Millie SchurchResearcher
About me
I joined the English Department at Stockholm University in January 2024 as a Researcher on the project ‘Underground Poetics: Geology, Literature and Criticism in the Nineteenth Century’.
Previously, I completed my PhD at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies and Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York in 2020, and I worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher on the project Early Citizen Science at the Department for the History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University (2022-2024).
My research focuses on the relationship between literary form and the production of knowledge in eighteenth and nineteenth-century British writing. My research interests include literature and science, women’s writing, text and colonialism, travel writing, and Scottish literature, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture.
Teaching
I have taught on English Literature modules from Undergraduate to Masters level, with teaching specializations in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, postcolonial literature, and literary theory. I gained Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (UK) in 2018.
I taught across disciplines at Uppsala’s Department for the History of Science and Ideas, on Idéhist A and B courses, including sessions on the colonization and decolonization of British museum institutions.
I am also interested in study skills and outreach teaching in various forms. I worked as a Writing Tutor at the University of York's Writing and Language Skills Center for four years from 2016-2020, on the Writing Initiative at the Department for the History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala, and I taught ‘Jane Austen: Works, Life, Legacy’ at the Centre for Lifelong Learning, York.
Research
My research to date participates in three areas of study: women’s writing, the history of colonialism, and poetics. Connecting my projects is an interest in the relationship between literary form and the production of knowledge.
In my PhD thesis, ‘Women, Empiricism, and Epistolarity, 1740-1810’ (AHRC, University of York, 2020), I explored the intersections between empirical methods of knowledge production and the letter form in women’s writing. I examined letters and broader cultural productions by female botanists and writers, including Margaret Bentinck the Duchess of Portland, Elizabeth Montagu, Anna Barbauld and Joanna Baillie, to discover how British women writers drew on the ubiquity of epistolary culture that surrounded them to engage in epistemological debate, and to contravene a masculinised empirical mode of knowledge production.
As a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Early Citizen Science project (Uppsala, 2022-24), I shifted lens from gender to colonialism to examine how botanists in the British colonies used textual and literary form to shape botanical knowledge, 1780-1820. I drew on the archival material at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, surrounding the figures of Joseph Banks, Archibald Menzies, George Caley and James Lee. I examined 1) how the aspirations and failures of Kew’s instructions to plant collectors shaped Kew as a colonial institution and 2) how the representation of the colonial botanist across different textual forms – in letters, travel narratives and satire – shaped public conception of colonial activity and the notion of ‘character’.
My current project, ‘Underground Poetics: Geology, Literature and Criticism in the Nineteenth Century’, probes the intersection of geology, poetics, and literary interpretation in nineteenth century Britain. I study poetry by canonical and non-canonical writers including Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Howitt, Dora Greenwell and Matthew Arnold to identify the qualities of a new ‘underground poetics’ that emerged in the 1840s-60s as poets, geologists and industrialists turned attention to the world beneath our feet, and to ascertain how this poetics cultivated esteem for depth in literary interpretation.
Publications (selection from previous affiliations):
Ph.D. Thesis
'Women, Empiricism and Epistolarity, 1740-1810', English Literature, University of York, 2020.
Articles/Book Chapters
‘“It envelops”: Geology, History and Theatrical Elementality in Nineteenth-Century Scottish Melodrama’, in ‘Elemental Melodrama’, Special Issue, ed. Gillian Russell and Monique Rooney (in progress).
‘Cultivating Land, Literature, Letters: Textualities of Improvement in Elizabeth Montagu's Travels in Scotland’, in Bluestockings and Landscape in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Prospect of Improvement, ed. Markman Ellis and Jack Orchard (Boydell & Brewer, forthcoming, 2024).
‘“And Breathes a Spirit through the Finish'd Whole”: Empiricism, Poetry and Devotion in Anna Barbauld's Poetic Epistemology', European Romantic Review 33, no. 6 (December 2022).
‘“All the productions of that nature”: Ephemera, Mycology and the Sexual System at the Bulstrode Estate', Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 42, no. 4 (2019), 519-39.
Other Publications
‘Review of Botanical Entanglements, by Anna K. Sagal’, ABO Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830 13, no. 2 (2023): article 12.
‘Chemical and Technical Glossary’, in The Collected Letters of Humphry Davy, ed. Tim Fulford and Sharon Ruston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).