Chris Keirstead

Education

PhD, University of Delaware

About Me

Christopher Keirstead received his PhD from the University of Delaware in 1999 and is a specialist in Victorian literature and culture. Other research and teaching interests include poetry, travel and mobility studies, genre studies, and Dickens. His current book project, Repeat Engagements: Continuities of Mobility, Modernity, and Form in Travel Writing since the Nineteenth Century, revisits some of travel writing’s most enduring and politically-charged contact zones in an effort to map the unique ways the form seeks to render processes of historical, technological and cultural change. Other on-going research projects include studies of British travel writing about the American South and the significance of poetry in nineteenth-century European travel guides. 

Research Interests

19th-century British literature and culture; poetry; Dickens; genre studies; travel writing; Victorian studies

Publications

• “Sea Changes:  Reimagining the Coast in EBB from “A Sea-Side Meditation” to “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 44.3 (2022): 240-63.
• “Verse Moves:  Poetry, Revision, and Periodical Space in John Murray’s European Handbooks for Travellers.” Victorian Periodicals Review 54.1 (2021): 60-88.
• “Sea Dreams and Realities:  Tennyson, Travel, and the Shifting Currents of Littoral Space in Victorian Culture.” Victorian Poetry 57.1 (2019): 73-99.
• “Travel and Poetry.”  The Cambridge History of Travel Writing.  Ed. Tim Youngs and Nandini Das.  Cambridge University Press, 2019: 442-55.
• “Contemporary Postcolonial Journeys on the Trails of Colonial Travelers.” Forthcoming in the Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing. Ed. Robert Clarke. Cambridge University Press, 2018: 139-53.
• “Cosmopolitan Soul:  Travels in Body and Spirit with Browning’s Cleon and Karshish.”  LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 27:1 (2016): 7-28.
• “Dickens, Travel Disorientation, and the Emergence of the Modern Literary Travel Essay:  Or, “A Flight” (and “Night Walks”) on Flight.” Studies in Travel Writing 19:4 (2015): 340-57.
• “Waterloo and its Afterlife in the Victorian Newspaper and Periodical Press.” Special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review 48.4 (Winter 2015). Co-edited with Marysa Demoor.
• "Convoluted Paths: Mapping Genre in Contemporary Footsteps Travel Writing." Genre 46.3 (2013):  285-315.
• Victorian Poetry, Europe, and the Challenge of Cosmopolitanism. Ohio University Press, 2011.