Reader

Email: r dot g dot forman at warwick dot ac dot uk

Coventry CV4 7AL

About

Dr Ross Forman is a Reader (Associate Professor) in English, and teaches on the English and Comparative Literary Studies program. He joined in 2011 after teaching at the National University of Singapore for four years. He previously worked for the Centre for Asian and African Literatures, based at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and jointly run by SOAS and University College London.

He is currently the Principal Investigator of a British Academy seed grant award on using art and theatre to mitigate urban youth violence in Brazil and the UK. He was the Principal Investigator, along with Professor Sandra Vasconcelos of the University of São Paulo of the British Academy Newton Mobility Network on "The Novel without Frontiers" and the two-year SPRINT Project on the same topic funded by Warwick and the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP).

Dr Forman currently serves as the academic co-chair of the University's Rainbow/LGBTQUA+ Taskforce. He is also the current Director of Graduate Studies for the department.

Research interests

My main research focus is the Anglophone long nineteenth century, with a special interest in the relationship between Britain and China and Southeast Asia, as well as Latin America. I also work in the areas of postcolonial literatures and cultures, diaspora literature, and queer studies.

My book China and the Victorian Imagination, which considers the role of China and the Chinese in British literature and culture from the 1840s to 1911, was released by Cambridge University Press in 2013. China and the Victorian Imagination won the Rudikoff Prize for best first book in Victorian Studies (awarded in 2015). I am also working on a project on the reception of Asian material culture in Britain and the empire during the nineteenth-century, covering such topics as food, imperial exhibitions, early film, and the representation of torture in popular British narrative.

My research in the area of queer studies and the history of sexuality includes a recent article for Victorian Literature and Culture considering the reception of the Oscar Wilde trials in Brazil as a case study for how we understand the global constitution of sexuality as an axis for identity in the late nineteenth century and our relationship to the archive. i was also the editor for transnational entries for the Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History, which won the prestigious Dartmouth Medal.

Teaching and supervision

I am happy to supervise postgraduate and undergraduate work on nineteenth-century literature, Anglophone literatures and cultures, postcolonial literatures and cultures, and queer studies or literature.

I have supervised several Early Career Fellows at Warwick's Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) and am open to working with postdoctoral fellows at the IAS and with applicants to the Leverhulme, British Academy, and other postdoctoral fellowship programmes.

Current PhD Students:

Jay Waters (supervised with Team Leach, Warwick Writing Programme)

Charles Gough (M4C student, based at and supervised with colleagues at the University of Birmingham)

Thirayut Sangangamsakun

Completed PhD Students:

Jungju SHIN, (Re)turn of the Abject: Representation of Asian (American) Masculinity in the West (2020)

Di [Dee] WU, The Cultural Legacy of Oscar Wilde in Modern China and Beyond (1909-2019) (2020)

Qingquan QIAO, China in Britain in the Interwar Period: Bertrand Russell, W.H. Auden,
Christopher Isherwood and Shih-I Hsiung (2018)

Qiong YU, Revisiting Britain’s Informal Imperialism from the Periphery and Beyond: Examining the Constructive Relations between Britain and China during the Sino-British Encounter in the Nineteenth Century within a Global Context (SOAS, University of London, 2017)

Waiyee LOH, Empire of Culture: Contemporary British and Japanese Imaginings of Victorian Britain (2016)

Shalini Jain, Ecocriticism and Indigenous Modernities (National University of Singapore, 2014)

Lorena Santos, A Truth Universally Acknowledged (?): (Post)feminist Rewritings of Austen’s Marriage Plot

(National University of Singapore, 2010)

Selected publications

Monograph

• China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Cambridge UP, 2013)Link opens in a new window.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

• "Nothing Corresponding to It in China: Asian Food at London’s International Health Exhibition, 1884.”
  Special issue on “Fairs,” Food, Culture and Society 24.2 (2021): 202-226.
• “From Reading to Rio: Oscar Wilde in Brazil,” Special Issue on “The Wide Nineteenth Century,”
  Victorian Literature and Culture, forthcoming 49.1 (2021): 1-32.
• “A Parasite for Sore Eyes: Rereading Infection Metaphors in Bram Stoker’s Dracula."
  Victorian Literature and Culture 84.4 (2016): 925-947.
• "Queering Sensation," The Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. Pamela K. Gilbert (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011).
• “Nineteenth-century Beefs: British Types and the Brazilian Stage,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 32.4 (Dec. 2010).
• “Room for Romance: Playing with Adventure in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World,” Genre 43 (Spring/Summer 2010).
• “Hong Kong, 1898,” invited piece for “Beyond Britain” forum, Victorian Review 36.2 (Spring 2010).
• "Cooking Culture," co-ed. Suzanne Daly, Victorian Literature and Culture 36.2 (Sept. 2008).

Qualifications

• AB (Harvard)
• MA; PhD (Stanford)
• Fulbright Scholar (Brazil)