Dr David McAllister

Overview

Biography

David joined Birkbeck in 2011 having previously taught at the universities of Newcastle and York. He also held a postdoctoral fellowship with the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group, as part of their Leverhulme-funded project Past versus Present: Abandoning the Past in an Age of Progress. Before attending university in his early 20s, he worked variously as: a call-centre worker; a carpenter's labourer; a serf in a medieval-themed restaurant; in skateboard, record, and book shops; and, briefly, in the rodeo.     

His interdisciplinary research spans the long nineteenth century, with a particular focus on medical humanities, histories and technologies of ageing, representations of death and burial and their influence on shaping public spaces and medical discourse, Dickens's writing, histories of inter-generational justice (in other words, how did generations form, constitute themselves, and relate to each other during a period of rapid demographic transition in the nineteenth century?). He also has wider research interests in the gothic, the Victorian novel, Victorian educational theories, masculinities, and nineteenth-century intellectual history. He has published on a wide range of writers including Gaskell, Dickens, Wordsworth, Elizabeth Hamilton, Carlyle, Tennyson, William Godwin and Jeremy Bentham.

David is currently Director of the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, and organises the long-running Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century series of research talks. He is also the General Editor of the journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century He was elected as a Trustee of the Dickens Society in 2020, and is currently writing a book about Dickens's novelistic construction of midlife and its effect on his experiments in narrative. He has most recently co-edited a collection of essays titled Graveyard Gothic, which will be published by Manchester University Press in Spring 2024.

Highlights

• CONTRACT SIGNED! Graveyard Gothic, ed. David McAllister, Eric Parisot and Xavier Aldana Reyes (Manchester University Press, forthcoming). 

• Now out in paperback: Imagining the Dead in British Literature and Culture, 1790-1848 (Palgrave, 2018)

  
  

Office hours

As we're currently working from home I don't have any fixed office hours. I'm always happy to hear from current, former, or prospective students, however, so please email me to arrange an appointment.

Qualifications

• PGCHE, Birkbeck, 2012
• PhD, University of Cambridge, 2007
• MA, University of London, 2001
• BA, University of London, 2000

Web profiles

• Twitter

Administrative responsibilities

• Chair of the School of Arts Education Committee
• Member of the School of Arts Executive Committee
• Member of Education Strategy Group
• Member of Education Committee
• Member of Whole University Approach to Mental Health Steering Group
• Member of College Programmes Committee

ORCID

0000-0001-7599-8862

Research

Research interests

• The Victorian novel
• Medical Humanities
• Charles Dickens
• Death, burial, hauntings
• The cultural construction of ageing, longevity, and the life course
• Victorian speculative fiction
• cemetery and graveyard history
• the literary culture of the first half of the nineteenth century
• Health technologies

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

Supervisions within Birkbeck:

5

I am currently supervising or co-supervising several doctoral projects on both Romantic and Victorian topics. I am happy to consider enquiries from potential doctoral students on topics relating to any aspect of nineteenth-century literature and culture, including, but not limited to my current and past research interests: Dickens, Wordsworth, death culture, ageing, vagrancy, etc etc.

Please do contact me at d.mcallister@bbk.ac.uk if you would like an informal discussion about your ideas for a PhD.

Current doctoral researchers

• AVERY CURRAN

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2022 onwards

  Title of thesis:

  'Hysteric, hybrid half-and-halfs': queerness in nineteenth-century British and American spiritualism

• CLAIRE COCK-STARKEY

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Oct 2020 onwards

  Title of thesis:

  The Folklore of Death and Dying in Nineteenth Century England

• SHANI CADWALLENDER

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2021 onwards

  Title of thesis:

  Trees Revisited: Exploring the Nature of Identity in Arboreal Poetry.

Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

• JEN MORIARTY

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2016

  Title of thesis:

  Lifelike and Afterlife-like: Spiritual Bodies and Secular Identities in the Victorian Protestant Imagination

  Awarded:

  2023

• HELENA ESSER

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2017

  Title of thesis:

  Re-Calibrating the Urban Matrix: Imaginaries of Victorian London in Steampunk Fiction

  Awarded:

  2020

Teaching

I currently teach on several modules offered as part of the MA Victorian Studies, including our core module Progress and Anxiety, 1789-1859, and two research-led option modules that relate to my interests in Death Studies and gothic: 'Death in Victorian Culture' and 'The Victorian Supernatural'.

At undergraduate level I teach modules on Dickens; The Victorian Novel, and The Victorians and their World.

Teaching modules

• Arts, Humanities and the Lifecycle 1 - Issues and Ideas (ARAR015S4)

Publications