Rebecca N Mitchell

Rebecca N. Mitchell is Reader in Victorian Literature and Culture and Director of the Nineteenth-Century Centre at the University of Birmingham. She has published widely on Victorian fashion, print culture, realism, George Meredith, and Oscar Wilde. Her scholarship on nineteenth-century dress includes Fashioning the Victorians: A Critical Sourcebook, (Bloomsbury 2018) and articles on fancy dress balls and on aesthetic dress (in Fashion Theory), on mourning dress (in Victorian Literature and Culture), and on the crinoline (in BRANCH). Outside of fashion, her interdisciplinary literary studies focussed on empathy in text and image (e.g. Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference, Ohio State, 2011) before turning to Meredith and Wilde. Her co-edited anniversary edition of Meredith’s seminal Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside (Yale, 2012), was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, and she edited the 2019 Yearbook of English Studieson Meredith and Margaret Oliphant. Her work on Wilde includes Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery, co-authored with Joseph Bristow (Yale, 2015) and articles in Review of English Studies, Word and Image, and Victorian Periodicals Review, among other journals; with Bristow and Yvonne Ivory, she is co-editing Wilde’s Unpublished, Incomplete, and Miscellaneous Works for the Oxford English Text edition of the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Mitchell co-edits the journal Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism; her research has been supported by awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, the AHRC, the British Academy, and the Huntington Library. Her current monograph project,