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. Her work explores how institutional, communal, and intimate forms of scrutiny structure social life and cultural expression in the Romantic period, and how literary texts both reproduce and resist regimes of visibility and control.

Her research develops this focus through Critical Disability Studies, tracing how literature engages with shifting ideas of impairment, dependence, and care. She has also published on Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, analysing how peer-based observation - gossip, speculation, and social scrutiny - functions as a form of gendered regulation in early nineteenth-century fiction.

She welcomes PhD applications on surveillance, disability, gender, and self-regulation in Romantic and nineteenth-century literature, as well as interdisciplinary projects engaging with medical humanities and cultural history. Current and recent doctoral work includes Gothic literature, fin de siècle fiction, periodical culture, disability studies, and representations of non-human figures.