Rebecca Dillon

Rebecca Dillon is a second year PhD student who is part of the Book History and Collaborative Specialization Program. Her research explores the narrative construction and secularization of natural disaster stories in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Transatlantic literature. She is interested in tracing thematic links between Romantic era depictions of disaster and concepts of the individual, nationhood, geography, and globalization. She holds a BA in English with a minor in Science for Arts Students from McGill University and a MSt in English from the University of Oxford.

Conference Papers:

• “An Ill-Starred Event: Disaster and Shipwreck in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” International Summer School of Romanticism, July 2022. Charles University, Prague.
• “The Cycle of the Universe”: The Reception of Darwinian Systems in Mathilde Blind’s Ascent of Man. Oxford English Graduate Conference, June 2022, University of Oxford, Oxford.

Book Reviews:

• “Own Your Unconscious,” Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House, Published in The Oxford Review of Books, Summer Issue 2022.

Fellowships and Awards:

• Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Award, 2023-27.
• Maxwell and Meyerstein Fund Travel Grant, University of Oxford, 2022.