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Dr. B.P. (Ben) Moore

Faculty of Humanities
Capaciteitsgroep Engelse taal en cultuur
Photographer: Ben Moore

Visiting address
  • Spuistraat 134
  • Room number: 5.28
Postal address
  • Postbus 1641
    1000 BP Amsterdam
  • Profile and Research Interests

    Ben Moore joined the UvA in 2017 as Assistant Professor in English Literature. Previously he taught at Cardiff University (2015-16) and the University of Manchester (2011-15), where he also completed his BA (2007), MA (2010) and PhD (2014). His research has focused mainly on modernity, cities, vision, space and architecture in the nineteenth century. This work has led to a monograph, Invisible Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Rethinking Urban Modernity (Edinburgh University Press). He has also written articles and book chapters on Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Kingsley, Margaret Oliphant, Victorian childhood, Rem Koolhaas, and Walter Benjamin, among other topics.

    Ben is also interested in re-reading discourses of biology and the human in nineteenth-century literature, in light of recent debates around the Anthropocene. A short book on this topic, Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850-1895, was published by Palgrave in 2023. 

    His next major project is provisionally titled Spatialising Money in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. It will look at the interaction between money and space in authors including Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Margaret Oliphant. It examines the role of specific locations in disrupting, suspending or bypassing the 'normal' processes of economic circulation. Such locations include the pawnbroker's shop, the debtors' prison, the bank in crisis and the European spa town. Conceptually, this project examines the relations between the symbolic and allegorical sides of money, in Walter Benjamin's sense of allegory as fractured, broken and incomplete, as opposed to the fullness of meaning associated with the Romantic symbol. The project aims to extend this interest into reading the cultural role of money and value in contemporary society. An article on surplus in Oliphant's novel Hester (2021) and a book chapter on money and representation in Dickens and Gissing (2022) are the first outcomes of this work. 

    Ben is Co-Editor and outgoing Reviews Editor for the Gaskell Journal, and a Trustee of the Dickens Society. For several years he has co-convened an ASCA reading group on Politics and Aesthetics in Critical Theory (details here), which culminated in a symposium on 'Troubling Universalisms' in June 2023.

    Current or potential students interested in supervision possibilities are welcome to get in touch.

  • Teaching

    In 2023-24 Dr Moore is co-ordinator for the BA English core course English Literature 4: The Nineteenth Century. He also teaches on the MA Critical Debates in English Studies course and contributes to the BA course English Literature 1

    He is co-Programme Director for BA English Language and Culture, and the UvA's Harting Programme representative.

  • Publications

    2024

    • Moore, B. P. (Accepted/In press). Invisible Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Rethinking Urban Modernity. (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Literature). Edinburgh University Press.
    • Moore, B. P. (Accepted/In press). Architecture. In J. John, & C. Wood (Eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts Edinburgh University Press.

    2023

    2022

    2021

    2020

    2019

    • Moore, B. (2019). [Review of: N. Henry (2018) Women, Literature and Finance in Victorian Britain: Cultures of Investment]. The Gaskell Journal, 33, 59-61. [details]

    2018

    2017

    2016

    2015

    2014

    • Moore, B. P. (2014). Review of Dickens and Benjamin: Moments of Revelation, Fragments of Modernity. Dickens Quarterly, 31(3), 262-265.

    2013

    • Moore, B. P. (2013). Review of London, Radical Culture, and the Making of the Dickensian Aesthetic. Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 64, NA. https://doi.org/10.7202/1025682ar

    2012

    • Moore, B. P. (2012). "When I went to Lunnon town sirs": Transformation and the Threshold in the Dickensian City. Dickens Quarterly, 29(4), 336-349.
    • Moore, B. P. (2012). Review of William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880-1914. The Modern Language Review, 107(1), 280-281. https://doi.org/10.5699/modelangrevi.107.1.0280

    2022

    2020

    2019

    Journal editor

    • Moore, B. (editor) (2023-2028). The Gaskell Journal (Journal). https://gaskelljournal.co.uk/
    • Moore, B. (member of editorial board) (2019-2023). The Gaskell Journal (Journal).
    This list of publications is extracted from the UvA-Current Research Information System. Questions? Ask the library or the Pure staff of your faculty / institute. Log in to Pure to edit your publications. Log in to Personal Page Publication Selection tool to manage the visibility of your publications on this list.
  • Ancillary activities
    • No ancillary activities