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

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. This can be found here: Wagner and Swinburne. 

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 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

• ‘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). 
• ‘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 (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).