Dr Sophie Franklin
Supported by the University of Glasgow Library
Sophie Franklin is a researcher currently based in Tübingen, Germany. Her research specialisations include nineteenth-century literature and culture, representations of violence, health and contagion, and literary afterlives. She completed her PhD at Durham University in 2019; and, since then, she has taught at several institutions, including Nottingham Trent University and the University of Tübingen. Her first monograph, Violence and the Brontës: Language, Reception, Afterlives, is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. The book redefines the significance of violence in Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë's writings and in their cultural and critical legacies. In the process, it explores the Brontës’ literary representations of violence alongside their reception in contemporary reviews and letters to reveal how these initial reactions shaped and continue to shape the sisters' ongoing cultural legacies. Sophie is also the author of Charlotte Brontë Revisited: A View from the Twenty-First Century, published by Saraband in 2016 and reissued with new material in 2018.
Sophie is currently developing her new project – provisionally titled Narratives of Violence, Contagion, and Health, 1798 to the Present – which argues that the cultural implications of the narrative of violence as a disease can be traced to the nineteenth century, when numerous writers from a range of disciplines were increasingly aligning brutality with ill health. Her time as a Visiting Research Fellow at Glasgow will be spent undertaking research on narrative strategies of representing intimate violence in relation to disease and health in the nineteenth century, specifically through the Library’s collections on temperance and syphilis.
I am delighted to receive a Visiting Research Fellowship from the University of Glasgow. With its important archival holdings on the medical humanities and Victorian culture, my time at Glasgow will enable me to explore the discursive proximity between disease and intimate violence in the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century was a turning point in the history of violence as a public health narrative, as associations between violence and disease recurred with increasing frequency in British literature and culture. Through consideration of literary, cultural, and scientific sources, I examine the ambiguities surrounding representations of intimate violence raised in nineteenth-century texts, especially in dialogue with considerations of venereal diseases and intemperance which often instrumentalised a vocabulary of brutality. I will focus on the Syphilis Collection (specifically eighteenth- and nineteenth-century publications, such as John Greaves’s A Practical Treatise on the Cure of the Venereal Disease [1815]) and the Syphilis series in the Thomson papers, as well as materials from the Scottish Temperance League Committee 1846–1876. I am also looking forward to being part of the wider research community in Glasgow and spending time in such a culturally vibrant city.
