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

Profile

I joined the School of the Arts 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.

I’m interested in interdisciplinary approaches to English teaching and research, especially from neurodivergent perspectives. 

I am currently preparing a scholarly edition of Sabine Baring-Gould’s Mehalah: A Story of the Salt Marshes (1880), an unjustly neglected proto-Decadent novel, for the Modern Humanities Research Association’s ‘Jewelled Tortoise’ series. 

My chapter on the poetry of Arthur Symons and the operas of Richard Wagner is about to be published in Salome’s Bookshelf: Artists and Writers of the 1890s (2025). 

My PhD on the relationship between the poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne and the operas of Richard Wagner can be found here: Wagner and Swinburne. I blog on music and poetry in terms of Swinburne and the nineteenth century and other literary matters at About – Verseandmusic.com 

Teaching

• ESH101: Shakespeare 
• ESH126: London Global 
• ESH279: Victorian Fictions 
• ESH5003: Chaucer: Gender, Faith, Identity
• ESH6000: English Research Dissertation 
• ESH7030: Aestheticism and Fin de Siècle Literature

Research

Publications

Recent and forthcoming publications

• Mehalah: A Story of the Salt Marshes by Sabine Baring-Gould, edited with an introduction and notes by Michael Craske (c.2027-8), Jewelled Tortoise Series no. 15, Modern Humanities Research Association. 
• ‘The Music of the Venusberg: Richard Wagner and the Poetry of Arthur Symons’, Salome’s Bookshelf: Artists and Writers of the 1890s (2025). 
• ‘Of Lips and Angels: The Rossettis at Tate Britain; Evelyn De Morgan: The Gold Drawings at Leighton House’, CUSP: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Cultures, Vol.2.1, (Winter 2024), pp. 145-150.
• ‘Lying Down or Standing Up for Music: Hearing and Listening in Vernon Lee’s Music and its Lovers’, Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, Vol. 5.2 (2022), pp. 83-101.
• ‘“Let us adore spilled blood”: Swinburne and the Scandal of Poems and Ballads’, Routledge Handbook of Scandals in Victorian Literature and Culture (2023). 
• ‘“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).