Professor Regenia Gagnier

Professor Regenia Gagnier’s specialisms include Victorian and modern Britain; the geopolitics of language and literature migration; world literatures and political economy; political languages; digital humanities; literary and social theory; sex, gender and sexuality; interdisciplinarity; and women in the professions. Gagnier holds the Established Chair in English Language and Literature at the University of Exeter, founding and former co-editorship of the Global Circulation Project, and Senior Research Fellowship in Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences. Her monographs include Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, 1986); Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832-1920 (Oxford, 1991); The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago, 2000); Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: on the Relationship of Part to Whole 1859-1920 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave, 2018). Gagnier has edited special issues of The Global Circulation Project on Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-first Century (2010), Global Modernisms (2012), Twenty-First Century “Chinoiserie” (2015), Rabindranath Tagore’s Global Vision (2015), Contemporary Fictions of Migration: Writing Diaspora in the 21st Century (2022), Literature and Global Responsibility (2023) and The Futures of English (2023). She is on the Editorial Boards of 23 scholarly journals and has supervised to completion 88 doctorates at Stanford and Exeter. She recently held Visiting Professorships or fellowships at Tsinghua, Fudan, Melbourne, UMass Amherst, Vanderbilt, Arizona State, Leeds, Delhi, Indian Institute of Advanced Studies (Shimla), Shiv Nadar, Humanities Research Centre at ANU in Australia, and STIAS in South Africa.

Gagnier has served as Chair of the Consortium of Institutes of Advanced Study, Great Britain and Ireland; the £1.5 Billion Selection and Interview Panels of UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund; Presiding Officer of six MLA Division Executives in the USA; President of the British Association for Victorian Studies; the AHRC Research Panel and University English Executive, UK. She is Honorary Centenary Fellow of the English Association; Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; Member of Academia Europaea; on the International Executive Committee of IAUPE (International Association of University Professors of English); Fellow of the British Academy and Chair of the British Academy's Section Modern Languages, Literatures, and other Media from 1830.