Lucy Thompson
Lucy teaches 18th and 19th-century literature. She works on the emotional impacts of surveillance in historical and contemporary settings, focused on gender and literary culture.
Subjects: Gender & Intersectionality Studies, Literature
Areas of Research / Professional Expertise
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Lucy's main research interests are Romanticism, gender, and surveillance theory, with a focus on how surveillance and mechanisms of invigilation were socialised and internalised between 1780 and 1830, and how this feeds into our experiences today. She is particularly interested in the recovery and analysis of women’s experience of inspection in the long nineteenth century and has explored surveillance under the rubrics of the medicalised body, the domestic body, and sexual bodies. She is currently examining the intersection between Critical Disability Studies and Surveillance Studies in Romantic-period literature.
Books
Articles
Vermeer's Curtain: Privacy, Slut-Shaming and Surveillance in ‘A Girl Reading a Letter’
Published: May 08, 2017 by Surveillance & Society
Authors: Lucy Thompson
Offering a historicized analysis of Vermeer’s ‘A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window’, along with a contextualized approach to the construction of ‘sluts’, this article seeks to recalibrate our understanding both of the importance of shame within the surveillance canon, and specific modalities of female experience of asymmetrical inspection.
Photos
News
English Academy Seminars: Literatures of Surveillance
By: Lucy Thompson
Subjects: Literature
As part of a series of interactive seminars for students at Solihull Sixth Form College, Professor Richard Marggraf Turley and Dr Lucy Thompson from Aberystwyth University led a session on the literatures of surveillance.