My research specialization is Victorian literature and culture. I am particularly interested in illustration and visual culture, religion, gender, textual criticism (scholarly editing), and the production of culture-texts (texts, such as Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, that are collectively known and “remembered” when the original works have not been read).

I am completing for Oxford University Press a SSHRC-funded monograph on the illustration and adaptation of Hardy’s novels, Visual Hardy: Imaging Gender and Genre. Other projects include the Cambridge Hardy edition of Jude the Obscure and a study of Hardy’s creative process as a poet.

I have supervised Victorianist postdoctoral, Ph.D., M.A., and Honours research on a wide variety of topics, including: listening as ecological encounter in Hopkins; Barrett Browning’s languages of resistance; Hardy and the blush; the transatlantic politics of art; Victorian spiritualism; Dickens and psychology; Christina Rossetti’s theology; the visualization of disordered eating in Victorian children’s literature; adaptations and revisionings of Dickens, the Brontës, and George Eliot.

I received my B.A. from the University of Victoria, my M.A. from the University of Toronto, and my D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. At UBC I was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow and then a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow before taking up a faculty position.

I have been awarded a Killam Research Prize and a Killam Teaching Prize, and am a Distinguished University Scholar.

Research Networks:

The Oxford Edition of Charles Dickens

The Cambridge Edition of the Novels and Stories of Thomas Hardy

Selected publications

• “Illustration,” in Thomas Hardy in Context, ed. Phillip Mallett (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2013), 54-70.
• “‘The Hard Case of the Would-Be-Religious’: Hardy and the Church from Early Life to Later Years,” in A Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Keith Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 71-85.
• Thomas Hardy’s “Poetical Matter” Notebook, ed. Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate (Oxford: Oxford U P, 2009).
• “The Gospel According to Hardy,” in Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate, ed. Keith Wilson (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006), 3-19; extract published in Times Literary Supplement, 17 March 2006, 12-13.
• “Anxieties of Representation: The Serial Illustrations to Hardy’s The Return of the Native,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 51.1 (1996): 84-110; reprinted in The Return of the Native: A Norton Critical Edition, 2nd edn, ed. Phillip Mallett (New York: Norton, 2006), 489-504.
• “Whatever Happened to Elizabeth Jane? Revisioning Gender in The Mayor of Casterbridge,” in Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts, ed. Phillip Mallett (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 64-86.
• A Pair of Blue Eyes, ed. Pamela Dalziel (London: Penguin, 1998).
• Thomas Hardy’s “Studies, Specimens &c.” Notebook, ed. Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
• “Hardy’s Sexual Evasions: The Evidence of the ‘Studies, Specimens &c.’ Notebook,” Victorian Poetry, 31.2 (1993): 143-55.
• Thomas Hardy: The Excluded and Collaborative Stories, ed. Pamela Dalziel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Choice Outstanding Academic Book, 1994.