza Lynn Linton: the media management of a woman author’s identity (2020)
4. Deborah Canavan, The British Workwoman 1863-1913 (2020)
5. Julian Day, Actresses and the Eighteenth-Century Press (2021)

• 2018 $2,000 Robert and Vineta Colby Prize for Researching the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Case Studies
• 2017 $2,000 Robert and Vineta Colby Prize for the Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and Newspapers
• 2016 $1,700 Visiting Scholarship to Harry Ransom Centre, Texas
• 2014 €5,000 Visiting Professor, University of Macerata (Sept-December) & accommodation costs
• 2013 $1,500 Wolff lecture, Research Society for Victorian Periodicals
• 2008-9 €60,000 12 month research fellowship, University of Ghent

• member of the Board of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, 2011-18
• Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Arts and Sciences, 2012 -
• member of the Ateneo of the University of Macerata (Italy), 2012 –
• member of Advisory Board of the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers,2013-
• member of Editorial Board Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, 2015 -
• FRSA, 2016 -
• President of the Victorian Popular Fictions Association, 2019 - 2022
• AHRC Peer Review College, 2017 – (membership renewed)
• Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, the Dutch Research Council) 2018 -
• member of Editorial Board, RRR: Revolution, Romanticism and Reform, 2018 -2020
• Reader for:  English; Authorship; Journalism: theory, practice and criticism; Victorian Studies, 19 and many other learned journals; and for publishers such as EUP, Continuum, Routledge, Bloomsbury.
• External Examiner of BAs: Liverpool John Moores (2004-8), Edinburgh Napier (2013-2017)
• External Examiner of MA English Studies, University of Hong Kong (2019-22)
• External Examiner of 16 PhDs (as of September 2021)

Prizes 

Andrew King and John Morton, together with their colleague from the University of St Thomas Alexis Easley, won the Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize “for the book that most advances our knowledge of the nineteenth-century press” for an unprecedented two years in a row (see Awards above).

Andrew's work in the Victorian period lies at the intersection of literature, history, media studies and sociology. Blending traditional archival work with newer research methods and methodologies, his work emphasises unexpected areas of cultural exchange between popular and élite, and across national and linguistic borders. A recent interest is the environmental cost of publishing as an industry.

Besides his commitment to thinking about nineteenth-century popular culture, evident in his work on the VPFJ and for the VPFA, Andrew has continued work on 19^th-century periodicals. He was the main editor and initiator of the Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers (2016) with Alexis Easley (University of St Thomas) and his colleague at University of Greenwich, John Morton. He contributed a chapter on periodical economics – a far wider topic than merely attention to publishers' accounts. Researching the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Case Studies (Routledge, 2017), a volume by the same editors, came out in 2017. Both won the Colby prize for the book published during the preceding year that most advances our understanding of the nineteenth-century British press.

Andrew's latest work, on a volume of essays called “Living Work:” Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press (Routledge, due out 2022) edited with Fiona Snailham and Elizabeth Tilley (Galway), derives originally from his work on the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism and from a year-long fully funded research fellowship at the University of Ghent (2008-09) when he uncovered the dearth of research on trade periodicals as mediated communications. This crystalised in 2016 into BLT19, a digitisation project that, in the spirit of the periodicals it digitises, shows that it is possible to deliver both academic and social value online for a very small pot of money indeed: refusing to equate financial investment with value per se, it polemically offers maximum return for minimum financial investment.

Already contracted publication stretches to 2026, including a chapter for CUP on 1860s publishing; a literary biography of Ouida and a 4 volume collection on unknown sources for print history edited with Marysa Demoor (Gent), Andrew Hobbs (UCLAN) and Lisa Peters (Chester) for Routledge.

Andrew would welcome PhD applications in any of the following areas:

• Popular fiction
• Victorian fiction
• Victorian periodicals
• Popular periodicals
• Trade and professional periodicals
• Ecocritical humanities, with especially attention to the publishing industry

Key funded projects

Professions and the press

A year-long fully funded research fellowship at the University of Ghent, 2008-09 (€60,000).

The most immediate outputs from the fellowship comprised three journal articles and the successful completion of the DNCJ, the joint winner of the Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize in 2010.

The main research findings comprised the identification of the components of what a "professional" was in the 19th century (and still is to a large extent today) and how they developed. The research paid particular attention to gender, especially to the changing nature of professional masculinities. Andrew continued this work, focusing on Victorian banking periodicals, for the 2013 Wolff lecture.

Detective fiction channel on YouTube

Article

Book section

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Conference proceedings

Edited book

Video