Miss Katie Victoria Holdway BA, MA
PhD Researcher in Nineteenth-Century Literature
Katie Holdway is a PhD Researcher in the Department of English at the University of Southampton.
Beginning my studies in 2014, I completed both my BA (2017) and my MA (2018) at the University of Southampton. After being awarded a Postgraduate Scholarship by the Wolfson Foundation, I commenced my doctoral studies in the English Department in October 2018. My project examines the ways in which Charles Dickens’s first serial—the Pickwick Papers—was appropriated by the newspaper press, through the politically strategic use of evocations, extracts and adaptations. Mapping these appropriations from Pickwick’s initial publication in 1836 to Dickens’s death in 1870, the project attends particularly to the significance of the serial’s deployment in the service of the debates about Reform politics that proliferated in the press at key moments during Dickens’s lifetime. The project urges thinking about fictional texts like Pickwick as being at the very heart of the composite, political, identity-shaping strategies employed by newspapers in the nineteenth century, as well as building a replicable, data-driven methodology capable of facilitating further research into the relationship between newspaper appropriation, politics and other literary texts.
Qualifications
B.A. English with French (First with Honours), University of Southampton, 2017
M.A. Nineteenth-Century Literature (Distinction), University of Southampton, 2018