Staff Profiles

Modules taught

I currently teach the following undergraduate and postgraduate modules:

• Criticism, Culture, Literature 2
• Specialist Option 3: The Victorian Supernatural
• The Victorians and Theatricality: from the stage to the seance

I have also taught and/or convened a broad range of 19th and 20th Century modules including Victorian Texts and Contexts, Aspects of the European Novel, Aspects of European Modernism, Gender in Victorian Literature and Culture.

Books

• Kontou T, Ed., Anti-Spiritualism, vol. 2, Spiritualism 1840-1930 4 vols., Routledge (2014)
  
• Kontou T, Willburn S, The Ashgate research companion to nineteenth-century spiritualism and the occult , Ashgate (2012)
  ISBN: 9780754669128 eISBN: 9780754696261
  Abstract Critical attention to the Victorian supernatural has flourished over the last twenty-five years. Whether it is spiritualism or Theosophy, mesmerism or the occult, the dozens of book-length studies and hundreds of articles that have appeared recently reflect the avid scholarly discussion of Victorian mystical practices. Designed both for those new to the field and for experts, this volume is organized into sections covering the relationship between Victorian spiritualism and science, the occult and politics, and the culture of mystical practices. The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult brings together some of the most prominent scholars working in the field to introduce current approaches to the study of nineteenth-century mysticism and to define new areas for research.Website 
• Kontou T, Women and the Victorian occult, Routledge (2010)
  ISBN: 9780415613262
  

Journal articles

• Kontou T, 'Florence Marryat’s “The Box with the Iron Clamps”: Pent-Up Grief and Guilt'
  Victorian Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies 44 (2) (2018) pp.170-173
  ISSN: 0848-1512 eISSN: 1923-3280
  Website 
• Kontou T, 'Introduction: Women and the Victorian occult'
  Women's Writing 15 (3) (2008) pp.275-281
  ISSN: 0969-9082 eISSN: 1747-5848
  Website 

Book chapters

• Kontou T, 'Spirit Worlds' in Laura Marcus, Michele Mendelssohn, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (ed.), Late Victorian into Modern, Oxford University Press (2016)
  ISBN: 9780198704393 eISBN: 9780191837005
  Abstract In 1882 the Society for Psychical Research was established to examine phenomena such as ‘spirit communication’, ‘thought transference’, ‘hypnosis’, and ‘haunted houses’. Psychical researchers were eager to remove the connotations of sensational, gothic, or supernatural genre writing from their reports and framed their experiments within contemporary scientific and technological developments. The empirical terminology employed by the SPR, for example its re-categorizations of ‘ghosts’ as ‘phantasms’ and ‘mediums’ as ‘sensitives’, fuelled the period’s literary imagination. ‘Spirit Worlds’ examines the complicated relationship between genre writing and psychical research. By drawing on the SPR’s proceedings, reports in spiritualist and popular magazines and fictional psychical research accounts I argue that psychical research gave rise to a new literary phenomenon, the psychic detective.Website 
• Kontou T, 'Florence Marryat' in Dino Franco Felluga (General Editor), Pamela K. Gilbert (Associate Editor), Linda K. Hughes (Associate Editor) (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Victorian Literature, Wiley-Blackwell (2015)
  ISBN: 9781118405383
  
• Kontou T, 'Spiritualism and the Occult' in Royal Opera House Programme: Un Ballo in Maschera, Royal Opera House Publications, Covent Garden (2014)
  
• Kontou T, 'Sensation fiction, spiritualism and the supernatural' in Cambridge companion to sensation fiction, Cambridge University Press (2013)
  ISBN: 9780521157094
  Website 
• Kontou T, 'The case of Florence Marryat: custodian of the Spirit World/popular novelist' in The Ashgate research companion to nineteenth-century spiritualism and the occult, Ashgate (2012)
  ISBN: 9780754669128
  

Monographs

• Kontou T, Spiritualism and women's writing: from the fin de siecle to the neo-Victorian , Palgrave Macmillan (2009)
  ISBN: 9780230200050 eISBN: 9780230240797
  Abstract This original and imaginative study examines the influence of Victorian spiritualism and Psychical Research on a variety of modern and contemporary female authors. It explores both the material and ghostly connections between women's writing - particularly the work of Michèle Roberts, A.S. Byatt, Victoria Glendinning and Sarah Waters - and the practice of mediumship inthe nineteenth century. For the first time, it provides a sustained analysis of how and why the haunted world of Victorian spiritualism has been appropriated and reimagined in late twentieth-century fiction. In addition, it shows how many of the apparently unprecedented innovations of modernism are in fact already present in the rituals, performances and documents of the Victorian séance. Supported by compelling archival research throughout, the book not only demonstrates how a unique selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts are bound together by phantasmal ties but also shows how spiritualism forces us to reconsider our wider understanding of history, narrative and the afterlife.Website 

Reviews

• Kontou T, review of The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859-1919, in Review of English Studies 63 (2013) pp.869-871ISSN: 0034-6551 eISSN: 1471-6968
  Website 

Membership of professional bodies

•  British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS)
• North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA)
• Victorian Popular Fiction Association (VPFA)
• The Edith Wharton Society

Conferences

• 'Victorian Spiritualism: Florence Marryat', Treadwell's Lecture Series, 12 March 2014
• 'Anti-Spiritualism', Ghostwatching: Spiritualism 1840-1930, University of Portsmouth, 31 January 2014
• 'Double consciousness, Clairvoyance and Posthumous Narration in George Eliot's The Lifted Veil', National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, 4 April 2012 and 2013.
• 'The Case of Florence Marryat: Custodian of the Spirit World/Popular Novelist', Director's Lunchtime Seminar Series, Senate House, 21 March 2012
• 'The Case of Florence Marryat: Custodian of the Spirit World/Popular Novelist', History and English Research Seminar Series, University of Exeter, 29 February 2012
• 'My Spirit Child and The Story of John Powles', Victorian Studies Reading Group, University of York, 3 February 2012
• 'Mother! I am Florence': Re-uniting with spirit children in Florence Marryat's There is No Death, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Culture Forum, Brasenose, University of Oxford, 27 January 2012
• 'Writing Life after Death: Florence Marryat's spiritualist memoirs', English and Modern Languages Research Seminar Series, Oxford Brookes University, November 18 2011
• 'Ekphrastic Jewellery in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone', The Wilkie Collins Society Journal Launch, University of Reading, 14  November 2011
• ‘Florence Marryat, 1865’, Florence Marryat Study Day part of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association. Institute of English Studies, University of London, 13 November 2010 
• ‘A Mind of Iron and Heart of Wool: Marryat and the literary career’, Victorian Popular Culture:  Prose, Stage & Screen, Institute for English Studies, University of London, 22-24 July 2010
• ‘Disorderly archives: Florence Marryat’s There is No Death and the haunting past’, Paranormal Cultures, University of Sussex, 4 June 2010
• ‘Experimenting with spirits in Florence Marryat’s The Strange Transfiguration of Hannah Stubbs’, Keynote Speech, Transitions, University of Sussex Postgraduate Conference, 11 June 2009
• ‘Spirit photographs and neo-Victorian Ghosts: Florence Cook’s mediumship and textual manifestations’, AHRC Beyond Text Workshops:‘Spiritualism and Technology in Historical and Contemporary Contexts’, University of Westminster, 29 May 2009
• ‘My Spirit Child and my daughter the actress:  Florence Marryat’s maternal connections’, Bodies and Things: Victorian Literature and the Matter of Culture, University of Oxford, 27 September 2008 
• ‘Miss Florence Cook’s Mediumship: Historical Fragments/Phantasmal Texts’, Victorianism: The Politics and Aesthetics of Appropriation, University of Exeter, 10-12 September 2007
• ‘Spirited Away: In Search of Florence Marryat’, Victorian Literature: The Canon and Beyond, University of Chester, 2 June 2007
• ‘Florence Marryat’s Spiritualist Writings’, Suitable for the Boudoir and the Circulating Library:  Marie Corelli and Popular Women Novelists 1890-1910, University of Birmingham and Liverpool John Moores University, 30 March-1st April, 2006 
• ‘Spectral Theatricals: Performativity in Sensation Fiction and the Séance’, The Fin de Siècle Seminar Series, University of Oxford, 2 June 2005
• ‘The Ghost Within Us: Victorian Spiritualism in Selected Twentieth Century Fiction’, Victorian Modernities, University of Reading, 1 May 2004
•  ‘Ventriloquising the Dead: Spiritualism in Sarah Waters’ Affinity’, Hystorical Fictions:  Women, History and Authorship, University of Wales, Swansea, 4-6 August 2003