Dr Emily Cuming
Humanities and Social Science
Faculty of Arts Professional and Social Studies
Email: E.M.Cuming@ljmu.ac.uk
Telephone: 0151 231 3076
My main research interests centre on British literature, culture and social history from the nineteenth century to the present day. My first monograph, Housing, Class and Gender in Modern British Writing, 1880-2012 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is a literary study of Britain’s housing story through the peripheral settings of slums, boarding houses, bedsits and council estates. My second book, Maritime Relations: Life, Labour and Literature at the Water's Edge, 1830-1914 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2025) explores the figure of the ordinary sailor, maritime families, and questions of class and literary culture in the long nineteenth century. My other research projects focus on: ‘ordinary’ life writing and the archive; working-class girlhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain; representations of orphanages and institutionalised childhood; port cities and material culture.
Before joining the department in January 2017 I was a Research Fellow for three years in the School of English at the University of Leeds. Prior to that I lived and worked in Los Angeles, California for seven years, teaching literature and interdisciplinary humanities at Scripps College, Harvey Mudd College, the University of Redlands, and Whittier College.
I lead three undergraduate modules: 5125ENGL Life Stories; 6109ENGL Our House: Representing Domestic Space; 3109FDNENG Waterscapes. I also teach on the MA course 7106ENGLIT Place: Imagining Place in Modern Times.
I am currently supervising three PhD projects and warmly welcome enquiries from students considering doctoral research in any of my research areas.
I am an editor of Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism and an editorial board member of the Journal of Victorian Culture. With Dr Lucinda Matthews-Jones, I co-lead the Home and Domestic Cultures research network at LJMU. I am a committee member of the Research Institute for Literature and Cultural History and a board member of the Centre for Port and Maritime History.
Languages
French
Degrees
2006, University of Manchester, UK, PhD
2002, University of Manchester, UK, MA
2001, University of Manchester, UK, BA Hons English & Russian
Highlighted publications
Cuming EM. 2022. Spaces of Girlhood: Autobiographical Recollections of Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Working-Class Childhood Joseph H, Holmes V, Nevalainen L. The Working Class at Home, 1770-1940 :99-121 Palgrave Macmillan Public Url
Cuming EM. 2019. At Home in the World?: The Ornamental Life of Sailors in Victorian Sailortown Victorian Literature and Culture, 47 :463-485 DOI Publisher Url Public Url
Cuming E. 2016. Housing, Class and Gender in Modern British Writing, 1880-2012 Cambridge University Press 9781107150188 DOI Publisher Url
Journal article
Cuming E, O'Brien P. 2024. Introduction: The Raymond Williams Centenary Issue Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, 21 :5-10 Publisher Url
Allen V, Bohata K, Braithwaite P, Cuming EM, Von Rosenberg I, Woodward K. 2021. On Working with Williams: Five Female Perspectives Coils of the Serpent, 2021 :63-81 Publisher Url Public Url
Cuming EM. 2019. At Home in the World?: The Ornamental Life of Sailors in Victorian Sailortown Victorian Literature and Culture, 47 :463-485 DOI Publisher Url Public Url
Rogers H, Cuming EM. 2019. ‘Revealing Fragments: Close and Distant Reading of Working-Class Autobiography’ Family and Community History, 21 :180-201 DOI Publisher Url Public Url
Cuming E. 2013. Private Lives, Social Housing: Female Coming-of-Age Stories on the British Council Estate Contemporary Women's Writing, 7 :328-345 DOI Publisher Url
Cuming E. 2013. ‘Home is home be it never so homely’: Reading Mid-Victorian Slum Interiors Journal of Victorian Culture, 18 :368-386 DOI Publisher Url
Cuming EM. 2006. ‘The Order of Things Past: Ciaran Carson’s Autobiographical Bricolage’ Life Writing, 1 :17-38
Internet publication
Cuming E. 2023. Writing Home: Nineteenth-Century Sailors’ Personal Logbooks Author Url Publisher Url
Chapters
Cuming EM. 2022. Spaces of Girlhood: Autobiographical Recollections of Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Working-Class Childhood Joseph H, Holmes V, Nevalainen L. The Working Class at Home, 1770-1940 :99-121 Palgrave Macmillan Public Url
Cuming EM. 2018. Leave to Remain: Bedsits, B&Bs and Borders in Contemporary Fictions of Asylum Briganti C, Mezei K. Living with Strangers: Bedsits and Boarding Houses in Modern English Life, Literature and Film :161-176 Bloomsbury Academic. London 978-1-3500-1652-1 DOI Publisher Url Public Url
Cuming E. Makeshift Dolls and Working-class Childhood, c. 1880-1930 Holmes V, Harley J. Objects of Poverty Bloomsbury Academic. London Publisher Url
Books (authored)
Cuming E. 2016. Housing, Class and Gender in Modern British Writing, 1880-2012 Cambridge University Press 9781107150188 DOI Publisher Url
Book review
Cuming EM. 2016. Home in British Working-Class Fiction Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, 14 :128-130
Cuming EM. Anglo-Irish Autobiography: Class, Gender and the Forms of Narrative Irish Studies Review, 14
Other invited event:
Mariners: Religion, Race and Empire in British Ports, 1800-1914, University of Bristol, Invited speaker at AHRC-funded network conference: 'Absent Sailor, Orphan Child: Victorian Institutions and the Construction of the Maritime Family'. 2024
'Fragments of a Life: Reading Working-Class Autobiographies in the Archive' for Exploding the Archive postgraduate network series, Online presentation, Guest speaker for postgraduate network reflecting on working with archives of autobiography. 2023
‘Seeing the World: Diaries, Journals, Sketches and Other Sailors’ Writing’, Tate Liverpool, Invited presentation for the launch of the Research Institute for Literature and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University.. 2019
‘“A Bit of Place”: Home, Work and Gender in Mid-Victorian Surveys of Working-Class Environments’, Institute for Historical Research (IHR), London, Invited paper for IHR Winter Conference on 'Home: New Histories of Living.. 2018
‘Archives and “Ordinary” Lives’., Leeds Humanities Research Institute, University of Leeds., Invited presentation for the Sadler Seminar Series: 'Shh! Encounters in the Unquiet Library'.. 2018
'At Home in the World? Sailors’ Homes, Port Cities and Melville’s Redburn’, University of Warwick, Invited paper for Victorian World Literatures conference. 2016
'Barmaids and Landladies', School of English, University of Leeds, Joint presentation with Prof Katherine Mullin; invited talk for School of English research seminar. 2016
'Home Truths: Re-visiting Henry Mayhew’s Morning Chronicle Survey’., University of Leeds, Invited research paper for the Victorian Research Group seminar series, School of English.. 2015
'Housing and Culture'., University of Leeds, Invited speaker and participant at AHRC–funded Research Network workshop, ''Home, Crisis and the Imagination'.. 2014
'At Home with Strangers: The Social Space of the Boarding-House in Twentieth-Century British Fiction’, Nottingham Trent University, Invited speaker at English Faculty Research Seminar Series.. 2014
Conference presentation:
'Childhood, Memory and Institutional Place: Life Stories from the Liverpool Seaman's Orphanage', Children's History Society conference, Newcastle University, Oral presentation. 2024
Writing Home: Sailors' Journals and the Forging of Kinship, STAY HOME - New perspectives on the home, The Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen, Denmark, Oral presentation. 2022
Sea Diaries: Life Writing and Oceanic Time, International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) conference; Life-Writing: Imagining the Past, Present and Future, University of Turku, Turku, Finland, Oral presentation. 2022
'Objects of Desire: Dolls and Dollhouses in Memoirs of Working-Class Girlhood', Objects of Poverty, 1100-2021 - Online Conference, Oral presentation. 2021
‘Ornamental Sailors: Surface Readings of the Victorian Seafarer’, 'Victorian Patterns', British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS) Conference, University of Exeter, Oral presentation. 2018
‘New Directions for Studying Working-Class Autobiography’ (with Dr Helen Rogers), Fragmentary Lives: The Survival and Interpretation of Historic Ego Documents, The National Archives, Oral presentation. 2018
‘Prison Voices in the Classroom: Crime, Punishment, and Pedagogy in the Digital Age' (with Dr Jude Piesse), Crime Fiction(s): Victorian and Neo-Victorian Narratives of Crime and Punishment, Edinburgh Napier University, Oral presentation. 2018
'Digital Victorians: Investigating the Victorians in the 21st Century', North West Print Culture Network meeting, Liverpool John Moores University, Oral presentation. 2017
‘Looking Out for “Jack Ashore”: Ship-Shape Life in the Victorian Sailors’ Home', Rethinking the Institution, Liverpool John Moores University, Oral presentation. 2017
'Beyond Hosts and Guests: Co-Production and Questions of Hospitality in Practice Research', TaPRA: Theatre and Performance Research Association, University of Bristol, Oral presentation. 2016
‘Spaces of Co-Production: Reflections on Working with Community Organisations and Architects’ with Dr Lisa Procter and Gemma Nash (Venture Arts), Changing the Future Research Landscape, University of East Anglia, Oral presentation. 2016
'Hospitable Research?' (with Dr Alison Jeffers), Changing the Future Research Landscape, University of East Anglia, Oral presentation. 2016
‘Hospitality Praxis: Problematising the Power Relations of Co-Production Through the Arts of Hospitality’, CSA: Cultural Studies Association, University of Riverside, California, Oral presentation. 2015
‘The Use of Domestic Evidence in the Production of Urban Knowledge: Henry Mayhew’s Morning Chronicle Investigation’, Urban History Group, University of Wolverhampton, Oral presentation. 2015
‘Unreliable Narration and the British Country House’, The Country House in Britain, 1914-2013, University of Newcastle, Oral presentation. 2014
‘“Home is Home be it Never so Homely”: Reading the Mid-Victorian Slum Interior’, Domestic Methodologies, The Geffreye Museum, London (Museum of the Home), Oral presentation. 2012
'Secret Spheres: Images of Homework in the Mid-Victorians Interiors of the Poor', Domestic Imaginaries, University of Nottingham, Oral presentation. 2012
Award:
Research and engagement funding for 'Voices from the Orphanage: Recovering Stories of the Liverpool Seamen’s Orphan Institution'. £495, Research Institute for Literature and Cultural History, LJMU. 2023
QR funding for 'Maritime Relations: Sailors in British Literature, Culture and Society, 1837-1915'. £480, Liverpool John Moores University. 2023
Travel bursary, €300 (£257), Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies. 2022
QR funding for 'Raymond Williams at 100: Centenary Engagements'. £250, Liverpool John Moores University. 2022
QR research funding for 'Global Relations: Sailors and the Maritime Imagination, 1830-1915'. £750, Liverpool John Moores University. 2021
QR research award for Writing Lives: The Autobiography of the Working Class in Britain, 1600 to Present, £1986, Liverpool John Moores University. 2018
Winner of the NCCPE Engage 2016 Prize for Public Engagement in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences for cross-disciplinary, arts-based research project 'Around the Toilet: Co-Creating Intersectional Understandings of Gender, Disability and Access’. £1500, National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement. 2016
British Association of Irish Studies postgraduate prize, British Association of Irish Studies. 2005
Fully-funded Phd studentship, Arts and Humanities Research Council. 2002
Margaret Johnson (Yates) Prize. Prize for the postgraduate student within the department with an outstanding average mark, University of Manchester. 2002
Fully-funded MA studentship, Arts and Humanities Research Council. 2001
Conference organisation:
James Hanley: New Directions, The Bluecoat, Liverpool. 2023
Bodies, Identities & Design: A Speaker Event, Manchester Metropolitan University, Organiser. 2015
Invited co-organiser and convener of ‘Gender, Space and Architecture’ session, for British Academy-sponsored event 'Is Gender Still Relevant?', University of Bradford, September 2014.. 2014
Making Use of Culture, University of Manchester, Co-organiser. 2005
Media Coverage:
The New Issue: Issue 2 (Big Issue North). Interviewed for 'The House, As Depicted in Literature and the Arts', by Deborah Mulhearn 2020
Fellowships:
Caird Short-term Research Fellowship, Royal Museums Greenwich. 2022
Research Grants Awarded:
AHRC Connected Communities, ''Servicing Utopia: Critical Considerations for Social Change Through Accessible Design', Lisa Procter (Manchester Metropolitan University); Jenny Slater (Sheffield Hallam University), Grant value (£): 10,000, Duration of research project: 4 months. 2016
AHRC Connected Communities, 'Travelling Toilet Tales', Jenny Slater (Sheffield Hallam University); Lisa Procter (Manchester Metropolitan University), Grant value (£): 20,000, Duration of research project: 4 months. 2016
AHRC Connected Communities, ‘Around the Toilet: Co-Creating Intersectional Understandings of Gender, Disability and Access’, Jenny Slater (Sheffield Hallam University); Lisa Procter (Manchester Metropolitan University), Grant value (£): 46,000, Duration of research project: 9 months. 2015
AHRC Connected Communities, ‘The Hospitality Project: Exploring Hospitality as an Arts-Based Praxis to Remake Relationships of Co-Production’, Naomi Millner (University of Bristol); Alison Jeffers (University of Manchester), Grant value (£): 55,000, Duration of research project: 11 months. 2015
Editorial boards:
Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, Editor, https://raymondwilliams.co.uk/journal/. 2015
Journal of Victorian Culture, Editorial board member.
Membership of professional bodies:
Fellow, Higher Education Academy.
Fellow, Royal Historical Society.