Stephanie Russo

Stephanie Russo is an Associate Professor of Literature in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature.

Stephanie is one of the leading researchers in the field of historical fiction, encompassing film, television, and theatre, especially musical theatre, as well as the historical novel and biofictions. She is especially interested in the use of deliberate anachronisms and the representation of time in historical fiction.

She also has a research interest in women's writing of the long eighteenth century. Her work has focused on exploring representations of politics, monarchy, power, fashion, gender, sex, and revolution. She has published widely on a range of female novelists of the eighteenth century, including Jane Austen, Mary Robinson, Frances Burney,  Charlotte Smith, Sarah Fielding, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Eliza Haywood.

She is the author of The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen, which was published as part of Palgrave Macmillan's Queenship and Power series in October 2020. This project spans five hundred years of writing about the Tudors, from the work of Sir Thomas Wyatt, to contemporary literary, televisual and digital texts. 

Her monograph, The Anachronistic Turn: Historical Fiction, Drama, Television and Film was published by Routledge in late 2023 as part of the Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature series. The Anachronistic Turn explores the use of intentional anachronisms in a wide range of historical fictions published from 2000-2023.

Stephanie has guest edited two issues of the journal Parergon and is currently guest editing an issue of the journal Clio on the topic of anachronistic historical fiction with Professor Jerome De Groot.

Stephanie's next project will be on the contemporary counterfactual historical novel, and will form part of a series on the representation of time in historical fiction. Her monograph Contemporary Counterfactual Fictions: Nightmares, Fantasies and What-Ifs will be published by Brill in 2027.

Stephanie is one of the series editors of the Global Historical Fictions series published by Brill. More information on this series can be found here: https://brill.com/page/hifi/forthcoming-series-global-historical-fictions

Stephanie is also the Editor of the Journal of Historical Fictions.

Teaching

Her teaching includes:

ENGL1001 Literature: Medieval to Modern 

ENGL2010 The Human Story: Heart, Mind and Body in Early Literature

ENGL2040 Historical Fiction and a Passion for the Past (convener)

ENGL3031 Popular Fiction (convener)

ENGL7001 Research in Literary Studies

ENGL7001 Textual Analysis, Literature Theory, and Creative Practice Research 

Stephanie is willing to supervise MRes and PhD projects in the following areas: historical fiction, historical film and television, biofiction, representations of the early modern, early modern and eighteenth-century women's writing, twentieth- and twenty-first century popular women's writing, adaptation, and the afterlife of Jane Austen.