Chloe Osborne

I joined Royal Holloway as an AHRC funded doctoral researcher in 2019. My research primarily involves colonial and postcolonial writing of the long-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and I am completing a thesis on the intersections and interplay between anthropological and literary discourses in representations of Oceania, with a particular focus on critical indigenous theory and indigenous presences in Victorian Studies. My current specialism is on the Pacific writing of Robert Louis Stevenson. I am particularly interested in the ways that reading his work alongside contemporary and twentieth-century theorists and writers of Oceania, notably the anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead, and Samoan author Albert Wendt, can illuminate some of the complex confluences between anthropology, ethnography and fiction from the late-nineteenth century to the present day. 

In 2020 I founded the London Nineteenth-Century Studies Graduate Strand run through the Institute of English Studies in London, which brings together PGRs and ECRs working on the long-nineteenth century. More information can be found on our website (www.lncssgs.wordpress.com) or by following us on Twitter (@LNCSSGS). I currently hold Visiting Fellowships at The Huntington Library in Los Angeles and The Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, London, and am Reviews Editor for the History of Anthropology Review (https://histanthro.org).

I completed my undergraduate and MA degrees in French and English Literature at the University of Birmingham and King’s College London. Prior to beginning my Doctoral research I worked in academic publishing and as a project officer for a number of research programmes at SOAS, University of London. 

In Spring Term 2022 I will be teaching EN1112 Introduction to English Poetry.

I am a member of the Centre for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies at the University of Kent, the British Association for Victorian Studies, the International Association for the Study of Scottish Literatures and the Australian Association for Pacific Studies.