Dr Lucy Thompson

Lucy’s research examines how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature registers and shapes practices of surveillance, with a particular focus on gender, disability, and the body. She is interested in how scrutiny – whether institutional, communal, or intimate - structures life and cultural expression in the Romantic period.

Her book, Gender, Surveillance, and Literature in the Romantic Period (Routledge, 2022), explores how surveillance became embedded in literary form between 1780 and 1830. Recent work develops this interest through Critical Disability Studies, tracing how literature reflects shifting ideas of impairment, dependence, and care. Her chapter on disability and surveillance in William Godwin’s Mandeville appears in Care and Disability: Relational Representations (Routledge, 2025).

She also writes on Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, analysing how peer-based observation – gossip, speculation, and social scrutiny - operates as a form of gendered regulation in early nineteenth-century fiction. Across these strands, her research considers how literary texts both reproduce and resist dominant regimes of visibility and control.

Her PhD students work on Gothic literature, fin de siècle fiction, periodical culture, disability studies, and representations of non-human figures in literature.

She welcomes PhD applications on surveillance, disability, gender, and self-regulation in Romantic and nineteenth-century fiction, as well as interdisciplinary projects engaging with medical humanities and cultural history.