Dr Justine Pizzo

Dr Pizzo convenes undergraduate and postgraduate modules including: 'The Act of the Essay', 'Desire and Decay: Literature of the Long Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries', 'Romantics and Victorians', 'The Origins of Climate Crisis: Ecology in Victorian Literature' and 'Women, Writing, and the Canon'. She supervises a range of undergraduate, masters, and doctoral students focusing on nineteenth-century literature and culture.

Dr Justine Pizzo is Lecturer in British Literature, 1837 to 1939. She specialises in the Victorian period with a particular emphasis on the novel, female characterisation, and intersections of literature and climate. Her forthcoming monograph The Character of Climate: Women and Atmosphere in Victorian Fiction explores the influence of nineteenth-century climate science, medical discourse, and classical conceptions of character on female protagonists in the realist novel. Her research on the work of Charlotte Brontë and other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novelists (including Charles Dickens, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf) has appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, PMLA and the Cambridge Critical Concepts volume on Climate and Literature (ed Adeline Johns-Putra, 2019). She has co-edited a volume on Charlotte Brontë, Embodiment and the Material World (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, 2020) and focuses on a range of mid-to-late nineteenth century writers in her research and teaching (including Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, Amy Levy, and Lucas Malet, among others).  Her current research interests focus on the intersections of ninteenth-century ecology and literature and Victorian fiction and farming. She is open to working with postdoctoral students of nineteenth-century studies and those thinking about literature and ecology as well as women writers and the canon.