Professor Carolyn Oulton

Professor of Victorian Literature

School of Sciences, Psychology, Arts&Humanities, Computing, Engineering & Sports

Prof Carolyn Oulton is Co-Director of the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers and teaches across Creative and Professional Writing and English.

Carolyn Oulton is Professor of Victorian Literature and Co-Director of the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers (ICVWW), and teaches on the Creative Writing BA. She is Co-Lead for Kent Maps Online in collaboration with JSTOR Labs and ‘Let’s do the time walk again! Exploring the East Kent Coast Through Digital Heritage’ (funded by the National Heritage Lottery Fund).

Teaching and research supervision in Creative Writing, Victorian Studies and Heritage' Senior Fellow Higher Education Academy'.

My publications include poetry and biography, as well as monographs and essay collections on Victorian and early 20th-century literature literary culture. My research interests include: the New Woman; the Victorian seaside; Dickens and literary pilgrimage; place-based reading. Books In All The Right Places: Reading Culture and The Victorians is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. My current research is on representations of the Victorian and intergenerational fiction of the 1920s and ‘30s.

My latest poetry collection The Letter Game will be published by Worple Press in 2026.

Research Projects

  • Beach City Canterbury: Creative and Craft Workshop. Researcher(s): Professor Carolyn Oulton, Jae Fowler, Dr Philip Ulrich. [Project]
  • Let’s do the time walk again! Exploring the East Kent Coast through digital heritage.. Researcher(s): Professor Carolyn Oulton, Mrs Michelle Crowther. [Project]

Research Supervisor

  • “How does the lived experience of neurodiversity impact the technique and methods involved in a creative output rooted in experimental practices and ‘inhabitation’?” (or something along these lines).. Researcher(s): Miss Elizabeth Waterman-Scrase. Supervisor(s): Professor Carolyn Oulton, Dr Sonia Overall. [Postgraduate Research Project]
  • A Place in Society: The Private Public of the Persistent Scribblers' Society. Researcher(s): Dr Michelle Crowther. Supervisor(s): Dr Susan Civale, Professor Carolyn Oulton. [Postgraduate Research Project]
  • An Orphic exploration of ineffable experience through the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Researcher(s): Ms Sinead Fitzgerald. Supervisor(s): Dr Peter Watts, Professor Carolyn Oulton. [Postgraduate Research Project]
  • Class based study of female masculinity from first to second wave feminism. Researcher(s): Ms Jan Dunn. Supervisor(s): Dr Mitch Goodrum, Dr Dave Hitchcock, Professor Carolyn Oulton. [Postgraduate Research Project]
  • Doctoral Research Project. Researcher(s): Dr Nihad Laouar. Supervisor(s): Dr Andrew Humphries, Professor Carolyn Oulton. [Postgraduate Research Project (past)]
  • Doctoral Research Project. Researcher(s): Dr Alyson Hunt. Supervisor(s): Dr Susan Civale, Professor Carolyn Oulton. [Postgraduate Research Project (past)]
  • Doctoral Research Project. Researcher(s): Mrs Lizzy Duffield-Fuller. Supervisor(s): Dr Susan Civale, Professor Carolyn Oulton. [Postgraduate Research Project (past)]
  • Going in Circles: Changing perceptions of the Arctic through literary and visual representations in the Long Nineteenth-Century. Researcher(s): Dr Jacqueline Stamp. Supervisor(s): Professor Carolyn Oulton, Dr Peter Merchant, Professor Peter Vujakovic. [Postgraduate Research Project (past)]
  • Moving through uncertainty with George Meredith. Researcher(s): Mrs Sylvia Hornsby. Supervisor(s): Professor Carolyn Oulton, Dr Simon Wilson. [Postgraduate Research Project]
  • Not simply a ‘literary editor’ 1 : reassessing Rose Weigall as a writer of women’s stories and an advocate for women’s agency.. Researcher(s): Mrs Elizabeth Earl. Supervisor(s): Dr Susan Civale, Professor Carolyn Oulton. [Postgraduate Research Project]
  • Quantifying and Qualifying Inventorised ‘Heirlooms’: A reconstruction of the material legacy of the Hammond Family of St Albans Court Nonington 1551 – 1938 including a searchable dataset.. Researcher(s): Mrs Victoria Stevens. Supervisor(s): Dr Claire Bartram, Professor Carolyn Oulton. [Postgraduate Research Project]
  • Recovering Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856–1934): Genre and Geography. Researcher(s): Miss Hayley Smith. Supervisor(s): Professor Carolyn Oulton, Dr Christian Beighton. [Postgraduate Research Project]
  • The ‘Strange’ Disappearance of Henrietta Stannard: Rediscovering the Life and Work of John Strange Winter, a fin de siecle celebrity. Researcher(s): Mrs Toni Atkinson. Supervisor(s): Dr Susan Civale, Professor Carolyn Oulton. [Postgraduate Research Project]
  • The Mission of Mary Eliza Haweis (1848-1898). Researcher(s): Miss Laura Allen. Supervisor(s): Professor Carolyn Oulton, Dr Susan Civale. [Postgraduate Research Project]
  • The New University in Post-War British Literature. Researcher(s): Mr Daniel Vince. Supervisor(s): Dr Mitch Goodrum, Professor Carolyn Oulton. [Postgraduate Research Project]
  • The Pilgrim-Writer: The transformative potential of the language arts and pilgrimage – an embodied investigation of self, drawing on theory and practice, including my own direct experience of contemporary pilgrimage and ‘languaging’.. Researcher(s): Ms Victoria Field. Supervisor(s): Dr Sonia Overall, Professor Carolyn Oulton. [Postgraduate Research Project]
  • The Voices of Ellen Courtenay- the Life and Work of Ellen Courtenay as Madame Helene Steinberg- Actress, Appeal Memoirist, Lecturer and Poet.. Researcher(s): Mrs Trina Willis. Supervisor(s): Dr Susan Civale, Professor Carolyn Oulton. [Postgraduate Research Project]
  • The YA novel: a conduit for exploring female disempowerment and self-identity, as demonstrated through the experiences of children of d/Deaf adults (CODAs) and of d/Deaf young adults. Researcher(s): Ms Lucie Bowins Roberts. Supervisor(s): Dr Susan Civale, Professor Carolyn Oulton. [Postgraduate Research Project]
  • Zolaism through Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s lens: serialisation on trial. Researcher(s): Ms Megan Hairan. Supervisor(s): Professor Carolyn Oulton, Dr David Budgen, Dr Susan Civale. [Postgraduate Research Project]

Trustee of the Canterbury Commemoration Society. Museum partners include the Dickens Museum in Broadstairs, Ramsgate Clock House, Deal Maritime and Local History Museum and Sandwich Guildhall Museum.

Patron of the Jerome K. Jerome Society

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Contact me

carolyn.oulton@canterbury.ac.uk
01227922340
Thorne & Fynden (THs05), Canterbury

Based in

School of Sciences, Psychology, Arts and Humanities, Computing, Engineering and Sport