Victoria Russell

Biography

Dr Victoria Russell joined Keele University in October 2021 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. She was awarded her PhD in Modern History at Birkbeck College, University of London in 2019, where she also taught undergraduate History and PPH modules.

Research and scholarship

Victoria Russell is a social and cultural historian of ideas, who uses gender as a category of analysis. Her PhD focused on the concept of androgyny and the unsexed mind, heterodox radicalism and social reform in England between the 1790s and 1840s. Her first monograph, The Unsexed Mind and Psychological Androgyny, 1790-1848: Radicalism, Reform and Gender in England, was published by Palgrave MacMillan in December 2021.

Funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, her postdoctoral research interrogates a range of radical print media to investigate how evidence of androgynies in the human and natural sciences - notably in the sciences of comparative anatomy, Lamarckian evolution and phrenology - was used to reframe the radical debate on male/female equality, challenging essentialist understandings of sexual difference and promoting what some described as 'unsexual politics'.

Teaching

Currently teaching on the undergraduate HIS–20067 Sources and Debates module.

Further information

Research interests include radicalism and reform in Britain between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, gender, Rational Dissent, education, marriage, the science of mind, phrenology and theories of evolution.

Collaborations and grants awards

Birkbeck SSHP Travel Fund Hobsbawm Scholarship Fund Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship