Dr Jonathan Memel
Jonathan Memel is Lecturer in English and a specialist in nineteenth-century literature and culture. He joined the English department in January 2020 following a research fellowship on the AHRC project ‘Florence Nightingale Comes Home for 2020’ (www.florencenightingale.org) at the University of Nottingham. He was awarded a Great Western Research/National Trust-funded PhD at the University of Exeter (2016) and an undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh.
Jonathan serves on the Executive Committee of the British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS) as Treasurer.
Related Courses
- English Literature
- Education Studies and English
- English and History
- Psychology and English
- English Literature and TESOL
- English Literature with Foundation Year
- Education Studies and English with Foundation Year
- English and History with Foundation Year
- Psychology and English with Foundation Year
- Children’s Literature and Literacies
- English Literature
On the AHRC project ‘Florence Nightingale Comes Home for 2020’ and accompanying book, Florence Nightingale at Home (nominated forthe People’s Book Prize 2021/22), Jonathan situated Nightingale’s public writings and private correspondence in Victorian discourses on health and domesticity. His research on this project has also been published in the European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health. He is currently working on an article on Nightingale as part of a special issue of the Journal of Victorian Culture on mid-Victorian provincialism.
Jonathan is currently writing a monograph on literary responses to late-nineteenth century educational change titled Unlearning: The Afterlife of Victorian Education in Thomas Hardy’s Fiction. Work from this project has been published in the Journal of Victorian Culture in an article titled 'Writers in Residence: Women Teachers and the Formationof Character in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure’ (March 2022).
Jonathan has ongoing interests in the relationship between literature, the environment and place, with an article in the Autumn 2019 issue of The Thomas Hardy Journal on literary heritage and planning disputes. From 2020-21 he co-led an AHRC/British Academy-funded event titled 'Plotting New Worlds' featuring the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize Winner, Isabel Galleymore, as part of the School of Advanced Study’s Being Human Festival.
Jonathan Godshaw Memel, ‘Writers in Residence: Women Teachers and theFormation of Character in Hardy’s Judethe Obscure’, Journal of VictorianCulture (March 2022).
Jonathan Godshaw Memel, with Richard Bates, ‘Florence Nightingale and Responsibility forHealthcare in the Home’, European Journal for theHistory of Medicine and Health, special issue ‘The Shared Responsibility ofCare’ (December 2021 (online), Spring 2022 (print)), eds. Peter Heyrman, KimChristiaens and Joris Vandendriessche
Jonathan Godshaw Memel, ‘Adding The Woman of Colour to BGU’s Syllabus’, BGU Telling It Like It Is Teaching Resource Group (2021).
Jonathan Godshaw Memel, with Paul Crawford, Anna Greenwood and Richard Bates, Florence Nightingale at Home (Palgrave, 2020).
Jonathan Godshaw Memel, with Fariha Shaikh and Joanna E. Taylor, ‘Black Lives Matter: Starting Points for the Victorianist’, BAVS Newsletter (Summer 2020), 2-8.
Jonathan Godshaw Memel, ‘“Only the Quality of a Work-ground”: Planning Disputes in Hardy’s Wessex’. Thomas Hardy Journal, special issue: ‘Hardy Now’, 25 (Winter 2019): 128-140.
Jonathan Godshaw Memel, review of Reading Thomas Hardy, by George Levine. In MLR 114.1 (2019): 126-128
Jonathan Godshaw Memel, ‘“Mythical Florence”: Where Does the Lady with the Lamp Stand Today?’. The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Blog < https://ahrc-blog.com/>, 2019.
Jonathan Godshaw Memel, ‘“Making the University less exclusive”: the Legacy of Jude the Obscure’. Neo-Victorian Studies, special issue ‘Neo-Victorianism and Discourses of Education’ 10.1 (2017): 64-82
Jonathan Godshaw Memel, ‘Obstacles to Social Mobility Date Back to the Victorian Education System’. The Conversation <https://theconversation.com/uk>. 2016.
Jonathan Godshaw Memel, review of The Beginnings of University English: Extramural Study, 1885-1910, by Alexandra Lawrie. In History of Education 44.3 (2015): 397-399
Jonathan Godshaw Memel, ‘“Some poor gaper”: Community, Identity and Marginal Individuals in Hardy’s Fiction’. The Hardy Review 15.1 (2013): 11-22
Jonathan convenes ‘Victorians Unbound’ (BA), ‘Writing Back: Literature and Memory’ (BA), ‘Introduction to Literary Studies’ (BA), ‘Explorations in Literary Genre’ (BA) as well as a newly-designed module, ‘Writing the Environment’ (BA), bringing environmental literatures of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries into dialogue with pressing debates in the environmental humanities today, and convene. Jonathan also contributes to English MA modules, supervises undergraduate and master's-level dissertations and research projects at BGU and co-supervises an AHRC-funded PhD project at the University of Nottingham on mental illness in sensation fiction. Jonathan welcomes enquiries from prospective postgraduate students with interests in all aspects of nineteenth-century literature and culture.
