Professor Mark Knight
Professor in Literature, Religion and Victorian Studies, Head of DepartmentProfile
Mark Knight joined the Department in January 2016, having taught previously at the University of Toronto and Roehampton University. He has taught widely in the area of British literature post-1800, and specialises in Victorian Literature and Religion.
His books include Chesterton and Evil (Fordham University Press, 2004), Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature (co-authored with Emma Mason, Oxford University Press, 2006), An Introduction to Religion and Literature (Continuum, 2009), and Good Words: Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel (The Ohio State University Press, 2019). He has co-edited collections on religion and literature for Ashgate (2006) and Continuum (2009), co-edited Literature and the Bible: A Reader (Routledge, 2013), and edited The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion (Routledge, 2016).
Currently, Mark is writing Oscar Wilde: A New Testament (under contract with Oxford University Press) and editing The Cambridge Companion to Religion in Victorian Literary Culture (under contract with Cambridge University Press). He is the General Editor of the journal Literature and Theology, co-editor (with Emma Mason) of the book series, New Directions in Religion and LIterature (Bloomsbury), and co-editor (with Charles LaPorte) of a forthcoming special issue ('Talking 51福利 Religion in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literary Studies') for the journal MLQ. Mark co-leads the Religion and Spiritualities caucus for the North American Victorian Studies Association, and has previously co-directed two NEH summer seminars on religion, secularism and the novel, with Lori Branch (2016, 2019).
In addition to his work on Victorian literature and religion, Mark has research interests in the postsecular, Victorian ghost stories, nineteenth-century periodicals, sensation fiction, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton, Marie Corelli, Alice Meynell, and the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer.
Mark has supervised and examined PhD students in Britain, Canada, the USA, and the Netherlands, and he would be delighted to hear from anyone with broadly related research interests who is interested in coming to do their PhD at Lancaster.
PhD Supervision Interests
I welcome proposals on: Victorian literature and religion/theology; other aspects of Victorian literature (including the novel, sensation fiction, ghost stories, periodicals, Dickens, Collins, Meynell, and Wilde); the broader relationship between literature and religion since 1800; the postsecular; and the work of G. K. Chesterton.
- Literature and Religion