Prof Claudia Capancioni

Claudia specialises in Victorian Studies, British women writers, travel and life writing, gender, transgender, and comparative studies. She is interested in multigenerational literary legacy in the long nineteenth century, intellectual circles, adaptation and transnational studies, women’s education and Anglo-Italian literary and cultural connections.

She is currently working on the creative arts and solitude in the nineteenth century and a volume that reassesses and revitalises the gendered and gendering debates associated with the nineteenth-century ‘Easts’ for Manchester University Press (forthcoming April 2026) with Mariaconcetta Costantini and Julia Kuehn. The volume is entitled Re-examining Nineteenth-Century Easts: Gendered Narratives of Encounter. With Mariaconcetta Costantini, who is Visiting Professor at Lincoln Bishop University, she is also embarked on a book project on Polar Gothic to be published by the University of Wales (Gothic Literary Studies Series).

The subjects of her most recent publications have been contemporary writer Ali Smith Victorian women translators Sarah Austin and Lucie Duff Gordon, the Anglo-Italian heroine, and Margaret Galletti di Cadilhac’s stories and fairy tales. She has also published on Thomas A. Trollope’s travel writing, and vulnerability and resilience in the long nineteenth century. Claudia also continues to work on the results of a multidisciplinary project, ‘Vote 100: A Lincolnshire view of women’s suffrage’, based on original archival material held in Lincoln Bishop’s Archive (in collaboration with Lincoln Central Library, Fawcett Society, University of Lincoln, and other partners), which she developed with Professor Andrew Jackson, Sîan Hope-Johnson, Elaine Johnson and Jasmine Mills. With them, she also worked on ‘Celebrating women’s football: past and present’, a project developed in partnership with Lincoln Central Library and Lincoln Mystery Plays, among other partners.

Research Leadership

Research Excellence Framework (REF)

Claudia is REF 2029 Unit of Assessment Lead (UoA 27), since 1 Aug. 2025. She was a member to the Assessment Panel 28 for the REF 2029 People, Culture and Environment Pilot Exercise (Dec. 2024 -July 2025). At Lincoln Bishop University she was also Unit of Assessment Lead (UoA 27) for REF 2021.

REF Impact Case Studies

REF 2021 (UoA 27): Claudia led the impact statement entitled, ‘Deeds and words: reclaiming women’s lives and their legacy in Lincolnshire since 1862’. She also contributed to ‘Public histories of the ‘long’ First World War: culture and society, Lincolnshire and England, 1910-20’ impact statement for the History UoA.

REF 2014 (UoA 29): she led the ‘From Risorgimento to Resistance: intergenerational female literary legacy in the Collier-Galletti-Salvadori Family’ impact statement (https://www.ref.ac.uk/2014/).

Institutional Roles

Senate – Professoriate representative: (1 Sep. 2025 -);

Deputy Chair of the Research Ethics Committee and Research Ethics Champion in the Arts and Humanities portfolio (2022 -);

Doctoral Student Committee (2023 -);

Doctoral Programmes Committee (2023 -).

External Roles

Claudia is a member of many professional associations and has served as a Peer Review College Member of UKRI (AHRC) since 2017. She is the membership secretary of the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) and regularly serves in BAVS Rosemary Mitchell Prize for Best PhD Student's Paper, whose pilot she led at BAVS 2025, and panels for Funding Streams (Events, Research, Public Engagement). She is the Deputy Chair of the Executive Committee of the Tennyson Society and serves as an Executive Committee member of the International Research Group L&GEND.

She is a trustee of The Lincoln Book Festival (LincolnBookFestival). As a member of the Lincoln Book Festival Organising Committee, she has contributed to the creation (in 2017) and running of The Lincoln Book Festival Flash Fiction Competition (Lincoln Book Festival Flash Fiction Competition).

Editorial boards:

The Tennyson Research Bulletin (2022 -)

Victoriographies (2023 -)

Il Segno e le Lettere, open-access, peer-reviewed book series university press series (G. D’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara) published by LED (Milan, Italy);

Anglosophia: Studies of English Literature and Culture, published by Mimesis Edizioni.

Books

Capancioni, C., Costantini, M. and Kuehn, J. (eds) Re-examining Nineteenth-century Easts: Gendered Narratives of Encounter. Manchester: Manchester University Press (forthcoming April 2026 in the Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century Series).

Capancioni, C., Costantini, M. and Mattoscio, M. (eds) 2024. Rethinking Identities Across Boundaries - Genders/Genres/Genera. Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan (978-3-031-40794-9), Rethinking Identities Across Boundaries: Genders/Genres/Genera | SpringerLink)

Journal articles

Capancioni, C., ‘Sarah Austin’s Transnational Advocacy for National Education in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, in Lingue e Linguaggi: Translation and Interpreting as Sites of Agency and Activism: Acts of Resistance and Change, pp. 73-98. (Special issue, edited by E. Federici, E. Maestri and G. Giorgi, forthcoming 2026).

Capancioni, C., 2024. ‘The Annual Tennyson Memorial Address 2023. On Tennyson’s Legacy and His Family’s Archive: Unique Opportunities in The Tennyson Research Centre’, in The Tennyson Research Bulletin, 12:3 (Nov), pp. 271-281.

Capancioni, C., 2022. At Home in Southern Egypt: Lucie Duff Gordon’s life on the Nile’. De Genere – Rivista Di Studi Letterari, Postcoloniali e Di Genere, no. 7, March 2022, pp. 23-35. (Special issue entitled Transnational Subjects and Intercultural Identities: Travel and the Global South, edited by S. Antosa and E. Marino, view item).

Capancioni, C., 2021. ‘Growing up in “a new sort of country”: charting transnational identities in the fairy tales of Margaret Collier Galletti di Cadilhac’, in Age, Culture, Humanities (issue 5, Narratives of Ageing in the Nineteenth Century edited by A. Crossley and A. Culley (DOI, open access: https://doi.org/10.7146/ageculturehumanities.v5i.130865).

Capancioni, C., Jackson, A.J.H. Jackson, Hope-Johnson, S., and Johnson, E. 2020. Provincial newspapers, sports reporting and the origins, rise and fall of women’s football: Lincolnshire, 1880s-1940s’, Midland History, 45:2, pp. 244-57.

Capancioni, C., 2017. ‘Janet Ross’s Intergenerational Life Writing: Female Intellectual Legacy through Memoirs, Correspondence, and Reminiscences’, in Life-Writing, 14:2, pp. 233-244.

Capancioni, C., 2017. 'A Meeting of Two Remarkable Men: Garibaldi at Farringford', in The Tennyson Research Bulletin, 11:1, pp. 40-51.

Chapters in books

Capancioni, C., ‘Lucie Duff Gordon’s Palimpsestuous Views of Egypt’, in Re-examining Nineteenth-century Easts: Gendered Narratives of Encounter. Manchester: Manchester University Press (forthcoming April 2026).

Capancioni, C., Jackson, A.J.H. Jackson, Hope-Johnson, S., and Johnson, E. ‘Debating the Vote for Women at the Lincoln Diocesan Training School: National and Regional Testimonies to Women’s Suffrage, 1909’, in Land and God: the City, County and Diocese of Lincoln over Nine Centuries. Essays in Honour of Nicholas Bennett. Lincoln Record Society: Boydell & Brewer (forthcoming January 2026).

Capancioni, C., 2025. ‘Off the Beaten Track in the Kingdom of Italy with Thomas Adolphus Trollope: Questioning Masculinity through Narratives of Travel in A Lenten Journey in Umbria and the Marches (1862)’, in Masculinity in Literatures and the Arts: Deconstruction/Evolution of Models of Identity, edited by M. Costantini and F. D’Ascenzo, Milan, Italy: LED, pp. 39-55 (open access).

Capancioni, C., 2024. The Resilience of the Anglo-Italian Heroine in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in Vulnerability and Resilience in English Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by R. Antinucci and A. Grafe, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, pp. 25-37.

Capancioni, C., 2024. ‘“This particular art [is] all about walls”: Nomadic Poetics of Identity in Ali Smith’s How to be both”, in Rethinking Identities Across Boundaries - Genders/Genres/Genera, edited by C. Capancioni, M. Costantini and M. Mattoscio, Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 183-201.

Capancioni, C., Costantini, M. and Mattoscio, M. 2024. ‘Bordering Genders, Genres, Genera: An Introduction’, in Rethinking Identities Across Boundaries - Genders/Genres/Genera. Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1-20.

Capancioni, C., 2022. ‘Three Generations of British Women Translators: Sarah Austin’s Legacy in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in New Perspectives on Gender and Translation: New Voices for Transnational Dialogues, edited by E. Federici and J. Santaemilia. New York and Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, pp. 33-47.

Capancioni, C., 2021. ‘Cannibalism, Charles Dickens, and Franklin’s Last Arctic Expedition: “a fate as melancholy and dreadful as it is possible to imagine”’, in Transgressive Appetites: Deviant Food Practices in Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by S. Antosa, M. Costantini, and E. Ettore. Milan: Mimesis, pp. 87 – 101.

Capancioni, C., 2020. ‘A Visit to the Brontë Parsonage: Metamorphoses of Charlotte Brontë in Michèle Roberts’ The Mistressclass’, in Metamorfosi Vittoriane: Riscritture, riedizioni, traduzioni, transcodificazioni, edited by R. D’Agnillo and A. E. Soccio, Chieti: Solfanelli, pp. 95-109.

Capancioni, C., 2018. ‘Janet Ross’s “Love of Italian Peasant Songs”: Tuscan Folk Songs and the Victorians’. In Interconnecting Music and the Literary Word, edited by F. Cioppi, R. Ferrari, and L. Giovannelli, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, pp. 110 – 123.

Other publications, including digital resources

Capancioni, C., 2024. ‘Family authorship across the Argenti and Wickham collections’ (exhibition piece), in AM Digital’s Women’s Voices and Life Writing, 1600-1968.

Capancioni, C., 2024. ‘In Memoriam Benjamin Zephaniah’ in The Four Corners, vol 5, no. 1, pp. 3-4 (27.03.24). [view item]

Capancioni, C., 2024. ‘In Memoriam Patrick, Lord Cormack’, in The Tennyson Society website (25.05.24) [view item].

Capancioni, C., 2022. Book Review. Saverio Tomaiuolo transl. Alfred Tennyson. In Memoriam e Altre Poesie, in The Tennyson Research Bulletin, Vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 87-90.

Capancioni, C., 2021. ‘Duff Gordon, Lucie’, in Scholl, L. (ed) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_394-1.

Capancioni, C., 2021. ‘Galletti di Cadilhac, Margaret’, in Scholl, L. (ed) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_395-1.

Capancioni, C., 2020. ‘Ross, Janet’, in Scholl, L. (ed) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_236-1 [view item].

Claudia contributes to the teaching delivery at undergraduate and postgraduate level leading and contributing to a variety of modules that cover the long nineteenth century, contemporary literature, literary theory, research methods and skills, travel and life writing. She also contributes to the doctoral programme of sessions for PhD and EdD students. She is a first doctoral supervisor and welcomes doctoral proposals on the following and related areas: Victorian literature and culture, Victorian and contemporary British women writers, travel and life writing, the Gothic, solitude in the nineteenth century, multigenerational intellectual legacy, migration and gender studies.

Claudia is also involved in the series of lectures of for the Doctoral Degree Programme in Languages, Literatures and Interconnecting Cultures at the G. D’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy, where is a member of the Teaching Committee for the above Doctoral Degree Programme.

Lincoln Bishop University Masterclasses

The topics of Claudia’s masterclasses include, but are not limited to Victorian poetry, novel and the fairy tale, Christina Rossetti and Tennyson, Daphne du Maurier, the Brontë sisters, Angela Carter, Tsitsi Dangarembga and contemporary African women writers, travel and life writing, love and the Victorians, and satire from Augustan to twentieth-century poetry, studying and research English.

Since becoming first supervisor, Claudia has developed a growing community of doctoral students in English Literature at Lincoln Bishop. She is currently first supervisor to four doctoral candidates:

Molly Ambler, who started in October 2025. Her project is entitled, ‘Beyond the Binary: Representations of Butch and Gender Non-Conforming Women in Literature and Cultural History’.

Holly McIntyre started in October 2024. The title of their project is ‘Haunted Spaces, Haunted Faces: Exploring the Trope of the Haunted House as a Metaphor for Traumatic Experiences in Gothic Literature’.

Samuel Prydderch’s doctoral journey started in October 2023. His project is entitled, ‘Gender and Sexuality in contemporary Science Fiction’.

Andrew Dickenson began his doctorate in 2022. His project’s title is ‘The Macabre and Gothic Nature of Children’s Illustrated Books’.

Claudia is supervised a funded doctoral student at G. D’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, in Italy, as first supervisor. Giulia Nonno started her doctoral studies in 2022. The title of her project is ‘L’odeporica femminile attraverso uno studio etnografico digitale / Women’s Travel Writing through a digital ethnographic study’.

Completions

I was the second-supervisor to the following two students’ Doctor of Education projects that were successfully completed:

‘Exploring Hidden Colours: A Yearlong Ethnographic Study of a Secondary School’s Somali Community’ by Annabelle Esme Larsen (passed in November 2022).

‘Difficult Conversations: Initial Teacher Education Trainees’ Perceptions of The Impacts of Poverty On Children In English Primary Schools’, by Elizabeth M. J. Farrar (passed in March 2023).

Recent Public Events

Claudia regularly organises public events for National Poetry Day. This year (2025), she contributed to the 2025 Lincoln Book Festival opening event on National Poetry Day (02.10.25): she presented the best-selling and award-winning author, Lemn Sissay, who is a poet, playwright, memoirist and broadcaster. She is a trustee of the Lincoln Book Festival and has been contributing to organising and running the Lincoln Book Festival since 2017.

For Lincoln Bok Festival 2025 (2-5 October), she also co-organised the closing event celebrating the legacy of Jane Austen: ‘Beginning with Austen’, with Alice Crossley, Amy Culley, and Rebecca Styler, who work at the University of Lincoln, and I) They offered new ways to think about Austen's fiction by taking key moments from her novels as inspiration to explore aspects of nineteenth-century women's lives and literature (Beginning with Austen). Two years ago, she contributed to the festival programme by being in conversation with Christy Lefteri about her novel The Book of Fire (2023) at Lincoln Museum (16 October).

In 2024 and 2020 she co-led funded events for Being Human: Being Human: A Festival of the Humanities (Twinning Landmarks in 2024 and Plotting New Worlds, featuring the 2020 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize winner Isabel Galleymore, in 2020). She organised events for the festival in 2018 (Origins and Endings: Winning the Vote: Equal Rights Past and Future) and 2017 (Lost and Found: Lincoln Bishop University’s Victorian Origins) too. She contributed to Heritage Open Day 2025 and 2018.

In 2024, for Black History Month, she also organised the Screening of The Color Purple (2023), with short presentation, at our cinema, The Venue, in collaboration with BG Futures and Dr Sheine Peart).

In 2023, she chaired the ‘Hidden Histories/ Recovered Stories Public Talk: Rediscovering Ellen Wood in the Twenty-First Century: Why and How’ with international guest speaker Mariaconcetta Costantini (G. D’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy), in collaboration with the Nineteenth-Century Research Group, University of Lincoln.

Public Engagement Projects

In 2018-19, with Dr Andrew Jackson, Siân Hope-Johnson, Elaine Johnson, and Jasmine Mills, she contributed to two multidisciplinary public engagement projects, ‘Celebrating women’s football: past and present’ (Lincoln Central Library, Lincoln Mystery Plays and other partners) and ‘Vote 100: A Lincolnshire view of women’s suffrage’ (Lincoln Central Library, Fawcett Society, University of Lincoln, and other partners).

Knowledge Exchange, and Outreach

This and last academic year, Claudia has led ‘GCSE English at the Cinema’, an English Learners Event funded by LiNCHigher, and delivered in collaboration with BG Futures and Lincoln Bishop’s Outreach team. This project aims to enrich learners’ interpretation of the literature they study in written form in school by highlighting the diversity of opportunities offered by contextualising their film adaptations the learners will watch and discuss, and by comparing literary features with those that are inherent to producing a film adaptation of it.

In 2023, she delivered ‘Plotting New Worlds, debating-skills workshop on Climate Change’ for Next Steps, a widening participation programme coordinated by Lincoln Bishop. In 2018, her theme was ‘Winning the Vote: Equal Rights Past and Future’: debating workshop’ and it was included in the Being Human 2018 programme.

With colleagues at the University of Lincoln, in 2017, she planned and helped delivering ‘The Gothic’, Gothic Literature School Event for local schools and colleges, at the University of Lincoln (included in the Lincoln Book Festival Programme 2017, 27 Sept.).

Conference Organiser

Claudia has organised several international conferences on our campus and abroad in partnerships with colleagues, associations and research centre she is actively engaged with. Among them, on campus, she hosted the Victorian Popular Fiction Association’s Annual Conference (Hidden Histories/ Recovered Stories’, 12^th & 14^thJuly) with Mariaconcetta Costantini and Laura Gill (VPFA 2023) in 2023; BAVS’s annual conference (Victorians Unbound: Connections and Intersections, 22-24 August), with Alice Crossley in 2017; and ‘George Meredith and His Circle: Intellectual Communities and Literary Networks’ (24-25 July), also with Alice Crossley in 2015. In July 2026, she will host Tennyson 2026 with the Tennyson Society and in collaboration with Jim Cheshire, Linda Hughes, and Valerie Purton.

In 2025, with Raffaella Antinucci and Mariaconcetta Costantini, Claudia co-organised ‘Gender and/in Migration’, an international conference at Parthenope University of Naples, Villa Doria D’Angri, Naples (3-4 July). With Heather Hughes, she co-organised ‘Writing the Air War and Lincolnshire’ at the International Bomber Command Centre, Lincoln, in 2024 (11-12 May). With Mariaconcetta Costantini and Mara Mattoscio, she co-organised the Victorian Popular Fiction Association Study Day: ‘Women & the East: Gendered Narratives of Encounter in Victorian Popular Writing’ (10-11 June) in 2022 at G. d’Annunzio University, Pescara, Italy. Together with the International Research Group L&GEND, she has already co-organised two conferences and is planning a third for 2026 at G. d’Annunzio University, Chieti-Pescara, Italy: ‘LE DISOBBEDIENTI’ in June 2024, and La mascolinità nella letteratura e nelle arti: decostruzione ed evoluzione di modelli identitari / Masculinity in Literatures and the Arts: the Deconstruction and Development of Models of Identity / Rethinking / challenging models of identity in September 2022. In 2011 Claudia co-organised Travel in the Nineteenth Century: Narratives, Objects and Collections (13-15 July) with Kate Hill and Laurie Garrison at the University of Lincoln.

In 2025, Claudia also convened ‘Seminar 11, Gender-ed Representations and/in Migration’, at the 32^nd AIA (Italian Association of Anglophone Studies) Conference, at Turin University, Turin, Italy (11-13 Sept.) with Raffaella Antinucci and Mariaconcetta Costantini. She also co-organised the first of two Accelerated Colonisations: Time, Space, Consumption panels entitled 'Accelerated Colonisations: Time, Space, Consumption in the Arctic', for the international INCS 2025 conference Speed and Acceleration at the University of Genoa, Italy (18-20 June), with co-organiser with Mariaconcetta Costantini and Charlotte Boyce. The second panel included Patricia Pulham and Danielle Dove and Rosario Arias. Furthermore, in 2024, Claudia also organised with Mariaconcetta Costantini and Charlotte Boyce, a panel for Event 2024, BAVS Cardiff Hub at Cardiff University (10-11 Sept.), entitled Eventful Arctic Voyages: Explorations, Hauntings and Encounters’; and with Costantini and Julia Kuehn, she also co-organised the seminar panel ‘Travel Writing Poetics’ for The European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) in Lausanne, Switzerland (26-30 August).

Most Recent Conference Paper and Keynote

‘Lucie Duff Gordon’s Gendered Travel Narratives of Encounter in the Easts’, BAVS 25th Anniversary Conference, University of Oxford (23–25 July 2025).

‘“More tempting to me even than the sea were the snowy mountains that bounded the opposite horizon”: Margaret Collier Galletti di Cadilhac’s new geographies of encounters on the Sibylline range’, VPFA 2025, Heights, Depths, and Extremes, Birmingham & Midland Institute, Birmingham (14–16 July 2025).

‘“A Weakness for Tennyson”: The Poet Laureate in the Writings of British Women Writers’, Brackenbury Lecture 2025, in Raithby Chapel (12 July 2025, invited).

‘Accelerated British Nineteenth-Century Scientific and Technological Ambitions through Arctic Travel Narratives’, INCS 2025 Speed and Acceleration, University of Genoa, Italy (18-20 June 2025, funded).

‘Narratives of Discoveries: Polar Explorations and the Victorian Arctic Imaginary’, Event 2024, BAVS Cardiff Hub, Cardiff University, UK (10-11 Sept. 2024).

Understanding Multigenerational Women’s Lives and Voices through the Family Papers in the Argenti and Wickham Collections’, Women’s History Network (WHN) Annual Conference: Curating the Female Self, Bedford Centre for the History of Women and Gender, Royal Holloway University, UK (5-6 Sept. 2024, sponsored).

‘Margaret Collier’s Spaces of Transnational Encounters by the Adriatic Coast’, VPFA 2024: ‘Places and Spaces in Victorian Popular Literature and Culture’, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK (15–17 July 2024).

‘“Ma quanto più bello il cammino ancora da fare”: sulle orme di Joyce Lussu, l'affabulatrice anticonformista’, L&GEND Research Group’s International Conference, ‘Le Disobbedienti’, G. d’Annunzio University, Chieti-Pescara, Italy (13-14 June 2024, partly sponsored).

‘Transnational Antifascism and Resistance in Italy 1920s-1940s through Women’s Life Writing’, Writing the Air War and Lincolnshire, The International Bomber Command Centre, Lincoln, UK (11-12 May 2024, funded).

‘On the Value of the Solitary State in Nineteenth-Century Literature’, Alone Together. Mapping the Field: Challenges and Futures: An International Pandisciplinary Conference on Solitude in Community, International Society for Research on Solitude (ISRS), Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, UK (25-27 April 2024).

‘Sarah Austin’s Transnational Legacy as an Advocate of National Education in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, BAVS 2023, University of Surrey, UK (31 Aug.-2 Sept. 2023).

‘The Annual Tennyson Memorial Address: Tennyson’s Legacy and Unique Opportunities in His Family’s Archive’, Tennyson Society, Bag Enderby, Somersby, UK (6 August 2023, invited).

‘Compelled by ‘Unmistakable talent’: Margaret Galletti di Cadilhac’s Search for Transnational Narratives in the Fairy Tale’, VPFA Annual 15^th Conference 2023, Hidden Histories / Recovered Stories, Lincoln Bishop University (12-14 July 2023).