Dr Michael Craske, BA, MA (Kent), PhD (QMUL)

Profile

I joined the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary as a permanent lecturer at the beginning of 2023 after teaching for several years on a range of modules at various levels. During this time, I completed my PhD on the relationship between the poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne and the operas of Richard Wagner. I’m interested in interdisciplinary approaches to English teaching and research, especially from neurodivergent perspectives. I blog on music and poetry in terms of Swinburne and the nineteenth century at www.verseandmusic.com.

Teaching

• ESH126: London Global
• ESH279: Victorian Fictions
• ESH5003: Chaucer: Gender, Faith, Identity
• ESH6000: English Research Dissertation

Research

Publications

Recent and forthcoming publications

• ‘The Music of the Venusberg: Richard Wagner and the poetry of Arthur Symons’, Salome’s Bookshelf: Artists and Writers of the 1890s (2023)
• ‘Lying Down or Standing Up for Music: Hearing and Listening in Vernon Lee’s Music and its Lovers’, Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies (2023)
• ‘“Let us adore spilled blood”: Swinburne and the Scandal of Poems and Ballads’, Routledge Handbook of Scandals in Victorian Literature and Culture (2022)
• ‘“A Genius for Inaccuracy”: Edmund Gosse and the Case of Swinburne’s Missing “Ear”’, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism (2022)
• ‘Dannreuther's Hidden Swinburne References Signal Artistic Kinship’, Notes & Queries (2019)
• ‘Swinburne, Wagner, Eliot, and the Musical Legacy of Poems and Ballads’, Journal of Victorian Culture (2018)