Associate ProfessorNicola Parsons

RESEARCH PROJECTS

Current Research Projects

Consuming Character: Harris's List and Eighteenth-Century Print

Associate Professor Parsons's current book project, undertaken in collaboration with Dr Amelia Dale (ANU), delves into a corpus of disreputable, marginalised, and pornographic eighteenth-century texts to argue for a reconceptualisation of literary character that centres upon consumption, repetition, and desire. The focus is Harris's List of Covent-Garden Ladies (1760-1794), a descriptive catalogue of women working London's sex trade, and a cluster of similar texts that were read alongside it. Through these texts, a new history of character emerges, and with it a new understanding of the productive ground of literary character, and the intricate relations of sexuality and consumption that underpin eighteenth-century print. Consuming Character offers a new, character-centered way forward for debates concerning histories of the novel, the relations between literature and pornography, and of the literary as a category.

Harris's List of Covent-Garden Ladies: A Critical Edition Across Four Decades

Associate Professor Parsons is co-editing, with Dr Amelia Dale, a major scholarly edition of Harris's List that is contracted with Boydell and Brewer's Durham University's IMEMS Press series.

Forthcoming Publications

"Wilkes and 'Honest Ranger': The Career of Joseph Burd (c.1727-1779), Fleet Street Printer", The LIbrary: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society. Accepted and forthcoming. 

"Harris's List Among the Collectors: Bibliophiles and Bookmen" with Amelia Dale, in The Uses of Books in Eighteenth-Century Britain, edited by Leah Orr and Nicholas Seager, Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming 2026.

"'Mind Manners and Rules': Poetry and Sociability in Eighteenth-Century Bath', with Amelia Dale and Claire Knowles, Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Aceepted and Forthcoming.

SUPERVISION SUMMARY

I welcome inquiries from students interested in British literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, novels and other forms of prose writing, periodicals, literary history and historical fiction. I am open ot supervising students participating in a Joint PhD program with one of USYD's partner institutions.

Current PhD Students

Christina King, “Finding Dorothea: the hunt for evidence of the elusive life and contribution of Lady Dorothea Banks 1758-1828” PhD. 

Monica Jarman, “Universals and Particulars: Retellings of Jane Austen’s Novels” PhD. 

Ziyang Zhang, “Archipelagic (Dis)Union between Women and Nation: Female Character Types and Domestic Spatial Tropes in British and Irish Epistolary Novels of 1770s and early 1780s”. PhD. 

Susannah Arthur, “To cultivate minds, improve their intellectuals, and season tender hearts’: Literary, ideological, and pedagogical foundations of Early Modern women writers” PhD 

PhD and MPhil Completions

Danyan Xue, “Imagining China and the Making of English Modernity: the Chinese Taste in English Literature from 1660 to 1750. PhD. 

Hamish Wood, "'Vertue and Decency': The Gendering of Character in Eighteenth-Century English Epistolary Fiction". PhD

Bonnie Ho, "The Animal Unbound: Liminal Bodies, Language and the Contemporary Southern Novel". MPhil. 

Amelia Dale, "'Spots upon the soul': Reading Quixotic Impressions in Eighteenth-Century Quixotic Narratives". PhD. 

Katrina Clifford, "Sisterly Subjects: Brother-sister relationships in female-authored domestic novels, 1750-1820". PhD.