Dominique’s academic research principally covers the area of Victorian literature and culture. Her work has been published in journals such as Word&Image, the Victorian Popular Fiction Journal, and Victorian Poetry. Her research interests include:
- Victorian poetry, short fiction, and essays, especially by female writers such as Michael Field and Vernon Lee.
- Media studies and the relationships between writing and other art forms (painting, sculpture, TV, etc.), including adaptation and ekphrasis.
- The detective fiction genre from the nineteenth century to the present day, in particular in modern TV series focused on ‘amateur’ detectives/extraordinary sidekicks.
- Greek and other myths in the nineteenth century, especially Victorian Homer.
- Broadly, the relationship between twenty-first-century culture and Victorian literature and culture through Neo-Victorianism as well as the continuity of political, social and cultural institutions, structures and norms.
See below for a list of talks and publications, including PDFs, where available.
You can also read non-academic blogs about my research and reviews of detective and other fiction right here!
Forthcoming
‘Ekphrasis in Sight and Song’
Michael Field in Context (forthcoming 2025)
Invited chapter on ekphrasis in Michael Field’s Sight and Song (1892).
Publications
‘Victorian Re-Encounters’
Special issue of Victorian Poetry, co-edited with Fergus McGhee (summer 2023)
This special issue will explore how Victorian poetry re-encounters and is re-encountered.
‘C.L. Pirkis’
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2023)
An encyclopaedia entry on nineteenth-century detective fiction author C.L. Pirkis, creator of female detective Loveday Brooke. (Article)
‘Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2023)
An encyclopaedia entry on nineteenth-century popular fiction writer Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett. (Article)
‘Theo Douglas’
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2022)
An encyclopaedia entry on fin-de-siècle popular fiction writer H.D. Everett (Theo Douglas). (Article)
‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti at the Intersection of Painting and Poetry’
Adaptation Before Cinema, ed. Glenn Jellenik and Lissette Lopez Szwydky-Davis (Palgrave, 2023)
Chapter on Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s double works as adaptations and how these early examples can inform adaptation studies today. (Chapter)
‘How The Poor Live’
London’s East End: A Short Encyclopedia (2023)
An encyclopaedia entry on George R. Sims’ series of articles about the living conditions for the London working classes in the 1880s. (Encyclopaedia)
‘Sherlock’s Legacy: The case of the Extraordinary Sidekick’
The Detective’s Companion in Crime Fiction: A Study in Sidekicks, ed. Lucy Andrew and Samuel Saunders (Palgrave, August 2021)
Chapter on the legacy of distrust of professional detectives emerging from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, featuring some of TV’s finest extraordinary detectives. (Chapter; PDF)
‘Ekphrasis’
Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing (August 2021)
An encyclopedia entry on ekphrasis as a genre of Victorian women’s writing, including by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Vernon Lee, and Margaret Oliphant. (Article; PDF)
‘Back to Bodies: Female Detectives and bodily Tools and Tells in Victorian Detective Fiction’
Victorian Popular Fictions, 2.1 (2020), 56-68
Article on early detective fiction featuring female detectives, arguing for defining the detective fiction genre around the actions of the body, typified as female, rather than around the male ratiocinative mind. (Article; PDF)
‘The Adventure of the “Petticoated Police”
Journal of Victorian Culture Blog (OUP) — May 2020
Short article promoting ‘Back to Bodies’ (see above), accompanied by a thread highlighting under-studied characters and texts. (Blog post; Twitter thread)
‘The Case of the Extraordinary Sidekick’
Journal of Victorian Culture Blog (OUP) — April 2020
Short article promoting research on Sherlock Holmes’ legacy in twenty-first-century detective story telling, trailing ‘Extraordinary Sidekick’ (see above). (Blog post)
‘The one question is not what you mean but what you do: Michael Field’s ekphrastic verse’
Victorian Poetry, 57.3 (2019), 345-364
Article on the aesthetic project of Michael Field’s Sight and Song, and how that volume both met and frustrated the expectations of the masculinised art critical community, through comparison with Swinburne’s First Series. (Article; PDF)
‘Belcaro: An Introduction’
The Literary Encyclopedia, May, 2019
Commissioned short article on Vernon Lee’s Belcaro collection of essays, its influences and reception. (Article)
‘Vernon Lee: A Biography’
The Literary Encyclopedia, April 2019
Commissioned short article on Vernon Lee’s life and works. (Article)
‘The Case for Kittler: considering ekphrasis as recursion’
Word&Image, 35.1 (2019), 89-96
Article on the utility of Friedrich Kittler’s media history for materialist literary criticism, proposing a Kittlerian toolkit and demonstrating its application to the ekphrastic poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. (Article; PDF)
‘Psychopath Aesthetics: the example of the Cannibal’
MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, 12 (2018), 70-79
Paper on the Kantian elements of beauty in the recent television series, Hannibal, developing a model of psychopath aesthetics and psychopath ethics. (Article; PDF)
Presentations and classes
Victorian Homer: A Tale of Two Genres (July 2024)
Week-long course and invited lecture on the 2024 Summer School in Homer (UCL Dept of Greek and Latin), covering the influence of Homer on Victorian literature and Classical scholarship.
Invited lecture explore epic and ekphrasis, and Homer’s influence on their development in the C19.
Victorian Legacies
Podcast episode on Adapting the Nineteenth Century Detective (May 2022)
NAVSA Professionalisation Workshop for Graduate Students
In-person (Dec 2021)
Contributor to a panel discussion about the value of non-academic publishing for graduate students, focusing on short fiction and op-ed writing.
‘Sherlock Holmes and distrust of the police’
YouTube (April 2021)
Short talk on the connection between Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective and distrust of the police, focused on the GCSE curriculum text The Sign of Four. This video was produced for the GCSE English Literature Boost project.
‘The Divine Right of Statues: Gothic Encounters and Divine Retribution’
Romancing the Gothic, 21 March 2021.
Paid talk on living statues of divine saints and goddesses in nineteenth-century folktales and ghost stories, including the work of Henry James, Vernon Lee, and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer.
Dominique Gracia 