Dr Emily Bell

Profile

I am a Lecturer in Digital Humanities & Digital Skills, joining the School of English in this role in 2022. I am also Deputy Director of Postgraduate Research. My research focuses on the life on works of Charles Dickens, nineteenth-century periodical culture and networks, and digital methods.

I first joined the School as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in 2020, working with Professor Richard Salmon on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘The Society of Authors, 1884–1914: Professional Association and Literary Property’. You can find full project details here. I completed my PhD at the University of York in 2018, after which I was a pedagogy project officer at York, and a Research Associate in Digital Humanities at Loughborough University working with Dr M. H. Wood on two projects: ‘Oceanic Exchanges Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840–1914’, funded by an AHRC/ESRC ‘Digging into Data’ grant, and a follow-on Enterprise Projects Group-funded project, ‘Empowering Users of Historical Digitised Newspapers Collections’. In 2020, I was Research Associate in Archiving and Preserving Open Access Books on the ‘Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs’ (COPIM) project at Loughborough.

I have acted as a researcher, consultant and guest expert for media projects including History Crush (History Channel), You’re Dead to Me (BBC Sounds, Radio 4), Homeschool History (Radio 4), Horrible Histories (BBC), Opening Lines (Radio 4), Ilkley Literature Festival, and the Audrey Audiobook App.

Responsibilities

• Deputy Director of Postgraduate Research
• Digital Education Academic Lead

Research interests

I am interested in the intersections of Victorian Studies and Digital Humanities, as well as the teaching of digital humanities and its implications in the modern world.

Dickens Studies

I am an editorial board member for the Oxford Edition of Charles Dickens (OUP). I’m in the process of finalising a new edition of Dickens’s later short fiction, 1851–1868 for the series with Professor Michael Slater, and editing David Copperfield for the same series. I also act as a consultant editor for the Charles Dickens Letters Project, which publishes newly discovered Dickens correspondence, and co-edit the database Dickens Search (with Dr Lydia Craig), which combines book history with digital tools, offering a browsable and searchable database of Dickens’s collected and uncollected output. In 2020 I published an edited volume, Dickens After Dickens, with an introduction and my own chapter on Dickens in biofiction (available open access from White Rose UP), and a special issue of Victoriographies on Dickens, Death and Afterlives with Dr Claire Wood, including my own article on representations of Dickens’s death in biography. I was a network participant for the AHRC-funded project ‘The Dickens Code’, which sought to solve the mysteries of Dickens’s undeciphered shorthand. An edited volume of Dickens’s verse, co-edited with Lydia Craig, is coming out in 2025 with Edinburgh University Press. This is the most complete record of Dickens’s poetry ever published.

Nineteenth-Century Newspapers and Periodicals

I am co-editor of the Curran Index, which identifies writers of over 160,000 anonymously published articles in Victorian periodicals, with Dr Lars Atkin. I am co-author of the Atlas of Digitised Newspapers & Metadata (2020), an open access report which is the first of its kind, bringing together a multidisciplinary team of researchers from six countries with archivists and library scientists to foster new ways into digital collections. The Atlas offers a guide to digitised newspaper collections through analysis of the metadata and the history of the newspaper itself. The full dataset of metadata from ten digital collections can also be downloaded. I have further publications on using word vector models to trace conceptual change in multilingual newspaper corpora, 1840-1920, and forthcoming publications on using digital newspaper collections and the careers of journalists including Edmund Yates and George Augustus Sala.

Digital Humanities

I am a digital humanist with training in corpus linguistics, social network analysis, data visualisation, GIS mapping, TEI, metadata creation and transformation, and coding in Python and R. I have published on using corpus linguistics tools to analyse Dickens’s fiction, and on digitised newspaper archive structures and user experience in Archival Science. I am a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute, acting as an advocate for better software practice in literary studies, and co-edit the Digital Forum for the Journal of Victorian Culture. I am part of the 2025 Gale User Engagement Group, a Leeds representative for the Turing DH & Data Science Group, a board member for the Digital Library Infrastructure Project, Leeds, and a co-initiator of the Digital Humanities Research Group.

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

Qualifications

• PhD in English, University of York
• MA Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, University of York
• BA English and Comparative Literature, University of Warwick

Professional memberships

• Advance HE (Associate Fellow)
• British Association for Victorian Studies
• Dickens Fellowship
• Dickens Society
• European Association for Digital Humanities
• Research Society for Victorian Periodicals
• Wilkie Collins Society

Student education

I teach widely across all levels, specialising in Victorian literature, digital humanities, and integrating writing and digital skills into teaching. As Deputy Director of Postgraduate Research, I run professional development workshops for PGRs and support postgraduates who teach.

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for the Comparative History of Print
• Textual Histories Research Group

Projects

<li><a href="//phd.leeds.ac.uk/project/2186-(in)justice-in-the-archives:-reinterpreting-the-policing-collections-at-ripon-museums-trust">(In)Justice in the Archives: Reinterpreting the Policing Collections at Ripon Museums Trust</a></li>