Dr Asha Hornsby

Dr Asha Hornsby

Research Fellow

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 1878
Email
arh37@st-andrews.ac.uk
Office
Room 102
Location
Beethoven Lodge

 

Biography

Dr Hornsby holds a BA (English & History) from Exeter, an MA (English) from Durham, and a PhD from UCL. She has taught at UCL, QMUL, St Andrews and Nottingham Universities and has been a research fellow at UCL's Institute of Advanced Studies and at the Huntington Library in California. She returned to the School of English in 2024 as a British Academy postdoctoral fellow.

Research areas

Dr Hornsby's research scrutinises the interplay between scientific medicine, public health anxieties, and nineteenth-century literary culture. One key research strand concerns animal experimentation, and her monograph Vivisection and Late-Victorian Literary Culture (Cambridge: CUP, 2025) is the first sustained literary-critical study of the topic. She has published related research in the Victorian Review and the Journal of Victorian Culture.

A second major research strand, supported by the British Academy (2024-27), concerns global seafaring and disease. Her second monograph Contagious Crossings: how marine medicine made waves in Victorian culture is in progress. Meanwhile, watery interests have led to an article which explores nautical metaphors in late-nineteenth century literary culture (Review of English Studies), and a piece about how Scottish ship's surgeons represented Shetlanders as well as indigenous populations they enountered on journeys to and within the Northern whaling grounds. The latter will appear in a volume she is co-editing with Dr Katie Garner; Sounding Scotland's Waters, 1800-1900: History, Literature, Science, will be published by EUP in 2027.

Selected publications

 

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