Dr Anne Witchard
Telephone: 020 7911 5000
Email: A.Witchard@westminster.ac.uk
Postal: University of Westminster, Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies,
32-38 Wells Street,
London, W1T 3UW
Section: English Literature
Education: University of North London (BA Hons in English 1997) and Birkbeck College, University of London (PhD in English 2003).
I lecture in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and culture. My research and teaching interests are in the Fin de Siècle, London Studies, China Studies, Modernism and the Gothic.
I am module leader for the Victorians (BA) and London Vortex (MA). I also teach Modernism and the Early Twentieth Century, and Reading Gothic.
I am currently organising an AHRC funded investigative project, China in Britain: Myths and Realities.
Publications
Monographs
Lao She, London and China’s Literary Revolution (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012)
Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown (Ashgate Publishing, 2009)
http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754658641.
See reviews:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/04/07/the-best-of-brit-lit-36.html
http://www.monmouth.edu/the_space_between/articles/EugeniaJenkins2010.pdf
Edited books
London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination (with Lawrence Phillips) (Continuum, 2010)
http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=134410&SubjectId=997&Subject2Id=1677
See reviews:
http://irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com/bookreview10.html
Articles in journals
‘China, Aestheticism and the stage: the modernist consumption of chinoiserie’ Journal of Victorian Culture (forthcoming)
‘Bedraggled ballerinas on a ’bus back to Bow: “the fairy business”’ 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (Autumn 2011).
http://19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/issue/view/81/showToc
‘A Threepenny Omnibus Ticket to Limeyhousey Causeyway: Fictional Sojourns in Chinatown’, Comparative Critical Studies (October 2007)
‘Thomas Burke, the “Laureate of Limehouse” : A New Biographical Outline’, English Literature in Transition (1880-1920) 48:2 (January 2005)
‘Aspects of Literary Limehouse: Thomas Burke and the “Glamorous Shame” of Chinatown’, Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 2:2 (September 2004)
Chapters in books
‘Curious Kisses: the Chinatown fantasies of Thomas Burke’ in Ruth Mayer and Vanessa Kunnemann (eds), Chinatowns in a Transnational World. Myths and Realities of an Urban Phenomenon (Routledge, 2011)
‘“A Fatal Freshness”: Mid-Victorian Suburbophobia’ in Anne Witchard and Lawrence Phillips (eds) London Gothic : Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination (Continuum, 2010)
‘Chinoiserie Wonderlands of the Fin-de-Siècle: Twinkletoes in Chinatown’, in Cris Hollingsworth (ed), Alice Beyond Wonderland: Essays for the Twenty-first Century (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2009)
‘Bloomsbury, Limehouse and Piccadilly: A Chinese Sojourn in London’, in Pallavi Rastogi and Jocelyn Stitt (eds), Before Windrush: Recovering a Black and Asian Literary Heritage within Britain, 1786-1938 (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008)
‘Thomas Burke: “Son of London”’, in Lawrence Phillips (ed.), A Mighty Mass of Brick and Smoke: Victorian and Edwardian Representations of London (Rodopi Press, 2007)
Reviews
Review of Graham Law and Alan Maunder, Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life (London: Palgrave, 2008) in The Journal of Victorian Culture 16:1 (2011)
Review of Susan David Bernstein and Elsie B. Michie (eds), Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in Verbal and Visual Culture, in Victoriographies: A Journal of Nineteenth-century Writing, 1790-1914 1:1 (Spring 2011)
Entry on Sax Rohmer for Encyclopedia of the Gothic, edited by Andrew Smith, David Punter and William Hughes (Blackwell, 2010)
Guest Editor with Stephen Barfield, ' London and the Camden Town Group' and
Review: ‘Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group, Tate Britain 13 February -– 5 May 2008’, Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 7:1 (Autumn 2009).
Review of Paul Fox and Koray Melikoglu (eds), Formal Investigations: Aesthetic Style in Late Victorian and Edwardian Detective Fiction, English Literature in Transition (1880-1920) 51: 3 (Winter 2008).
Review of Alex Murray, Recalling London: Literature and History in the work of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair (London: Continuum, 2007), in Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 6:1 (June 2008)
Review of Daryl Ogden’s The Language of The Eyes: Science, Sexuality, and Female Vision in English Literature and Culture, 1690-1927, in English Literature in Transition (1880-1920) 49: 4 (Summer 2006)
Reviewer for Routledge ABES Modernist Section
Colloquia
‘Gothic London’, University of Westminster, 2008
‘“No Hawkers, No Models”: The Vicissitudes of the Modernist Muse’, University of Westminster, 2010
Conference papers etc:
‘Lao She in Modernist London,’ Contesting “British Chinese” Culture: Forms, Histories, Identities, University of Reading, September 2011
‘Lao She, London and China’s Literary Revolution’, Britain and China, Pasts, Presents and Futures from the nineteenth century to the twenty first, British Inter-University China Centre , University of Bristol, August 2011
‘London Gothic’, Stoke Newington Literary Festival, June 2011
‘“A Poplar dope-house on bargain night” and other Chinatown trips’, Birkbeck School of Arts seminar series, The Night Shift: Writing and Research on London’s Dark Half, November 2010
Speaker - Yellowface/Yellowperil, Musées d’Extrême Orient, Pavillion Chinois, Brussels, October 2010
‘Maidens and Mandarins’, The Cultural Politics of English Pantomime, 1837-1901, University of Birmingham and Lancaster University, July 2010
‘“No Hawkers No Models”: The Vicissitudes of the Modernist Muse’, Reading Jean Rhys, Anglia Ruskin University and Kings College London, July 2010
British Chinese Network, Q and A with James Yeatman, director of ‘Limehouse Nights’, Limehouse Town Hall, June 2nd 2010
‘Bedraggled ballerinas on a ‘bus back to Bow: “the fairy business”. Revisiting the Victorian East End, London Nineteenth Century Studies Seminar, Institute of English Studies, University of London, Spring 2010
Public Lecture ‘Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown’, Museum of London Docklands, July 2009
‘Being ‘John Chinaman’: Singing the Limehouse Blues’, Metropolis in Flux: Contemporary Cultural Migrations in London, University of Westminster, June 2009
‘From China to Piccadilly (1929): The Untold Story’, Cityscapes of Diaspora: Chinatown and Beyond, Middlesex University, November 2008
‘Mary Butts’ Inheritance: Blake, Magic and Modernism’, Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln, April 2008
‘Chu Chin Chow and Chinatown: London’s Nightlife and World War One’, The First World War and Popular Culture Conference, University of Newcastle, March 2006
‘Limehouse Nightmares: Sax Rohmer and Thomas Burke’, University of Bristol, Centre for the Study of Colonial and Postcolonial Societies, May 2005
‘The Glamorous Shame of Chinatown’, University of Oxford, English Faculty, Fin-de-Siècle Seminar Series, November 2004
Media
I am Consultant Literary Associate for .cent magazine, a quarterly journal for the creative arts http://www.centmagazine.co.uk/
DVD commentaries Dr Who Revisitations The Talons of Weng Chiang (BBC) ‘Victoriana and Chinoiserie’ and ‘Limehouse a Victorian Chinatown’
