Professor Richard Salmon

Profile

I graduated with a BA in English and MA in Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds, before studying for a PhD on Henry James at Birkbeck College, University of London. I then returned to the School of English at Leeds, first as a post-doctoral Research Fellow and subsequently as a Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and Professor in Victorian Literature and Culture.

Research and Publications:

I have published widely in the field of nineteenth-century literature and culture, especially on novelists such as Henry James, W.M. Thackeray, Charles Dickens, and Charles Kingsley, and on non-fictional prose writing including Victorian periodicals and literary criticism. I am the author of three books on nineteenth-century literature, including two research monographs published by Cambridge University Press - Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (1997) and The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession (2013) – and a volume on Thackeray in the series of critical introductions to ‘Writers and their Work’ (2005). My other major publications are a co-edited volume of essays Thackeray in Time: History, Memory, and Modernity (Routledge, 2016) and a scholarly edition of The Reverberator (1888) for the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James (2018). I have also published numerous book chapters and journal articles on topics such as the Victorian bildungsroman; authorship and literary fashion; advertising as new media, and literary advice writing. 

From 2020 ro 2024 I led a major collaborative research project, working with colleagues at Leeds, the University of London and the University of Cambridge, to examine the origins and early history of the Society of Authors, one of the most influential and enduring literary associations founded in the nineteenth century (The Society of Authors, 1884-1914: Professional Association and Literary Property). Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, this project has extensively researched the Society’s historic archives and its findings will be published in a collaborative monograph. Work in progress was presented in panels at the annual conferences of the British Association of Victorian Studies (2022) and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (2024). The project will also lead to the publication of a four-volume anthology of primary sources on Victorian authorship in the Routledge series ‘Historical Resources’, for which I am a co-General Editor and one of the volume editors.   

Leadership:

I have served in several leadership roles in the School of English at Leeds, including MA Admissions Tutor, Director of Postgraduate Research, Research Ethics Lead, Acting Director of Research and Innovation, Acting REF UOA Lead, and Assessment and Academic Integrity Lead. From 2016 to 2019 I was the Chair of the English Subject Cluster Committee for the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH) and a member of the Studentships Committee, responsible for assessing doctoral scholarship applications to the AHRC-funded White Rose consortium of universities (Leeds, Sheffield, and York). 

External Examining:

I have wide experience as an external examiner of BA and MA programmes at other UK universities, having  served in this capacity at Kings College London (2004-2007), University of Aberystwyth (2011-2014), and the University of Birmingham (2019-2022).  I have also been appointed as an external examiner of PhD theses at a range of universities across the UK and in other countries, including India and Australia.

Research interests

Authorship Studies:

My work on the development of professional authorship in the early Victorian period culminated in the  publication of The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession (Cambridge University Press, 2013). This book examines the figure of the author in narrative and iconographic texts of the mid-nineteenth century alongside the emergence of professional literary organizations. It discusses the work of a number of major Victorian writers, including Thomas Carlyle, William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Kingsley.

 The collaborative project which I am currently developing – ‘The Society of Authors, 1884-1914: Professional Association and Literary Propery’ – extends my research on literary professionalism and the history of authorship into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This project will examine the formation and early history of the Incorporated Society of Authors, founded by the novelist Walter Besant, the most successful professional literary association of the nineteenth century and still in existence today. Through extensive primary research on the Society’s archive and official publications, it will offer the first comprehensive scholarly assessment of the Society’s work in support of professional association, literary property, and members’ careers. Culminating in the publication of a collaborative critical study and an edited anthology of primary sources, the project will shed new light on late-Victorian and Edwardian literary culture, and on the wider professionalization of authorship in Britain. 

Henry James:

Other Work:

Another focus of ongoing research is the nineteenth-century literary genre of the Bildungsroman, on which I have published several essays, including a contribution to the Cambridge History of the Bildungsroman (2018).  Future work in this field will consider the Victorian Bildungsroman in the context of the discursive history of 'self-culture'.

I have supervised doctoral research on a wide range of Victorian writers, including Dickens, Gaskell, Henry James, Swinburne, Hardy, Thackeray, George Meredith, Wilde, and Ruskin, and on topics as diverse as Victorian Medievalism, Empire, science fiction, historiography, masculinity, religion, and the radical press. I'm happy to consider proposals for PhD research on most aspects of Victorian literature, or in any of the areas of special interest outlined above.

• The Society of Authors, 1884-1914: Professional Association and Literary Property

Qualifications

• PhD University of London
• MA University of Leeds

Professional memberships

• British Association of Victorian Studies
• Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP)

Student education

I currently teach at all Levels of undergraduate study and at MA level in the School of English. My optional modules at Level 3 and on the MA porgramme focus on different genres and material forms of Victorian fiction. 

Research groups and institutes

• Textual Histories Research Group