Biography

I started teaching at Sussex in January 2012. I studied for my PhD in the Department of English Literature at New York University, where I also taught literature and writing. I studied for my BA in English Literature at Oxford University, and I also have an MSc in Gender Studies from London School of Economics. I specialise in Victorian literaure, especially the fin de siecle, and also in queer, gender, and disability studies. I teach primarily critical theory and LGBT/queer studies.

Role

Lecturer

I specialise in Victorian literature, especially the fin de siecle, and also in queer, gender, and disability studies.

My current book project, tentatively entitled “The Origins of Lifestyle Journalism: Gender, Sexuality, and the Making of Taste at the British Fin de Siècle,” will tell the story of how Aesthetic writers transformed print journalism at turn of the nineteenth century by developing a form of writing that is a progenitor of today's lifestyle journalism. The project will present a critical history of lifestyle journalism, interrogating the origins of this form of writing that now strongly influences our conceptions of home, family, domesticity, and the good life.

I also maintain an ongoing engagement with the field of disability studies and have published articles on disability and sexuality in the journal Nineteenth Century Gender Studies and an anthology edited by Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow entitled Sex and Disability (Duke University Press, 2012).

My PhD dissertation project, "Positions of Retreat: Forms of Non-Oppositionality in British Fin de Siecle Aestheticism, 1873-1914,” explores the way that various late-nineteenth-century Aesthetes valued non-oppositional stances and modes of interaction (such as reticence, hesitancy, and permissiveness) and sought to identify ways of operating in the world and interacting with others that avoided violence, imposition, and exploitation.

Summer term (13 May-7 June): Tuesdays 2.00pm-3.00pm in Arts B 224.

O'Connell, Rachel (2012) "That cruel spectacle": the extraordinary body eroticized in Lucas Malet's The history of Sir Richard Calmady. In: Sex and disability. Duke University Press, Durham, N.C., pp. 108-122. ISBN 9780822351542

O'Connell, Rachel (2011) "Significant negatives": genre and ethics in Alice Meynell's Familiar Essays, 1893-1909. Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, 74. pp. 59-74. ISSN 0220-5610

O'Connell, Rachel (2008) Cripsploitation: desire, the gaze, and the extraordinary body in The history of Sir Richard Calmady. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 4 (2). ISSN 1556-7524