Paul Young

Office: Queens 312

My research interests focus predominantly upon the cultural dimensions of imperialism and globalization in the Victorian period. My first book, entitled Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order, was published as part of the Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth Century Writing and Culture Series in 2009. Building upon this work, I have continued to explore how different forms of nineteenth-century Anglophone culture can be understood with relation to the heightened global connectivity and intensified world-level forces that characterized the period. My current research project draws on ecological and imperial history in order to consider how Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction can be linked to the global growth of Britain’s meat markets. This work opens up opportunities to engage with current debates about meat-eating in the contemporary world: The Victorians caused the meat-eating crisis the world faces today – but they might help us solve it.

In teaching terms my research interests feed directly into the third-year module Imperial Encounters: The Victorians and their World as well as the MA module Critical and Literary Theory in a Global Context.

Research supervision:

I am interested in supervising PhD projects in many different areas of Victorian literature and culture, as well as cultural forms, phenomena and discourses associated with other historical phases of globalization. I supervise projects that are registered within the Department of History as well as English. These projects draw particularly upon Exeter’s rich C19th archival holdings as well as the scholarly expertise to be found respectively in the Centre for Victorian Studies, the Centre for Imperial and Global History, and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. The majority of my students use their research work in order to engage in interdisciplinary discussions and debates.