Dr Claire O'Callaghan

Dr Claire O’Callaghan joined Loughborough in May 2018 as one of the University’s prestigious ‘Excellence 100’ appointments. She is an expert on the lives and works of the Brontë family and in the writing of Sarah Waters. Claire is Editor-in-Chief of Brontë Studies, the official journal of the Brontë Society.

Claire gained her PhD from the University of Leicester. She holds a PGCHE from the University of Nottingham, and she is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Claire has worked with the media in various guises and has contributed to news articles, programmes for television and (including The Secret Life of Emily Brontë and Britain’s Novel Landscapes for Channel 4, and Britain by Book for Channel 5) and she has also contributed to radio. She has worked as a historical advisor on multiple creative projects, including an original radio drama for Audible. Claire has spoken at a range of literary and public events, including the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Durham Book Festival, and Books on Tyne. She has written shorter pieces for BBC History Magazine, History Today, The Historian and The Conversation.

Claire’s research is in Victorian and neo-Victorian literature and culture, with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, and more recently, the body and health. She has received funding from the AHRC, the British Academy and the British Society for Literature and Science.

Claire is an expert on the Brontës and has published widely on their lives and works, including on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Emily Brontë’s poetry, race and Wuthering Heights, and —with Dr Sarah E. Fanning—mental health in Sally Wainwright’s To Walk Invisible.

Claire is completing a monograph on Charlotte Brontë and diversity, a project for which she received a University Fellowship in 2023-2024.  Alongside her 2018 title Emily Brontë Reappraised, Claire’s more recent research has focused on demythologising elements of the Brontës’ biography, particularly in relation to health. She has published on Emily Brontë and tuberculosis and is working on an article exploring the myths surrounding Anne Brontë’s experience of the so-called ‘white plague’. She is planning a new monograph on the Brontës’ letters and health.

As Editor-in-Chief of Brontë Studies, Claire works closely with the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. Presently, she is leading a collaborative project to publish Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Parisian Little Book’ for the first time in 2025. With her long-term collaborator, Dr Sarah E. Fanning (Mount Allison University, Canada), Claire is also co-editing a major new title: the Routledge Companion to the Brontës (2026), in which her own contribution explores male nursing and care.

Beyond the Brontës, Claire is also an expert on Sarah Waters. Along with the edited title, Sarah Waters and Contemporary Feminisms (2016), her first book, Sarah Waters: Gender and Sexual Politics (2017), remains the only monograph dedicated to Waters’s published works.

Since 2022, Claire has co-led the Health Humanities research group.

Claire’s currently teaches on several modules in the undergraduate and postgraduate English degree programmes, including Victorian and neo-Victorian literature and culture, and on the literary and cultural history of queer genders and sexualities. She also supervises dissertations at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

In 2020, Claire was, with Anne-Marie Beller, awarded the School Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) prize in recognition of her commitment to teaching EDI issues. Their collaborative teaching was recognised as a best practice case study in the University’s Research-informed Teaching Awards in 2023. Claire has been nominated for several teaching prizes for teaching excellence.

Current Students

• Lisa Climie-Somers – Unfaithful Women: Fanny Stenhouse
• Becca Gadd - Forgotten Narratives: A Recovery Project into the works of Frances Burney (1752-1840)
• Ellie Gudgin – Life Writing and Mental Health
• Adelle Hay – Anne Brontë: How Anne Has Been Edited Out of the Literary Canon
• Hannah Palmer – Abortion in Victorian Literature (1837-1901)

Past Students

• James Barker – Creative/critical project: The Things Which No One Can See
• Isobel Sigley - A (New) Woman’s Touch: Tactility and Feminism in Women’s Fin-de-Siècle Short Fiction, 1880-1930

• 2024: ‘The Brontës and Neo-Victorianism: The Afterlives of Wuthering Heights and the Legacy of Wide Sargasso Sea; or, Reading Race, Identity and Violence in Caryl Philip’s The Lost Child and Michael Stewart’s Ill Will’, in D Wynne and A Regis (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës (forthcoming, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).
• 2022: ‘“She resolutely refuses to see a doctor”: Re-reading Emily Brontë and Tuberculosis in 1848; Or Charlotte Brontë, Sickness and Correspondence’, Women’s Writing, 29(4), 566–582.
• 2022: (with Sarah E. Fanning), ‘Bad or mad?: Branwell Brontë, mental health, and alcoholism in Sally Wainwright's To Walk Invisible’, in J Taddeo, K Byrne, and J Leggott (eds), Diagnosing history: Medicine in television period drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• 2020:  ‘Pronouns are Problematic: The Trans* Body and Gender Theory; Or, Revisiting the Neo-Victorian Wo/Man’, Neo-Victorian Studies 13:1(2020), 75-99.
• “‘He is rather peculiar, perhaps”: Jane Eyre in a Queer Context; or, reading Mr Rochester’s coarseness queerly’, Brontë Studies (2018), 44:1, pp. 123-135.
• '"A poet, a solitiary": Emily Brontë – Queerness, Quietness and Solitude, Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature (2018), 134, pp. 204-217.
• ‘Killing the Angel: Violence and Victim-blaming in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond, ed. by Barbara Leonardi (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 297-320. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96770-7_13
• Sarah Waters: Gender and SexualPolitics (2017, Bloomsbury)