TATIANA KONTOU

Tatiana Kontou joined the Department of English Language and Literature in 2025 as Assistant Professor, having previously worked at Oxford Brookes University and the University of Sussex. Tatiana received her BA (HONS) in English Literature from Brunel University of London and an MA and DPhil from the University of Sussex. Her publications include a monograph titled Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: from the fin de siècle to the neo-Victorian (Palgrave, 2009), an edited collection of essays on Women and the Victorian Occult (Routledge, 2011) as well as a volume of primary sources on Anti-Spiritualism 1840-1930 (Routledge, 2014) for which she received a Visiting Research Fellowship from Senate House, University of London. Tatiana is the co-editor of The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult (with Sarah Willburn, Ashgate, 2012) and of the multi-volume Victorian Material Culture (with Vicky Mills, Routledge, 2022). She has also written on Wilkie Collins, Florence Marryat, sensation fiction, psychical research and fin de siècle psychic detectives, on Victorian fashion and on the contemporary artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. More broadly, her research interests lie in Victorian literature and culture, thing theory, gender and performativity, ghostliness, spectrality, psychoanalysis and fairytales. Tatiana is currently writing a book on the figure of the lost and revenant child and psychoanalysis which brings together her ongoing interest in Victorian and early twentieth-century spiritualism and the ways in which thinking, writing, feeling and living with ghosts resonates with theoretical writings on literary criticism, material culture and object-relations psychoanalysis.