Elspeth (Elsie) Askew

Thesis Title: The Transatlantic Last (Hu)Man: Anthropocentrism and Human Extinction in British and American Periodicals, 1816-1848

Supervisor: Professor Fiona Stafford

Research Interests: Romanticism; the Gothic; the periodical form; transatlantic influence; verbal and visual culture; animal poetry; women's writing; silence, absence and loss

Doctoral Research: I am an English DPhil student at St John’s college, where I hold a faculty studentship. In my current research, I am exploring the relationship between extinction and anthropocentrism in apocalyptic literary texts from British and American periodicals of the first half of the nineteenth century. One key aim of my thesis is to consider whether the status accorded to non-human animals in these texts varies across national lines in this period. As texts about apocalypse are often highly allusive, I also hope to trace the more general lines of domestic and transatlantic influence between them. My BA and MA dissertations, both awarded at the University of Exeter, focused on eighteenth-century animal poetry and the role of silence in gothic texts respectively. Before I began my DPhil, I taught secondary-school English and gained my PGCE with QTS.

Teaching: Graduate Teaching Assistant on the Word and Image course for FHS Paper 6: Special Options in Michaelmas 2024; TMS for FHS Paper 5: Literature in English, 1760-1830 in Trinity 2025; teaching for Jane Austen: Literature and Legacy at Lady Margaret Hall's Summer School in 2025

Conference Papers: ''The cold world shall not know': Silence and Sympathy in Shelley’s 'Julian and Maddalo'', The Shelley Conference, July 2024; 'Beyond the Last Man: Shelley's Response to Buffon's 'sublime but gloomy theory'', Oxford's Romantic Research Seminar, May 2025