Associate Professor Lisa O'Connell

Lisa specializes in eighteenth-century British literature. She trained at Melbourne and Brown universities and has held fellowships at various international English departments including Johns Hopkins University and the Free University Berlin.

Her research interests include sentimental fiction, theories of enlightenment and secularization and early global literatures. She has published on a range of topics including the English marriage plot, libertinism, popular anthropology, travel narrative, settler fiction and courtesan memoirs.

She teaches courses on the history of the novel, the literature of enlightenment, Gothic fiction and literary realism in the School of Communication and Arts where she is available to supervise honours and post-graduate theses across the broad fields of novel studies, post-colonialism, women's writing and global fiction.

Lisa's most recent research, a new account of why and how marriage became central to the English novel, is the subject of a book with Cambridge University Press titled The Origins of the English Marriage Plot: Literature, Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century (2019).

Her past Australian Research Council-funded Discovery Projects include 'Secularisation and British Literature, 1600-1800' and 'The Cultural Impact of Irregular Marriage in the Age of British Colonialism'.

She is currently working on three collaborative projects: 'Spaces of Enlightenment', with Dr Peter Denney (Griffith U), forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Life (Duke UP); 'The Colonial Reinvention of Anglo-European Literary Culture, 1680-1832', with Prof. Dr. Jennifer Wawrzinek (FU Berlin), forthcoming in Postcolonial Studies (Taylor & Francis); and a co-edited book with Dr Peter Denney titled 'Natures of Enlightenment: Cultures of Environment in the British World, 1700-1840'.