Professor Sarah Parker

Pronouns: She/her
  • Doctoral Programme Lead (English)
  • Professor of Literature, Sexuality and Visual Culture

Specialism: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature

Research groups and centres

Publications
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Sarah Parker

Sarah Parker specialises in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, with an emphasis on poetry, women's writing, decadence, aestheticism, modernism, gender, sexualities, and visual culture.

Sarah’s research expertise encompasses the fields of gender and sexuality, especially LGBTQ+ literature, and she has published extensively on fin-de-siècle and twentieth-century poetry and visual culture, including intersections with portraiture, photography, fashion and celebrity.

Sarah’s monograph Form and Modernity in Women’s Poetry, 1895-1922: A Line of Her Own (Routledge, 2024) focuses on women’s poetry during and after the turn of the twentieth century. The book shows how the later work of Alice Meynell, Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Dollie Radford, and Katharine Tynan troubles and transforms restrictive narratives of modernism.

Sarah is a recognised authority on the collaborating poets ‘Michael Field’ (the pseudonym of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper). She is the editor of Michael Field in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2025), a volume that brings together over thirty scholars from across the globe to reflect on Michael Field’s lives and work.

Sarah is currently working on a major AHRC-funded collaborative research project 100 Years of The Well of Loneliness. This project aims to discover what Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) – one of the most significant books in LGBTQ+ history – has meant to readers over the past century. The project runs from 2025 until 2029 and involves collaborations with project partners, including the National Archives and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Austin, Texas.

At Loughborough, Sarah is the co-leader (with Dr Jade Elizabeth French) of the Cultural Currents: Nineteenth to Twentieth Century Research Group, which focuses on continuities between the ‘Victorian’ and the ‘modern’.

Beyond Loughborough, Sarah is the Careers and Professionalisation Officer for the British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS). She is also a member of the editorial leadership board of two international digital humanities projects, The Diaries of Michael Field and the Amy Lowell Letters Project.

Sarah regularly presents her research to public audiences, and has featured on Radio 3’s Free Thinking. In 2023, Sarah co-curated a popular exhibition,

Poets in Vogue, at the National Poetry Library, Southbank Centre, London, which attracted widespread media interest, featuring in Vogue and The Guardian.

Sarah Parker’s research publications focus on nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, including poetry, women's writing, decadence, aestheticism, modernism, gender, sexualities, and visual culture.

Sarah’s recent monograph, Form and Modernity in Women’s Poetry, 1895-1922: A Line of Her Own (Routledge, 2024) presents a new narrative of twentieth-century poetry by focusing on the later work of women poets Alice Meynell, Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Dollie Radford, and Katharine Tynan. While still primarily associated with the late nineteenth century, Sarah's book reveals that these poets used established poetic forms to address the conditions of modernity, including contemporary concerns such as suffrage, sexuality, motherhood, and the First World War.

Sarah is a globally recognised authority on the writer Michael Field, the collaborative pseudonym of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper. In addition to editing Michael Field in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Sarah also co-edited Michael Field, For That Moment Only and Other Prose Works (MHRA Jewelled Tortoise series, 2022, with Alex Murray) and Michael Field, Decadent Moderns (Ohio University Press 2019, with Ana Parejo Vadillo).

Sarah’s current research focuses on legacies of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), exploring a nexus of questions relating to lesbian visibility, self-fashioning, portraiture and representation, clothing and tactility, and queer femininities. Sarah has published extensively on lesbian literature; her most recent book in this area is Interrogating Lesbian Modernism Histories, Forms, Genres (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), co-edited with Jana Funke and Elizabeth English.

Bringing together her interests in women’s poetry and queer sexualities, Sarah’s first monograph, The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889-1930 (Routledge, 2013) reconsidered the role of the muse in late-Victorian and modernist women's writing, analysing poetry by Michael Field, Olive Custance, Amy Lowell, H.D. and Bryher.

In addition to the above, Sarah has published chapters and articles on Brigid Brophy, Iris Tree, Amy Levy, H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, Amy Lowell, Olive Custance and Djuna Barnes (see Key Publications and the Publications tab above for a full list).

Sarah teaches across all undergraduate years, on modules focused on poetry, Victorian Literature, LGBTQ+ literature and women writing of the fin de siècle. She has supervised numerous dissertations in areas related to her research specialisms.

Sarah is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Sarah welcomes proposals in areas relating to her research specialisms, including nineteenth and twentieth century poetry, LGBTQ+ literature, women’s writing, and decadence, aestheticism and modernism.

Current supervisees:

  • Joanna Turner, ‘Reimagining Marie Corelli (1854–1924): Self-Construction, Charles Dickens, and Literary Lineage’ (principal supervisor).
  • Milly Harrison, ‘Deviant Cartographies: Queer Errancy and Masculine Deviancy in British Weird Fiction, 1890–1914’ (secondary supervisor)
  • Sarah Featonby, ‘In the Company of Viragoes: Sistership and Fairy Godmother Angela Carter’ (principal supervisor)
  • Jill Walters, ‘Mediating Modernity: The Literary Career and Prose Writings of Lionel Johnson’ (secondary supervisor)
  • Anna Loughran, 'Writing Eliza: A creative-critical thesis on the medicalisation and representation of trans bodies in literature' (secondary supervisor)
  • Gemma Larkin, ‘“I leave a page half-writ – The work begun”: The Legacies and Afterlives of Michael Field and Emily Dickinson’ (principal supervisor)

PhD completions:

  • 2023: Isobel Sigley, ‘A (New) Woman's Touch: Tactility and Feminism in Women's Fin-de-Siècle Short Fiction, 1880-1930’ (principal supervisor)
  • 2021: Aaron Eames, ‘The Critics as Artists: Oscar Wilde’s Sexual Identity in Biographical Literature, 1900-1967’ (secondary supervisor)
  • 2020: Eleanor Dumbill, ‘Vanished Authors: A Study of the Relationships Between Three Nineteenth-Century Women Writers and Their Male Publishers’ (secondary supervisor)

Monographs:

Edited collections:

Recent articles/chapters: