Dr Louise Benson James is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Ghent University, based in the Literary Studies Department, English section. Her project INTRARIB - ‘Intracorporeal Narratives: Reading Internal Biology in Women’s Literature, 1880s-1930s’ - examines British and American women’s fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for its depictions of internal anatomy: organs, viscera, and systems.
Louise is one of the four coordinators of the Literary Studies Workshop at Ghent, and is supervising several BA and MA dissertations in English.
She was previously a lecturer in 19th and 20th century litearature at the University of Bristol, where she is now an Honorary Research Associate, and is a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy.
Her PhD 'Hysterical Bodies and Narratives: Medical Gothic and Women’s Fiction, Victorian to Contemporary' (awarded March 2020) explored links between medicine and women’s fiction, examining the materiality of the body in women’s writing and medical texts published between 1850 and the early 2000s, with a focus on hysteria and nervous disorder.
