Dr Anna Mercer

Publication

• Date
• Type

Research

My current research on the Shelleys includes editing the selected works of Mary Shelley for Oxford University Press (Series Editor: Seamus Perry). I am currently researching Mary Shelley's correspondence, travel writing, short stories, poetry, and journals, considering her original manuscripts and her interaction with other contemporary authors. My research also involves working closely with literary organisations and museums in the UK, the US and Italy.

I have essays forthcoming in the following editions: Nineteenth Century Literature in Transition: the 1810s ed. Emma Mason (Cambridge University Press); Percy Shelley in Context ed. Ross Wilson (Cambridge University Press); Mary Shelley in Context ed. Kate Singer and Lisa Vargo (Cambridge University Press). I co-edited with Cian Duffy the Shelleys' History of a Six Weeks' Tour for Oxford World's Classics (to be published on 12 June 2025). 

Teaching

I have taught on the following modules

Undergraduate teaching:

• 'Bluestockings, Britannia and Unsex'd Females: Women in Public Life 1770-1800'
• 'Fictive Histories/Historical Fictions'
• 'Introduction to Romantic Poetry'
• 'Jane Austen in Context'
• 'Romantic Circles: Collaboration, Radicalism and Creativity 1770–1830'
• 'Romanticism, Politics, Aesthetics'
• 'Second-generation Romantic Poets'
• Dissertation

Postgraduate teaching:

• 'Narrative and Nation: Politics, Gender, History, 1780-1830'
• Research Methods
• Dissertation

Biography

I joined ENCAP in October 2018, and I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2024. I have previously taught in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York.

I completed my AHRC-funded PhD at the University of York in 2017. I have also studied at Jesus College, University of Cambridge and the University of Liverpool. 

I was on maternity leave from March 2024-April 2025.

Honours and awards

• Innovation for All Project Grant 2022, working with Keats House Museum.
• Keats-Shelley Essay Prize (Runner-up) 2015 for the essay ‘Beyond Frankenstein’. 
• Awarded AHRC Travel Award Scheme grant to travel to the USA to study manuscripts in Washington D.C. and New York City, October/November 2015.
• Recipient of BARS Stephen Copley Postgraduate Research Award 2015 for the same research trip as above.
• Recipient of a full AHRC Doctoral Award.
• Essay entitled ‘Shelley and Mary in 1816’ shortlisted for the Keats-Shelley Prize 2012.
• Awarded Jesus College University of Cambridge Graduate Scholarship 2012.

Professional memberships

FHEA.

Speaking engagements

Recent and forthcoming

• ‘Bargain Hunt: Meeting the real Frankenstein’, BBC One, Series 70 Episode 21, 31 March 2025.
• ‘Opening Lines: Frankenstein’, BBC Radio 4, 14 July 2024. 
• ‘The Cenci, Valperga and Making an Audience’, BARS Conference ‘Romantic Making and Unmaking’, University of Glasgow, 23-25 July 2024.
• “Women and Inconstancy in Shelley’s ‘The Bride of Modern Italy’ and Valperga”, The Year of Gothic Women Conference, University of Dundee, 29-31 August 2023. 
• ‘Young Romantics: Romantic Localities’, public lecture at Keats House with Professor Nicholas Roe,18 May 2023.
• ‘The Keats House Collections’, invited speaker at the Keats-Shelley House, Rome, 2 February 2023. 
• ‘Shelley’s Beatrice Cenci as Romantic Heroine – Then and Now’, invited speaker at the P. B. Shelley’s Contemporaneity/ies conference, Bologna and Ravenna, 20-22 October 2022.
•  ‘Teaching Gothic Women’, Roundtable at BARS/NASSR Conference ‘New Romanticisms’, Edge Hill University, 2-5 August 2022.
• ‘Mary Shelley and a new History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817 in 2022)’, BARS/NASSR Conference ‘New Romanticisms’, Edge Hill University, 2-5 August 2022.
• ‘The Last Days of Shelley’, coorganiser and host, Keats-Shelley Memorial Association (online) 18 July 2022.
• ‘The Shelleys in Lerici’, invited speaker at the Shelley200 public festival in Lerici, Italy, June 2022.
•  ‘The Shelleys’, invited speaker at Research Seminar, Lancaster Words (online) 25 February 2022.
• ‘Mary Shelley, John Keats and Romantic Circles’, Keynote Address, The Keats Bicentenary Conference 2022, London, 20-22 May 2022.
•  ‘Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley as collaborators’, invited research talk at the Romanticism Research Seminar, Balliol College, University of Oxford, 9 November 2021.
• ‘Romantic interaction in London: Hazlitt, Keats and the Shelleys’, invited speaker at The Hazlitt Day School, London, September 2021.

Supervisions

Romantic literature, in particular the writings of Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley.