Professor David Skilton MA (Cantab) MLitt (Cantab) FRSA FEA

Overview

I have several complementary strands to my current research:

• illustration, and in particular meaning production by words and images working together in the privileged environment of an illustrated work of literature
• the development of digital tools for the processing of bimedial texts
• anticipated ruins: vision of London in ruins in the future.

My principal research interests have been Victorian, and I am best known for work on fiction, especially Anthony Trollope, for whose collected novels, published by the Trollope Society in forty-eight volumes, I was general editor.

In recent years I have worked on the art and literature of London, with particular emphasis on modes of urban vision and the multiplicity of urban narratives. I am preparing a book on visions of London in ruins. The other main strand of my research is in illustration and illustrated texts, and I am one of the founding editors of the Journal of Illustration Studies, which is a peer-reviewed, electronic journal devoted to the systematic study of literary illustration as a discipline in its own right, having its own subject-matter and its own critical and scholarly methods. I was co-investigator in the AHRC-funded project, A Database of Mid-Victorian Wood-Engraved Illustration (DMVI), and held an AHRC grant for a series of illustration workshops run in conjunction with the Victoria and Albert Museum under the title "Literary Illustration: Conservation, Access, Use" (LICAU).

I am currently collaborating on the development of digital tools and digital research platforms capable of processing text and image together.