Professor Julia Thomas

BA (Wales), MA and PhD (Wales)

Publication

• Date
• Type

Research

I specialise in Victorian visual and material culture, word and image, and digital humanities, and am a leading figure in the field of Illustration Studies.

Much of my research has involved raising academic and public awareness of historical illustrations, which are often marginalised in conventional narratives and modern print editions. With this aim in mind, I created the AHRC-funded Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration (2007; updated 2011), a pioneering digital project, the methodologies of which have since been adopted on other digital archives. Images from this database have been used by publishers, graphic designers, television and film producers, and the heritage sector. The database was submitted as an impact case study for REF 2014. For more information about the impact of DMVI, click here.

My research on the intersection between historical illustrations and the digital continued on the AHRC-funded 'Lost Visions' project, a big data initiative that led to the creation of The Illustration Archive. With over a million images from books of literature, history, geography and philosophy in the British Library's Collection, this is the world's largest searchable online resource dedicated to book illustration. Quentin Blake has called it ‘amazing’. For more information about the significance of The Illustration Archive, click here.

Most recently, I have been Principal Investigator on an international and multi-partner project funded by the AHRC and NEH that uses AI tools to search for and interrogate historical images of places and people. For more on this project, including a short film, see https://findingaplace.org.uk/

My published monographs focus on Victorian visual and material culture in various contexts and guises:

• The Victorian Mind's Eye: Reading Literature in an Age of Illustration (Oxford University Press, 2025) examines the cognitive mechanisms at work in the Victorian reading of illustrated literature, from the impact of images on mental visualisation to their affect on memory
• Nineteenth-Century Illustration and the Digital: Studies in Word and Image (Palgrave, 2017) offers a conceptual and critical model for understanding the interaction between historical illustrations and the digital. Individual chapters focus on digital visibility, making the content of images searchable online, and the politics of crowdsourcing
• Shakespeare’s Shrine: The Bard’s Birthplace and the Invention of Stratford-upon-Avon (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) discusses the construction of the myth of Shakespeare's birthplace in the Victorian period, focusing on visual and textual representations
• Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image (Ohio University Press, 2004) analyses the relation between text and image in illustrations and narrative paintings as one that is bound up in cultural values about gender, race and class
• Victorian Narrative Painting (Tate, 2000) offers an introduction to pictures that tell stories and their often ambiguous meanings.

I am currently engaged on a multi-volume editorial project to bring together historical documents relating to nineteenth-century illustration (Routledge)

Teaching

I have taught a wide range of modules at all university levels (BA, MA, PhD) and have been nominated several times for the Enriching Student Life Award. Much of my teaching involves innovative learning and assessment methods. As well as working hands-on with scholarly materials, I regularly integrate digital resources and methods into my teaching.

On the BA programme, I currently teach a module on The Illustrated Book 

On the MA programme, I currently co-teach on the core module 

On the PhD programme, I am supervising or have supervised the following PhD subject areas:

• The illustrated afterlives of John Milton's Paradise Lost
• Illustrated editions of Matthew Arnold's poetry
• Victorian illustrated song
• Domestic Iconography: a Cultural Study of Photography, 1840-1880
• Illustrating Shakespeare: Practice, Theory, and the Digital Humanities
• The Representation of the Workhouse in Nineteenth-Century Culture
• A Lost Legacy: a critical assessment and catalogue of the illustrated work of Alfred Ernest Walter George Aris
• “Graceful Expression and Useful Purpose”: mid-Victorian fashionable femininity
• “Tell me what you eat”: representations of food in nineteenth-century culture
• Childhood and Visuality in Victorian Culture

Biography

I studied at Cardiff University, gaining a BA in English Literature, an MA in Critical and Cultural Theory and a PhD in English Literature (under the supervision of Catherine Belsey) in which I focused on visual and textual representations of adultery in the nineteenth century. My interest in the interaction between word and image developed primarily during my time as a Leverhulme Special Research Fellow when I wrote my first book, Victorian Narrative Painting (Tate, 2000). Since then, I have worked to establish Illustration Studies as an academic field in its own right.

As the developer of two pioneering digital illustration archives, the AHRC-funded Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration (2007, 2011) and The Illustration Archive (2015), I am drawn towards the dynamic between illustration and the digital. I have shaped ideas of how illustrated material is remediated in digital contexts. My monograph, Nineteenth-Century Illustration and the Digital (Palgrave, 2017), offers a conceptual model for understanding the relation between historical illustrations and the digital.

I have written a range of books that engage with different aspects of Victorian visual and material culture, including The Victorian Mind's Eye: Reading Literature in an Age of Illustration (Oxford University Press, 2025), Nineteenth-Century Illustration and the Digital (Palgrave, 2017), Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image (Ohio University Press, 2004) and Shakespeare’s Shrine: The Bard’s Birthplace and the Invention of Stratford-upon-Avon (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). I am the editor of Reading Images (Palgrave, 2000) and co-editor of The Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader (Routledge, 2008). I am currently working on a multi-volume editorial project with Routledge to bring together historical materials relating to nineteenth-century illustrations.

I regularly speak and give keynote addresses at conferences and events, and have acted as Principal and Co-Investigator on numerous projects. I have also had the privilege of supervising some brilliant postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers and always welcome queries from prospective students.

Honours and awards

• Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA)
• Elected Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales (FLSW)
• 2022-2024: Finding a Place: advancing digital methods to unlock the use of digitized book illustrations in cultural institutions, AHRC/NEH New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions (Principal Investigator, with University of Wyoming) (£250,000 plus $150,000)
• 2017: 'The World in Illustrations', Data Innovation Research Institute Fund, Cardiff University (Principal Investigator) (£8,297)
• 2015-17: Cardiff University AHSS Network: Digital Humanities Initiator Bid (co-applicant) (£10,000)
• 2015-16: Cardiff University Research Leave Fellowship (£15,000)
• 2014-15: ‘Lost Visions: retrieving the visual element of printed books from the nineteenth century’, AHRC (Principal Investigator) (£439,975)
• 2011: ‘Crowd Sourcing for the Humanities: a DMVI Case Study’, Cardiff Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (co-applicant) (£1,530)
• 2010-11: ‘Enhancing the Database of Mid-Victorian Wood-Engraved Illustration’, Digital Equipment and Database Enhancement for Impact award, AHRC (Principal Investigator) (£121,171)
• 2008: ‘Verbal context to images in an illustration database’, Cardiff Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (co-applicant) (£1,546)
• 2007-2008: 'Literary Illustration: Conservation, Access, Use', workshops run in partnership by Cardiff University and the Victoria and Albert Museum, AHRC (co-applicant) (£16,000)
• 2007: AHRC ICT Methods Network (co-applicant) (£5,000)
• 2006: ‘Undergraduates as researchers: using original archival and historical sources’, Interdisciplinary/Interprofessional Collaboration in Teaching and Learning Scheme, Cardiff University (co-applicant) (£7,700)
• 2004-7: ‘A Web-Mounted Database of Mid-Victorian Wood-Engraved Illustration’, AHRC Resource Enhancement Award (Principal Investigator) (£198,132)
• 2003: Young Researcher Travel Scholarship, Cardiff University. To study in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (£3,427)
• 1997-1999: Leverhulme Special Research Fellowship
• 1993-1997: British Academy Studentship, PhD
• 1993: British Academy Studentship, MA

Academic positions

2009-2012       Reader, School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University

2005-2009       Senior Lecturer, School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University

1999-2005       Lecturer, School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University

1997-1999       Leverhulme Special Research Fellow, School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University

Supervisions

Please get in touch if you would like to work with me. I supervise PhD students in a number of areas:

• Victorian visual and material culture
• Word and image
• Digital Humanities
• Illustration Studies