Professor Bridget Bennett

Profile

I am currently the DIrector of Research and Innovation in the School of English. I am a former Vice Chair of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) and am currently an active member of both BAAS,The Society for Ninteenth-Century Americanists (C19) and the British Association for Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA). I regularly give keynotes at international conferences, assess manuscripts for journals and academic presses, review grant proposals for national and international funding bodies, participate in outreach activity. Media work includes contributions to programmes on BBC Radio 3 and 4 as well as local radio. in 2020 I was awarded a Leverhulme Major Fellowship for a project that supported the work for my most recent book. I was a member of Sub-Panel 27 for REF 2021 and am also a member of the AHRC Peer Review College as an academic and strategic reviewer.

Responsibilities

• Director of Research and Innovation

Research interests

My research interests are reflected in my main publications: Ripples of Dissent (1996); The Damnation of Harold Frederic (1997); Grub Street to the Ivory Tower (1998); Special Relationships: Anglo-American Affinities and Antagonisms, 1854-1936, (2002), Twelve Months in an English Prison (2003, two volumes) and Transatlantic Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2007). I have recently edited two books for the Macmillan Press, Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Selected Poems (2019), and Willa Cather, My Ántonia (2019).

My most significant recent publication is my new monograph Antislavery in the Dissenting Atlantic: Archives and Unquiet Libraries, 1776-1865 (LSU Press 2025). The book focuses on the relationship between dissenters (especially Quakers) in Yorkshire and Pennsylvania between about 1750 and 1870 and their antislavery and abolitionist activity. I have a number of related publications in this area and am continuing my research on the topic.

My current research interests also include a focus of representations of home in American culture. A number of publications related to this have already appeared: "'The Silence Surrounding the Hut': Invisible Slaves and Vanished Indians in Wieland" Early American Literature 53:2, Summer 2018, 369-404 which was awarded the 2019 Arthur Miller Prize; "The Crisis of Restoration: Mary Rowlandson's Lost Home" Early American Literature 49.2, Summer 2014, 327-356; "Home Songs and the Melodramatic Imagination: From "Home, Sweet Home" to The Birth of a Nation", Journal of American Studies (46: 1, 2012, 1-17). A jointly-authored research review was supported by AHRC funding: "Imagining the Place of Home" http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/downloads/file/1306/imagining_the_place_of_home-research_review

A further longstanding interest is in spiritualism. In addition to my 2003 and 2007 books on spiritualism, I have also published articles a number of articles and also participated in a programme for BBC Radio Devon on Arthur Conan Doyle and spiritualism, called "Sherlock, Spirits and Soldiers". You can listen to the programme here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p01wsfvc

An interest in transatlantic and transatlantic approaches to American literature has always been a key element of my research, and is central to a set of further publications. More broadly, I'm interested in nineteenth-century American literature. I regularly give lectures and talks, nationally and internationally, and engage in seminars with academic and non-academic audiences. I have been a contributor a BBC Radio 4 programme, "In Our Time" on several occasions, discussing Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, which you can listen to here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09gzjm5 Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000ml8, Edgar Allan Poe https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001svfv and Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00245nl

I have also spoken on the BBC, at outreach events at the University of Leeds and throughout Leeds at public events in venues such as the Leeds Library, the Howard Assembly Room and City Museum and in schools and to community groups. In 2009-2011 I worked with an undergraduate student, Neko Mellor on a project titled "Transatlantic Abolition: Nineteenth-Century Yorkshire" which traced the impact of abolitionist activism in Leeds and Yorkshire . We developed a public-facing website with activities aimed at children, including two short films. The project also curated an exhibition at the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery using materials we uncovered in our research. In November 2016 I organised a set of events at Leeds as part of the national Being Human Festival with the title, “US Slavery and Yorkshire Anti-Slavery: Forgotten Narratives from the Leeds Archive". I also led a Sadler Seminar series titles "Shh! Encounters in the Unquiet Library" from 2017-2018. For details, follow this link: https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/leeds-arts-humanities-research-institute/doc/shh-encounters-unquiet-library

I have supervised or am supervising theses on a wide range of topics. Please feel free to contact me to discuss research plans. I am especially interested in United States literary culture and cultural history with a particular focus on Early America to the nineteenth century; spiritualism and spiritualist performances and their impact on literary and cultural formations and representation; transatlanticism and the circumatlantic (especially literary transatlanticism); cultures of home; transnational slavery; dissenting and radical religious and political cultures.

• 'Shh! Encounters in the Unquiet Library' Seminar Series
• Home, Community and Belonging
• Home, Crisis and the Imagination
• Imagining the Place of Home
• The Dissenting Atlantic: Archives and Unquiet Libraries, 1776-1865
• US Slavery and Yorkshire Anti-Slavery: Forgotten Narratives from the Leeds Archive

Qualifications

• BA (Hons)
• DPhil

Professional memberships

• British Association for American Studies (BAAS)
• British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA)
• Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (C19)
• American Studies Association
• C19 in the North

Student education

I usually teach across a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, chiefly on US literary and cultural texts from the colonial period to the present. 

Research groups and institutes

• American Studies Research Group

Current postgraduate researchers

• Yishi