Lucy Powell

In 2021 I took up a Leverhulme early career research fellowship at the University of Oxford, exploring the literary and cultural afterlives of birds and feathered objects, and the forging of a global imaginary in the long eighteenth century. Prior to that, I was a teaching fellow at UCL, where I studied for my AHRC-funded PhD. My thesis interrogated the relationship between the history of the prison as a cultural structure and the novel as a literary form. My first monograph, which emerged from that thesis, is titled Prison and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Form and Reform, and will be published in 2025 with Cambridge University Press. I completed my Master’s degree at McGill University, Montréal, on a Commonwealth scholarship, where my thesis investigated the gendered identity of the narrators of Aphra Behn’s prose fictions. 

I am also a New Generation Thinker for the BBC, and have appeared in programmes across the network on everything from solitude and isolation to feminism and Farquhar, to a history of dreams from Homer to Freud. As an arts journalist, my features and reviews have appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, as well as in Time Out, Tank, Trade and Vogue magazines. 

I currently teach Paper 5 for Trinity – Literatures in English from 1760-1830. I have also lectured on Paper 4 and taught paper 6 options for the English Faculty. The first of these was ‘Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Literature and the Anthropocene’, an ecocritical module co-designed and co-convened with Professor Ros Ballaster which covered texts from the philosophy of Empedocles to “post everything. 12:01 on the doomsday clock” in the music of Moor Mother. Additionally, with Professor David Taylor, I co-convened a paper 6 on 'Word and Image', exploring the relationship between the visual and the verbal in poetry, drama, art writing and the novel. I have supervised undergraduate and graduate dissertations on a variety of topics including, most recently, a Master’s thesis on the symbol of the oak tree in Georgic poetry of the eighteenth century, and an undergraduate thesis on the figure of the bird in an age of environmental collapse.

My current project, "The Feather'd Tribe: Birds and the Routes of Empire in the Eighteenth Century" explores the ways in which birds and feathered objects enabled British writers and artists to forge a global imaginary in the eighteenth century. As more Europeans traversed a shrinking globe – in the role of naturalists, settlers, slavers, transportees and traders – so European knowledge about birds increased exponentially. With the burgeoning of triangulated trade routes between Africa, the Americas and Europe, the numbers of non-native birds imported to Britain also grew. Additionally, feathered ‘exotica’, created by native peoples in colonial settings, were increasingly imported into Britain as totemic representations of those peoples – objects that were made to perform both the ‘savagery’ of the colonial ‘margin’ and the wealth and supposed sophistication of the metropolitan ‘centre’. The project closely analyses works by Pope, Thomson, Barbauld, Cowper and Smith, and each chapter of the resulting monograph will be prefaced by an object biography of seven birds or feathered objects – including Robert Walpole’s pet flamingo, Hans Sloane’s feather ‘fetish’ and Elizabeth Montagu’s ‘feather room’. Across this study, I aim to map the ways in which ideas of empire and the material pathways of trade, consumption and curation intersect.

Prison and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Form and Reform (in production, forthcoming in 2025 with Cambridge University Press) 

‘Imprisonment’ in The Oxford Handbook of Henry Fielding, ed. Thomas Keymer and Henry Power (accepted for publication, Oxford University Press, forthcoming) 

‘Jakob Bogdani’s Stuffed Titmouse: Birds, Still-Life Painting and the Global Imaginary’ Eighteenth-Century Life (48: 3, 2024) pp. 24-45 

‘Sterne’s Captive and the Prison: Double Vision’, Shandean (33: 2022) pp. 25-49

‘Cant in Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild’, Notes and Queries (68: 3, 2021) pp. 267-268

 ‘“Doing Time”: Temporality and Writing in the Eighteenth-Century British Prison’, Life Writing (15: 1, 2018) pp. 59-77 

‘Life to the Power of Two’, review of Mary and Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of her Father’s Eyes in Opticon 1826 (Jan 2013)