Professor Josie Billington BA (Hons.), PGCE, MA, PhD

Personal Statement

I specialise in Victorian literature and in research on reading and health. My publications include Faithful Realism: Elizabeth Gaskell and Leo Tolstoy (2002), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (2008), This is Living Art: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare (2012), and editions of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (2006), Margaret Oliphant's Novellas (2013) and The Ladies Lindores (2016), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry (2014) and George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life (2015). I have published extensively on the power of literary reading to influence mental health including research projects on reading in relation to chronic pain, self-harm, reading with children and families, and the psychodynamics of reading groups, with colleagues in Medicine and Psychology, and with national charity The Reader. My monograph, Is Literature Healthy?, was published by Oxford University Press in 2016, and I have edited an interdisciplinary volume, Reading and Mental Health, for Palgrave (2019) with 46 contributors globally. I am a Higher Education Academy National Teaching Fellow and a member of the AHRC Peer Review College.

Prizes or Honours

• National Teaching Fellow (Higher Education Academy, 2015)

Funded Fellowships

Other Personal Distinctions

• Peer Review College Member (Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2017)