Charlotte Katie Bartle is a postgraduate researcher specialising in mourning and the material culture of death in nineteenth-century and neo-Victorian literature. 

She studied English at the University of Hull (2009-2017) and is currently completing an MRes in Humanities at Newman University, Birmingham, with a view to beginning her PhD in September 2020. 

Research Interests

Charlotte’s research interests predominantly lie in nineteenth-century and neo-Victorian literature, especially focusing on death, mourning, memorialisation, and psychology. As an undergraduate, she developed a keen interest in the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough and in New Woman literature. Further interests include asylums, the Gothic, Victorian spiritualism, horror, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 

She began presenting her ongoing research in 2011 and was shortlisted for the BPS Psychology of Women Section Student Prize in 2013 with an essay titled, ‘”Staying here will be good for you”: Amalie Skram and the [un]willing female psychiatric patient’. Her undergraduate dissertation continued this research and compared the duplicity, complicity, and subversion in Professor Hieronimus and Paa St. Jørgen by Amalie Skram, and Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. 

Charlotte’s ongoing MRes dissertation examines nineteenth-century and neo-Victorian representations of Elizabeth Siddal. Her proposed PhD project considers the use of hair to memorialise in the nineteenth century and in subsequent neo-Victorian representations.