Professor Dale Townshend FSA

Academic and Professional Qualifications

Bachelor of Arts. 1992. University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Bachelor of Arts with Honours in English. 1993. University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Master of Arts by Research (English). 1997. University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

PhD (English).  2004. Keele University, Staffordshire. 

I am elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

Selected Research Awards and Fellowships (Since 2015)

• June 2015—December 2016: AHRC Leadership Fellowship (PI) for the project ‘Writing Britain’s Ruins: The Architectural Imagination, 1700-1850’. Grant Ref: AH/M00600X/1.  Amount Awarded (80 % of FEC): £181 863.   This research grant included the following costings:
• Lewis Walpole Library Fellowship, Yale University: 1 November–1 December 2016, including all travel, accommodation and subsistence grant.
• Yale Centre for British Art and Lewis Walpole Library Travel Grant for Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother: A Mini-Conference, Yale University, May 2018.
• March 2020: British Academy / Leverhulme Trust Small Research Award for archival work towards the completion of my current monograph project, Matthew Gregory Lewis (contracted to University of Wales Press). Amount awarded: £7370.00. This will finance research trips to the USA (Los Angeles and Boston) and Kingston, Jamaica, over a 3-year period (until March 2023)
• March 2020: Awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship in Eighteenth-Century Studies at the Huntington Library, California (Academic year 2020–21; postponed to 21–22 academic year): $3500.00 plus travel and visa fees. I took up this month-long Fellowship in term Autumn term of 21–22 academic year.
• December 2021: I was awarded an AHRC Follow-On Funding Grant for a project entitled ‘Experiencing Britain’s Ruins: ‘Revenants and Remains’ at Five Northern English Religious Houses and Beyond’. Grant Ref: AH/W004399/1. Amount Awarded (80 % of FEC): £80, 531. As PI on this project, I will collaborate with colleagues Dr Michael Carter and Dr Dominique Bouchard at English Heritage to develop an intensive year-long programme (January–December 2022)of youth engagement initiatives, guided tours, creative writing workshops and related digital events at five ecclesiastical ruins in the north of England (Byland Abbey, North Yorkshire; Furness Abbey, Cumbria; Lanercost Priory, Cumbria; Rievaulx Abbey, North Yorkshire; and Roche Abbey, South Yorkshire). At a concluding workshop for Heritage professionals in December 2022, I will use the feedback gained from this project to articulate a policy on the use of the Gothic and / or supernatural in for use by the contemporary heritage management sector.  

My research interests lie in all aspects of Gothic writing (romance; drama; chapbooks; poetry) of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Within this broad field, I have worked on a range of topics, including the Gothic in eighteenth-century children’s literature; Gothic appropriations of Shakespeare; Ann Radcliffe; Horace Walpole; William Beckford; Gothic topography; and the relationship between Gothic and Romantic aesthetics.  I have recently completed two books on the relationship between architecture and literature in the period 1700–1850, the first a collaborative and interdisciplinary collection of essays entitled Writing Britain’s Ruins (co-edited with Michael Carter and Peter Lindfield; British Library, 2017)and the second, a scholarly monograph entitled Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–1840 (Oxford University Press, 2019).    These are two of the many academic outputs of my AHRC Leadership Fellowship, Writing Britain’s Ruins, 1700–1850: The Architectural Imagination (2015–2017).  I also have strong research interests in critical theory, particularly in the work of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Emmanuel Levinas; within this more theoretical mode, I am currently working on the ethics of  Gothic fiction, from the eighteenth century to the present.   With Angela Wright (University of Sheffield), I have recently edited volumes 1 and 2 of The Cambridge History of the Gothic, a major, three-volume collection of essays that is to be published by Cambridge University Press in October 2020.  I currently have in press articles and chapters on such topics as ethics, hospitality and the Gothic; Horace Walpole’s Gothic tragedy The Mysterious Mother; and Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill.