Dr Claire O'Callaghan

Dr Claire O’Callaghan joined Loughborough in May 2018 as one of the University’s prestigious ‘Excellence 100’ appointments. She is an expert and in the writing of contemporary historical novelist, Sarah Waters and on the lives and works of the Brontë family.

Claire gained her PhD from the University of Leicester. She holds a PGCHE from the University of Nottingham and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is the current Editor-in-Chief of Brontë Studies, the official journal of the Brontë Society.

Claire works with the media in various guises, contributing to news articles, programmes for television (including documentaries for Channel 4, Channel 5, and Sky Arts), podcasts (including BBC History) and radio. She has also worked as a historical advisor on multiple creative projects, including an original radio drama for Audible. Claire has spoken at a range of literary and public events, including the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Durham Book Festival, and Books on Tyne. She has written several shorter pieces for BBC History Magazine, History Today, The Historian and The Conversation.

Claire’s research is in both Victorian and neo-Victorian literature and culture, with specialisms on gender and sexuality, the body, and more recently, sickness and grief. She is an expert on the lives and works of the Brontës and in the writing of the contemporary historical novelist, Sarah Waters.

Claire has published widely on the Brontës’ lives and works, including articles and chapters on Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Emily’s poetry, race and Wuthering Heights, and mental health in the Brontë biopic To Walk Invisible. Alongside her 2018 book Emily Brontë Reappraised, Claire’s more recent research on the Brontës has focused on ill health, especially tuberculosis. She has published on Emily Brontë's refusal of medical treatment for TB and death, is completing a piece on the myths surrounding Anne Brontë’s final months, and is writing on Charlotte Brontë’s experience of anticipatory grief and mourning. Claire is also working on two book projects, one of which explore male violence and the Brontës (provisionally entitled The Victim in the Attic: The Brontës and Male Violence). She is also collaborating with the Brontë Parsonage Museum on the publication of a recently recovered manuscript written by a young Charlotte Brontë.

Claire is also an expert on Sarah Waters. Along with the edited title, Sarah Waters and Contemporary Feminisms (2016), her first book, Sarah Waters: Gender and Sexual Politics (2017), remains the only monograph dedicated to Waters’s published works. She continues to write on Waters and is currently preparing a new title on her work for Liverpool University Press.

Claire has also been writing on the Victorian educator and activist Emily Faithfull and has an article forthcoming on Faithfull’s only novel in Victorian Popular Fictions Journal.

Claire’s currently teaches on several modules in the undergraduate and postgraduate English degree programmes, including Victorian and neo-Victorian literature and culture, and on the literary and cultural history of queer genders and sexualities. She supervises dissertations at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

In 2020, Claire was, with Anne-Marie Beller, awarded the School Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) prize in recognition of her commitment to teaching EDI issues. Their collaborative teaching was recognised as a best practice case study in the University’s Research-informed Teaching Awards in 2023. Claire has been nominated for several teaching prizes for teaching excellence.

Current Students

• Lisa Climie-Somers – Unfaithful Women: Fanny Stenhouse
• Becca Gadd - Forgotten Narratives: A Recovery Project into the works of Frances Burney (1752-1840)
• Adelle Hay – Anne Brontë: How Anne Has Been Edited Out of the Literary Canon
• Hannah Palmer – Abortion in Victorian Literature (1837-1901)

Past Students

• James Barker – Creative/critical project: The Things Which No One Can See
• Isobel Sigley - A (New) Woman’s Touch: Tactility and Feminism in Women’s Fin-de-Siècle Short Fiction, 1880-1930

• 2024: ‘The Brontës and Neo-Victorianism: The Afterlives of Wuthering Heights and the Legacy of Wide Sargasso Sea; or, Reading Race, Identity and Violence in Caryl Philip’s The Lost Child and Michael Stewart’s Ill Will’, in D Wynne and A Regis (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës (forthcoming, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).
• 2022: ‘“She resolutely refuses to see a doctor”: Re-reading Emily Brontë and Tuberculosis in 1848; Or Charlotte Brontë, Sickness and Correspondence’, Women’s Writing, 29(4), 566–582.
• 2022: (with Sarah E. Fanning), ‘Bad or mad?: Branwell Brontë, mental health, and alcoholism in Sally Wainwright's To Walk Invisible’, in J Taddeo, K Byrne, and J Leggott (eds), Diagnosing history: Medicine in television period drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• 2020:  ‘Pronouns are Problematic: The Trans* Body and Gender Theory; Or, Revisiting the Neo-Victorian Wo/Man’, Neo-Victorian Studies 13:1(2020), 75-99.
• “‘He is rather peculiar, perhaps”: Jane Eyre in a Queer Context; or, reading Mr Rochester’s coarseness queerly’, Brontë Studies (2018), 44:1, pp. 123-135.
• '"A poet, a solitiary": Emily Brontë – Queerness, Quietness and Solitude, Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature (2018), 134, pp. 204-217.
• ‘Killing the Angel: Violence and Victim-blaming in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond, ed. by Barbara Leonardi (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 297-320. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96770-7_13
• Sarah Waters: Gender and SexualPolitics (2017, Bloomsbury)