Dr Claire O'Callaghan

Dr Claire O’Callaghan joined Loughborough University in May 2018 as part of its prestigious ‘Excellence 100’ initiative. Her scholarship lies mainly in Victorian literature and culture, particularly the lives and works of the Brontë family, and in neo-Victorianism, especially the work of Sarah Waters.

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

Claire regularly collaborates with the media, contributing to news features, radio and television - most recently for the BBC, Sky Arts and History Hit. She has also worked as a historical advisor on multiple creative projects, including an original Audible radio drama. Claire has spoken at a wide range of literary and public events, including the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Durham Book Festival, and Books on Tyne. Her shorter pieces have featured in BBC History Magazine, History Today, The Historian and The Conversation.

Claire O’Callaghan is a scholar of Victorian and neo-Victorian literature and culture, with expertise in gender and LGBTQ+, the body, and health.

Claire’s research on the Brontës is extensive. A substantially expanded edition of her book, Emily Brontë Reappraised, will be published by Saraband in 2026. She has written numerous articles and chapters on the Brontës, including on Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Emily’s poetry, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, among other topics. Her recent work explores the intersections of the Brontës and health: she has published on Emily Brontë and tuberculosis and is finalising an article exploring the myths surrounding Anne Brontë’s final illness.

Claire is also preparing a new edition of Agnes Grey for Oxford University Press (2027) and, with Dr Sarah Fanning, is Co-Editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to the Brontës. 

Claire is a leading authority on the writing of Sarah Waters. Along with the edited title Sarah Waters and Contemporary Feminisms (2016), her 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.

Claire’s research also extends to the Victorian publisher, educator and activist Emily Faithfull. She has an article forthcoming in Victorian Popular Fictions Journal on Faithfull’s only novel, published from 1868.

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

In 2020, Claire, along with Anne-Marie Beller, was awarded the inaugural School Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) prize in recognition of their commitment to teaching EDI issues. Their collaborative teaching was also 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
• Nathaniel Corns – Daphne Du Maurier and the Weird
• Becca Gadd - Forgotten Narratives: A Recovery Project into the works of Frances Burney (1752-1840)
• 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 solitary": 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 Sexual Politics (2017, Bloomsbury)