Sophie Smith
Department: English & Film
Discipline: English
Research Centre/Unit: Centre for Victorian Studies
Project Summary
My PhD research focuses on pathological criminality in the Golden Age of detective fiction. I'm currently looking at the legacy of fin de siècle theories of mind in the early twentieth century, exploring how popular culture and concepts of science shaped attitudes to criminality and eugenics during the inter-war years, and how this relates to the growth of fascism during the 1920s and 1930s.
Forthcoming book chapter: 'The Spectre of Heredity', Genetic Histories and Liberties: Eugenics, Genetic Ancestries and Genetic Technologies in Literary and Visual Cultures, Edinburgh University Press (2022)
Articles:
https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~assets/doc/Emergence%20VIII%202016.pdf https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~assets/doc/Emergence%20IX%202017.pdf
https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~assets/doc/Emergence-Special-Edition.pdf
Supervisory Team
Angelique Richardson and Benedict Morrison
Wider Research Interests
Deviance, Medical Humanities, Gothic, Middlebrow Fiction, Social History
Authored Publications/Reports
Sophie Smith (September 2016) Berlin is a City with Two Centres: Images of Societal Decay in Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, Emergence, 8, 41-53
Sophie Smith (2017) Fairy Tale, Fable and the Reality of Evil: Representing the Holocaust in John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Emergence, 9, 59-70
Sophie Smith (2018) Nurses, Nuns and the NHS: The 1950s and the Golden Age of Community Medicine, Emergence, Special Edition: At Home and Abroad: Politics and Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century, 41-50
Sophie Smith (2022) The Spectre of Heredity, Genetic Histories and Liberties: Eugenics, Genetic Ancestries and Genetic Technologies in Literary and Visual Cultures
