Dr Jane Ford joined the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Law in February 2018. She has previously taught at Edge Hill University, the University of Chester, Keele University and the University of Portsmouth. Jane holds a BA (Hons) in English Language & Literature, an MA in Victorian Literature (University of Liverpool) and a Ph.D in English (University of Portsmouth). Her doctoral thesis examined metaphors of economic exploitation and domination in a range of late nineteenth-century writing. Jane is a specialist in fin-de-siècle literature and culture and has a particular interest in economic motifs and ideas, feminist recovery, the Gothic and literary representations of insects / entomology.

Jane is a specialist in the literature and culture of the fin de siècle and she is currently completing a monograph which examines the complex network of metaphors that emerged around late nineteenth-century conceptions of economic self-interest and exploitation.

Jane a co-editor of two collections of essays. The first, titled Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: Libidinal Lives (Routledge 2016), considers how the literature of the fin de siècle questions, defines and registers the relationship between economy and desire, particularly in the light of late nineteenth-century developments in economic thought and sexology. The second, Lucas Malet, Dissident Pilgrim: Critical Essays (Routledge, 2019), is the first collection of essays to consider the writing of the critically-neglected author Lucas Malet (Mary St. Leger Kingsley Harrison). The volume serves as an introduction to Malet’s work and highlights her centrality within the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literary establishment.

Jane welcomes enquiries from prospective research students interested in any aspect of fin-de-siècle literature, late-Victorian Gothic, Victorian literature and finance / economics and nineteenth-century women’s writing.