Research Interests

• Victorian Literature

• Early 20^th Century Literature

• Literature & Medicine (19^th Century)

• Cultural History of Drugs & Drug-use

• Crime & Detective Fiction

• Science Fiction

• Fantasy , Horror, & Weird Fiction

Biography

Dr Douglas Small is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Literature and Medicine. His current project, entitled 'Cocaine and Cultural Mythology, c. 1860-1919,’ examines cultural and literary depictions of cocaine in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. He specialises in Victorian literature, with a particular focus on the literature of the fin-de-siècle, drug narratives, and 19^th C popular receptions of medicine and bio-science.

His PhD thesis examined representations of the curious collection and the phantasmagoria from 1700 to 1900. He is the author of ‘Sherlock Holmes and Cocaine: A 7% Solution for Modern Professionalism’ (English Literature in Transition, 58.3) and ‘Masters of Healing: Cocaine and the Ideal of the Victorian Medical Man’ (Journal of Victorian Culture, 21.1). He is currently working on a monograph on the cultural significance of cocaine in Victorian and Edwardian Literature.

He has written articles on Victorian cocaine, coca, and sports doping for Metro (https://www.metro.news/in-victorian-britain-the-crowds-approved-of-sports-doping-with-cocaine/703837/) and The Conversation. (https://theconversation.com/in-victorian-britain-the-crowds-approved-of-sports-doping-with-cocaine-82225)

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Douglas currently convenes the Senior Honours course ‘Detection and Crime Literature: From Poe to the Present’ (ENGLIT4122), and has previously convened the Senior Honours course on Science Fiction (ENGLIT4106).

He teaches on undergraduate and postgraduate courses on Literature and Medicine, Modernism, Fantasy Literature, Victorian Literature, Victorian Decadence, Science Fiction, and Weird Fiction.