Josephine McDonagh

Josephine McDonagh’s research and teaching focus is on nineteenth-century British literature, especially in the contexts of colonialism, imperial expansion, and the migration of people across the world. She covers a range of authors, genres and print forms, and explores questions about the kinds of knowledge that literature produces and the intersections of literary texts with works in other disciplines, for instance law, political economy, and the natural sciences. McDonagh’s work also considers the spatial movement of texts across regions and continents, and across genres, from private, intimate forms like diaries or letters to works that are published and circulating publicly.  She has written books about British authors Thomas De Quincey and George Eliot, a study of ideas about child murder in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and about migration and literature in the nineteenth century; and edited volumes on gender politics, 19th-century science and literature, Charles Dickens and the French Revolution, and on nineteenth-century colonial commodity cultures. 

Her current work is on literature and migration: she is currently editing (with Hadji Bakara and Charlotte Sussman) a major volume of critical work on migration and literature across periods, The Oxford Handbook to Literature and Migration (forthcoming in 2027); and working on a study of nineteenth-century child migrants, and considering the connections with contemporary issues around child migration. At the University of Chicago, she is Director of the Nicholson Center for British Studies, and a member of the International Network of Postcolonial Print Cultures.