SLLL welcomes Dr Amelia Dale as Lecturer in English

Dr Amelia Dale believes a classroom should be a creative space where students can share their own ideas and experiences, while also developing their understanding of the contexts and histories that shape their learning.

“I had the pleasure of teaching in the first year course, Close Encounters: How to Read Literature run by Dr Claire Hansen in the first Semester of 2023. In my lectures I attempted to establish to the students the broader context around the key skill we were teaching: close reading. I wanted to give them a sense of the long histories of close reading emerging as a concept, as well as how it is helpful outside the academic area of literary studies,” Dr Dale said.

Dr Dale is a Lecturer in English at the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics (SLLL) and has previously held positions at Nanjing University, SUIBE, and the University of Sydney, where she received her PhD in 18th-century literature. Her areas of specialisation include 18th-century literature and culture, gender and genre, histories of the novel, histories of sexuality, and women’s writing.

Her monograph The Printed Reader: Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain was recently reviewed as “beautiful and surprising” and “one of the best books” that the reviewer had “ever read in the field of eighteenth-century studies.” The Printed Reader examines British adaptations of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote to argue that literature was envisaged as imprinting the reader’s mind, character, and body in gendered ways. It was shortlisted for the British Association of Romanticism’s First Book Prize.

“I am currently working on a project in collaboration with Dr Nicola Parsons from the University of Sydney on Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies (1760-1794). It’s a long-running, culturally important periodical publication, which has inspired TV series like Harlots. It has multiple facets to it – it functions like a celebrity gossip column, an anthology of poetry and a collection of character descriptions. We have written several articles on it, including an account of its publication history which came out recently in The Library,” Dr Dale said.

One of her other projects involves looking at renowned author Jane Austen’s later work. “Jane Austen wrote her last pieces of writing in years filled with catastrophic climate anomalies, including flooding across Europe and Asia, and a famously cold summer of 1816, stemming from the eruption of Mount Tambora, a volcano in Indonesia. I am interested in how these natural calamities affected Austen’s treatment of climate and seasonal change,” she said.

Dr Dale is the editor of The Shandean and an Interviews Editor for the poetry journal Rabbit. Her work has been supported by the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the ARC Centre for Excellence for the History of Emotions, Yale University Lewis Walpole Library and Chawton House. Next semester, she will be co-convening the course “Literature and Modernity” with Dr Russell Smith.