Image via Lauren Cullen.
UBC Department of English Language & Literatures is pleased to welcome Dr. Lauren Cullen (she/her/hers), the newest Postdoctoral Fellow in the EL&L community. Dr. Cullen holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford, where she was also a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow. She also has an MA and BA from Queen’s University, Canada.
Cullen’s research is located at the intersection of nineteenth-century literature, animal studies, and the environmental humanities, with broader interests spanning histories of settler colonialism, food studies, and sustainability. Her monograph, Rethinking Character: Animals in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, asks what it means to be a realistic character, and how this might be complicated by our understanding of animals. The book takes up these questions by examining the roles of animals in books by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others. Work drawing on research from this project has appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture (forthcoming) and Beastly Modernisms: The Figure of the Animal in Modernist Literature and Culture (Edinburgh, 2023).
As a keen collaborator, Cullen loves knowledge exchange within and between disciplines as well as outward-facing work. At Oxford, she collaborated on a life-writing project, “Pulling Up Stakes: Women and Work on the Canadian Frontier”. Additionally, she was a research assistant for the Bodleian Libraries’ “Gifts and Books” exhibition; served as co-chair for the Oxford Faculty of English’s Nineteenth-Century Research Seminar; and wrote for several public-facing initiatives, including LitHits and Ten-Minute Book-Club.
At UBC, Cullen will be working closely with Dr. Miranda Burgess. Her postdoctoral work aims to make the case that the damaging effects of human activity — environmental exploitation, industrialism, and species displacement, among other consequences — underpinned a range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canadian cultural forms, from Margaret Marshall Saunders’s Beautiful Joe (1893) to Emily Carr’s writing and paintings, including “Stumps and Sky” (1934).
“I’m excited to immerse myself in UBC’s community,” she says. “I love collaborating with others and have been fortunate at every turn to have worked alongside – and learned from – brilliant scholars and students. There are so many incredible researchers at UBC working across all aspects of my new project, from specialists in nineteenth-century culture to Canadian and Indigenous literatures to studies of the environment. I’m eager to draw upon UBC’s interdisciplinary strengths – and hope to share mine as well.”
Outside of academic work, Cullen looks forward to spending time in Vancouver. “I’m from Ontario but have spent many summers out West visiting family during my childhood. British Columbia holds a special place in my heart, and it’s great to be back in Canada again.”
