Office: PHIL 170
Tel.: +49 (0)851-509-2790
katharina.boehm@uni-passau.de
If you’re a student and need to get in touch with me, please direct your inquiry to: lehrstuhl.boehm@uni-passau.de or jevgenija.sperlich@uni-passau.de (secretary's office)
I research British literary history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a focus on interfaces between literary production and the history of science and media. Particular interests include the relationship between literature and practices of knowledge production in other fields (antiquarianism, historiography, natural history, and medicine); the history of the book and cultures of print; literature and the visual arts; literature and ecology.
I am currently completing a book on novelists’ engagement with the material practices and media experiments of antiquarians in the long eighteenth century (contracted to Oxford University Press). Together with Noah Heringman and Crystal B. Lake, I’m working on a digital edition of the eighteenth-century antiquarian print series Vetusta Monumenta. Vicky Mills and I co-edited a special issue on media history and material artefacts for Word & Image. My articles on the history of the novel, material culture, and book history have appeared in Modern Philology, Studies in the Novel, SEL, Word & Image, Victorian Review, Textual Practice, and a number of essay collections.
With Luisa Calè and Vicky Mills, I’ve set up the Passau-Birkbeck History of the Book Network. We’ve been convening annual summer conferences since 2023, bringing together book historians, literary historians, media historians and historians of science. The Events page contains more information on the past conferences we’ve held.
My first monograph, Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood (Palgrave Macmillan’s Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture Series, 2013) explored the medical institutions, scientific entertainments, debates and print cultures that revolutionised how the Victorians understood childhood. I have also edited a volume entitled Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (2012) and co-edited, with Stephan Karschay, a special issue on Gothic Ecologies from the eighteenth century to the present.
