Emily Vincent

Emily Vincent is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Birmingham working on narratives of disease and the Gothic in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Emily’s doctoral research focused on maternal grief, the spiritualism movement, and women’s ghost stories and life-writing in the late nineteenth century. She has wider interests in histories of science, the occult, and the medical humanities. Her first monograph manuscript centralises archival and literary research relating to child loss and maternal bereavement, arguing for the ghost story as an indispensable form through which to communicate grieved maternal experiences and traumas of the female body. Emily’s most recent article ‘Hauntings in the Nursery: Reviving the Nursemaid Through Fin-de-Siècle Gothic’ can be found in CUSP: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures. Currently, she is an Early Career Representative for the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) and an Honorary Fellow and Deputy Associate Director of Research for the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International (CN-CSI), based at Durham University.

Within the MEDEP project, Emily will explore representations of the so-called ‘Russian Flu’ of 1889-90 and the ‘Spanish Flu’ of 1918 in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century British fiction and periodical sources. Her research will be shaped around three key strands — criminality, Gothic contagion, and marginalised communities — to investigate the representation of influenza in Britain in literary and media spheres. Emily will share her findings in various publications and at several international and UK conferences in 2024 and 2025. Supporting the project’s UK Team Principal Investigator, Melissa Dickson, Emily will help to develop an edited collection based on research findings from the 2024 MEDEP conference in Bucharest. She will also help to amplify the academic and public engagement activities of the MEDEP consortium through academic workshops, grant applications, blog posts, and social media promotion.

You can find Emily on her research profile and on X/Twitter.