Overview

I am a Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture. My main research interests are women’s writing and women’s work and art and design history in the Victorian period. My current work explores the relationship between authorship and the decorative arts in the second half of the nineteenth century, and I am currently writing a monograph entitled Designing the Novel: Women’s Writing and the Decorative Arts. More broadly, I am interested in the interactions of different forms of art in the nineteenth century and the interplay between aesthetics and economics.

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Research

In general, my work explores the connections that existed between artistic, commercial, and gender economies in the second half of the nineteenth century. My first monograph, Representing Female Artistic Labour, 1848-1890: Refining Work for the Middle-Class Woman, examined a number of literary, visual and contextual concerning the prevailing cultural debates surrounding women's work. It considered the impact the conjunction of femininity, art, and commerce had on the working woman's engagement with the industrial marketplace and reassessed the notion that entering the public sphere of work was considered a fundamentally degrading act for women. The primary source reader I co-edited, ‘What is a Woman to Do?' Women, Work, and Art, c. 1830-1890, also brought together some of the wide range of nineteenth-century writing on women's work in artistic and related professions ranging from acting, literature, and journalism to needlework, painting and illustrating. This reader provides students and researchers with an overview of key nineteenth-century writing on women's creative work in the period. My recent co-edited collection, Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain explored the gendered divide between amateurism and professionalism in relation to women's creative labour.  

I am currently writing a monograph entitled Designing the Novel: Women's Writing and the Decorative Arts, which explores the way in which the principles of design that developed out of the institutionalisation of education in the applied arts influenced the way in which women writers related to their own creative work.

My most recent article on the decorative arts,  "The Victorian Christmas Card as Aesthetic Object: 'Very interesting ephemerae of a very interesting period in English Art-production'"  was just published in The Journal of Design History.  

Full Text:

http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/epv045?
ijkey=XBS9x3TfwNMA8sL&keytype=ref

PDF:

http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/epv045?
ijkey=XBS9x3TfwNMA8sL&keytype=ref 

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Supervision

I would welcome applications from students who would like to work on Victorian literature and visual or material culture in the nineteenth century, or women's writing in all its forms, particularly the work of Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Yonge, Elizabeth Gaskell, and the Brontes. I would also be interested in supervising projects on  women and work, on Victorian literature's interactions with art, craft, design history or aesthetics more generally, or on Victorian 'things' as they relates to architecture and the built enviroment, the decorative arts, or the body and dress.

Research students

 I am currently first/joint supervisor for:

Lucy Foster, "Knowing Your Space: Mapping the Gendered Negotiation of Natural Spaces in Victorian Literature"

Michelle Reynolds, "Identifying and Assimilating the New Woman Artist in Britain: 1850-1920"

Zhiying Zhang, "Feminist Humor in 19th-century Women's Writing: A Case Study of Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Mary Elizabeth Braddon"

Previous completed students (principal or co-supervisor):

Koeun Kim, "Going beyond the Domestic Sphere: Womens’ Literature for Children, 1856-1902"

Molly Ryder , "The Psychology of Space: Architectural Imagery in the Victorian Novel"

Heather Hind, "Hairwork in Victorian Literature and Culture: Matter, Form, Craft"

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Publications

_{Copyright Notice: Any articles made available for download are for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the copyright holder.}

| 2022 | 2020 | 2016 | 2015 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2006 |

2022

• Zakreski P. (2022) Crafting Professionalism: Victorian Women Writers and the Decorative Arts, Trabalho (no) Feminino– Histórias dos Mulheres (Séculos XVIII A XX)/Female Work – Women’s Stories (From the 18th to the 20th Century), Letras Lavadas edições, 115-132.

2020

• Zakreski P. (2020) Sewing and Patterns, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing, Springer Nature, 1-4, DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_100-1.
• Zakreski P. (2020) Sewing and Patterns, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing, Palgrave.
• Zakreski P. (2020) The Writer and the Couturière: Authorship and Creative Industry in the 1870s, Fashion and Authorship Literary Production and Cultural Style from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century, Palgrave Macmillan, 207-230, DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-26898-5_9.

2016

• Zakreski P. (2016) Creative Industry: Design, Art Education and the Woman Professional, Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain, 145-166, DOI:10.4324/9781315574561-15.
• Hadjiafxendi K, Zakreski P. (2016) Introduction: Artistry and Industry – The Process of Female Professionalisation, Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain, pages 1-22, DOI:10.4324/9781315574561-6.
• Hadjiafxendi K, Zakreski P. (2016) Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain, DOI:10.4324/9781315574561.
• Zakreski P. (2016) Transformative Beauty: Art Museums in Industrial Britain by Amy Woodson-Boulton (review), Victorian Review, volume 41, no. 1, pages 183-185, DOI:10.1353/vcr.2016.0017.
• Zakreski P. (2016) Fashioning the Domestic Novel: Rewriting Narrative Patterns in Margaret Oliphant’sand, Journal of Victorian Culture, pages 1-18, DOI:10.1080/13555502.2015.1123171.

2015

• Zakreski P. (2015) The Victorian Christmas Card as Aesthetic Object: ‘Very interesting ephemeræ of a very interesting period in English Art-production’, Journal of Design History, DOI:10.1093/jdh/epv045.

2013

• Zakreski P. (2013) The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James, MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW, volume 108, pages 288-290, DOI:10.5699/modelangrevi.108.1.0288. [PDF]
• Hadjiafxendi K, Zakreski P. (2013) Introduction: Artistry and industry - The process of female professionalisation, Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain, 1-22.
• Zakreski P. (2013) Creative Industry: Design, Art Education and the Woman Professional, Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain, Ashgate.

2012

• Zakreski P. (2012) Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, TEXTUAL PRACTICE, volume 26, no. 6, pages 1121-1123, DOI:10.1080/0950236X.2012.739302. [PDF]
• Zakreski P. (2012) Translation, Authorship and the Victorian Professional Woman: Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Martineau and George Eliot, LITERATURE & HISTORY-THIRD SERIES, volume 21, no. 2, pages 88-89. [PDF]
• Hufton O, Rugemer E, Elliott C, James S, Worthington H, Zakreski P, Donghaile DÓ, Knight S, Carver B, Kane L. (2012) Reviews: Social History, Local History and Historiography, Receptions and Revisitings: Review Articles, 1978–2011, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, Transatlantic Literary Exchanges, 1790–1870: Gender, Race and Nation, the Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James, the Mysteries of the Cities: Urban Crime Fiction in the Nineteenth Century, Translation, Authorship and the Victorian Professional Woman: Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Martineau and George Eliot, the Lost Ireland of Stephen Gwynn: Irish Constitutional Nationalism and Cultural Politics, 1864–1950, Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction, the Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle, Middlebrow Literary Cultures, the Masculine Middlebrow, 1880–1950: What Mr Miniver Read, Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism, a Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing, Marianne Moore and the Cultures of Modernity, British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940, American Postmodern Fiction and the Past, the Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction: Secret Histories, 9/11 and the Literature of Terror, Literature & History, volume 21, no. 2, pages 78-111, DOI:10.7227/lh.21.2.6.
• Zakreski P. (2012) ‘“Tell Me Lies”: Lying, Storytelling, and the Romance Novel as Feminist Fiction’, Journal of Popular Romance Studies, volume 2, no. 2.

2011

• Zakreski P. (2011) ‘“Tell Me Lies”: Lying, Storytelling, and the Romance Novel as Feminist Fiction’, Nothing But Good Times Ahead: The Novels of Jennifer Crusie, Palgrave Macmillan.

2010

• Hadjiafxendi K, Zakreski P. (2010) What Is a Woman to Do?, Peter Lang.
• Zakreski P. (2010) Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian Literature: My Lady Scandalous Reconsidered, VICTORIAN STUDIES, volume 53, no. 1, pages 152-154. [PDF]
• Zakreski P. (2010) 'Piece Work: Mosaic, Feminine Influence and Charlotte Yonge’s Beechcroft at Rockstone’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, volume 43, no. 1, pages 69-93.
• Zakreski P, Hadjiafxendi K. (2010) What is a Woman to Do? A Reader on Women, Work and Art, c. 1830-90, Peter Lang.

2006

• Zakreski P. (2006) Representing Female Artistic Labour 1848-1890: Refining Work for the Middle Class Woman, Ashgate. [PDF]

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