Dr Chris Ewers

I have had articles published on eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth-century fiction, but the main focus of my research is on the long eighteenth century. I am interested in how mobility - the way people move through space - alters and shapes narrative, and the connections beween movement and how we experience time.

I study modes of transport, such as ships, coaches, aerostatic machines, railways, tube trains and motor cars, tracing the link between physical movement and its representation in fiction. My first book, Mobility and the Novel from Defoe to Austen, argues that the novel emerges and develops in response to the remarkable changes to transport in Britain in the eighteenth century. My current book project aims to rethink temporality in the period, looking at the connections between street rhythms, novelistic time, religious time, gendered time, and the way infrastructure alters experience.

I have also worked as a sports journalist, and have a corresponding interest in early newspapers, and the narratives of sport (in film, poetry, and the novel).

I studied English Literature at Exeter University before working as a journalist for a number of national newspapers. While working as a sub-editor, I completed a Masters with the OU and a doctorate at King's College London (my PhD was on roads and the novel in the long eighteenth century).

I have written a monograph, Mobility and the Novel from Defoe to Austen (Boydell and Brewer 2018), as well as journal articles on Agatha Christie, Walter Scott, Robert Bage, and Thomas Love Peacock, and book chapters on Sir John Hill's work as a columnist, and Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey.

I would be keen to discuss research proposals on any topics that touch on my areas of research, such as mobility, sport, temporalities, and narrative geography. I don't believe in ring-fencing periods, and would be happy to discuss projects that move beyond the long eighteenth century.