Deirdre Coleman

Biography

Deirdre Coleman completed Honours in English at the University of Melbourne before going to Oxford University where she graduated with a BPhil (1979) in Romantic and Victorian literature and a DPhil (1986) on Coleridge’s journalism. Since returning to Australia she has taught at the Universities of Wollongong, Adelaide and Sydney. In 2007 she returned to the University of Melbourne as the Robert Wallace Chair of English, and from 2010-13 served as Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Arts.

Her research interests encompass eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature and cultural history; women’s writing, abolitionism, travel, colonialism, natural history, the rise of racial science and the gothic.
She has recently completed a book entitled Henry Smeathman, the Flycatcher: Natural History, Slavery and Empire in the late Eighteenth Century (Liverpool UP, 2018).