All Affiliates
Professor Julia Kuehn
Honorary Professor

Professor Julia Kuehn

MA Bonn, MSt Oxon, PhD London, Habilitation Bamberg

Contact Information

Email

jkuehn@hku.hk

Profile

Julia Kuehn has postgraduate degrees from the Universities of Oxford, Bonn and London, and also completed the Habilitation at the University of Bamberg. Her research interests lie in the literature and culture of the ‘long’ nineteenth century, travel writing (often related to China), as well as literary and critical theory. She has published in international journals including Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Review, Studies in Travel Writing, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Frontiers: A Journal of Women Writing. Julia’s current book projects include a comparative study of nineteenth-century German and British realist prose and a short historical poetics of the travel genre. Essay projects include the treatment of opium as commodity and literary theme between the nineteenth century and twenty-first century, as well as research on the literary tools that help travel writing turn geospaces into imagined spaces.

Julia received the University's Outstanding Teaching Award in 2008 and the Outstanding Young Researcher Award in 2010.

She was a Director (as well as Co-Chair) of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival (2016-22). The latter is an annual event held in Hong Kong over 10 days every autumn, featuring established and emerging writers from around the world. Julia was also a Director of the Asian Literary Prize from 2009-2015; an annual literary award given to the best novel by an Asian writer, either written in English or translated into English. She currently serves as the President of the London-based Victorian Popular Fiction Association and is on the Executive Committee of the Australasian Victorian Studies Association.

She is on the Editorial Board of Global Nineteenth-Century Studies; Journal of Victorian Culture, Victoriographies: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790-1914 and Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction, and on the Advisory Boards of English: Journal of the English Association, The Australasian Journal for Victorian Literature, Coldnoon: Travel Poetics, an International Journal of Travel Writing.

She is a founding member of COEDA, the Coalition of English Departments in Asia which brings together staff and students from Hong Kong University, National University of Singapore, Seoul National University and National Taiwan University, as well as representatives from the University of Tokyo.

Publications

Monographs

A Female Poetics of Empire: From Eliot to Woolf. New York and London: Routledge, 2014. 253 pp.

Glorious Vulgarity: Marie Corelli's Feminine Sublime in a Popular Context. Berlin: Logos, 2004. 268pp.

Marie Corelli und der spätviktorianische Bestseller. Marburg: Tectum, 2001. 184pp.

Edited Collections, Editions and Special Issues

New Directions in Travel Writing Studies. Eds. Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

The Victorians and China. Special Issue. Ed. Julia Kuehn. Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 20:1 (2015).

Diasporic Chineseness after the Rise of China: Community, Culture and Communication. Eds. Julia Kuehn, Kam Louie and David M. Pomfret. Victoria, BC: The University of British Columbia Press, 2013. 256pp.

Beyond Orientalism: Texting the Victorian East. Special Issue. Eds. Julia Kuehn and Tamara Wagner. Critical Survey 21:1 (2009).

China Abroad: Travels, Subjects, Spaces. Eds. Elaine Y.L. Ho and Julia Kuehn. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009. 287 pp.

Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility. Eds. Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst. Routledge Research in Travel Writing 1. New York: Routledge, 2008. 255 pp.

The Sorrows of Satan, by Marie Corelli. Ed. with an Introduction and Notes by Julia Kuehn. Kansas: Valancourt, 2007. 393 pp.

A Century of Travels in China: A Collection of Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940. Eds. Douglas Kerr and Julia Kuehn. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007. 232 pp.

Chapters in Books

‘Before Scenes of Clerical Life: Eliot’s 1854-57 Travelogues as Poetic Practice’, in: Antipodean George Eliot. Eds. Margaret Harris and Matthew Sussman. Forthcoming with Routledge, 2022-23.

‘The Old Curiosity Rock: The First Opium War, Hong Kong and the Travelogues and Fictions of 1837-41’, in: Pacific Gateways: English Literature and the Pacific Ocean, 1760-1914. Eds. Laurence Williams and Tomoe Kumojima. Forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan (2022).

‘Marie Corelli, the Public Sphere and Public Opinion’, in: Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century. Eds. Brenda Ayres and Sarah Meier. London: Anthem, 2019: 61-79. 

‘China’, in: The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing. Ed. Carl Thompson. New York and London: Routledge, 2016: 394-404.

‘Colonial Cosmopolitanism: Constance Cumming and Isabella Bird in Hong Kong, 1878’. New Directions in Travel Writing Studies. Eds. Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

‘China Rising: A View and Review of China’s Diasporas since the 1980s’ (with Kam Louie and David Pomfret), in: Diasporic Chineseness after the Rise of China: Communities and Cultural Production, eds. Julia Kuehn, Kam Louie and David Pomfret. Vancouver, BC: The University of British Columbia Press, 2013: 1-16.

'Exotic Eroticism in the Anglo-Indian Women's Romance, 1880-1920: Moral and Narrative Responsibility', in: Literature and Ethics: Questions of Responsibility in Literary Studies, eds. Daniel Jernigan, Neil Murphy, Brendan Quigley and Tamara Wagner. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2009: 125-48.

'China Abroad: Between Transnation and Translation', in: China Abroad: Travels, Spaces, Subjects, eds. Elaine Ho and Julia Kuehn. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009: 23-41.

'China of the Tourists: Women and the Grand Tour of the Middle Kingdom, 1878-1923', in: Asian Crossings, eds. Steve Clark and Paul Smethurst. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008: 113-130.

'Exoticism in Anglo-Indian Women's Fiction, 1880-1920', in: V ictorian Traffic: Identity, Exchange, Performance, ed. Sue Thomas. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008: 49-69.

'Introduction', in The Sorrows of Satan, by Marie Corelli. Ed. with an Introduction and Notes by Julia Kuehn. Kansas: Valancourt, 2007: vii-xix.

'Introduction' (co-authored with Douglas Kerr), in: A Century of Travels in China: A Collection of Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s, eds. Douglas Kerr and Julia Kuehn. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007: 1-11.

'Encounters with Otherness: Female Travelers in China, 1880-1920', in: A Century of Travels in China: A Collection of Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s, eds. Douglas Kerr and Julia Kuehn. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007: 75-89.

'The Bourgeois Pleasures of a Queen: Late-Victorian Popular Fiction', in: In the Footsteps of Queen Victoria. Ed. Christa Jansohn. Munster: LIT, 2002: 239-259.

Journal Articles – Refereed

‘Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, Constantinople 1869-70 (Part II)’. Forthcoming Victorians Institute Journal 51 (2024). Translation David Possen, Introduction Julia Kuehn.

‘Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, Constantinople 1869-70 (Part I)’. Forthcoming Victorians Institute Journal 50 (2023). Translation David Possen, Introduction Julia Kuehn.

‘George Eliot’s Italian Roads: Mobility, Temporality and the Crises of Realism in Romola and Middlemarch’. Forthcoming Literature & History (2023).

‘Mobilis in Mobili: Notes from Hong Kong’. Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 258.2 (2021): TBC.

‘”All is vanity, nothing is fair: Thackeray on heroism and money’. Orbis Litterarum 76.1 (2021): 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1111/oli.12281

 ‘Journeys to a War, and the Literature of the 1860s and 1870s’. Literature & History 29.1 (2020): 60-77. 

 ‘Vanity Fair in Frau Jenny Treibel: A Comparative Analysis of Thackeray’s and Fontane’s Novels’. Oxford German Studies 48.4 (2019): 453-71. 

‘David Copperfield and the Tradition of the Bildungsroman’. Dickens Quarterly 35:1 (2018): 25-46.

‘Realism’s Connections: George Eliot’s and Fanny Lewald’s Poetics’. George Eliot and George Henry Lewes Studies 68.2 (2016): 91-115.

‘Colonial Cosmopolitanism: Albert Smith and Rudyard Kipling in Hong Kong’. Studies in Travel Writing 19:3 (2015): 1-20.

‘The Victorians and China: Travels with Ships, Ideologies and Literature’. The Victorians and China. Ed. Julia Kuehn. Special issue of Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 20:1 (2015): 1-6.

‘Eulogiseth Marie’: A Critic’s Review of recent Corelli Scholarship’. Literature Compass 9:7 (August 2012). http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2012.00904.x/abstract.

‘One Colonialism, Two Colonialisms: Teaching Heart of Darkness in Hong Kong’. Victorian Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies 38:1 (Spring 2012): 20-25.

‘Visual Hybridity: Margaret Murray Cookesley’s Orientalist Aestheticism’. Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 74 (2011): 169-95.

‘The Voyage Out as Voyage In: Exotic Realism, Romance and Modernism’. Woolf Studies Annual 17 (2011): 126-50.

‘Exotic Harem Paintings: Gender, Documentation, and Imagination’. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 32:2 (2011), pp. 31-63.

‘Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, Egypt 1870’. Victorian Literature and Culture 31:8 (2010): 255-64.
‘Amelia Edwards’s Picturesque Views of Cairo: Touring the Land, Framing the Foreign’. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 5:3 (Winter 2009). www.ncgsjournal.com

'Beyond Orientalism; Texting the Victorian Orient' (co-authored with Tamara S. Wagner). Re-Imagining the Victorian Orient. Special Issue of Critical Survey. Eds. Julia Kuehn and Tamara Wagner. 21:1 (2009): 1-3.

'Exotic Eroticism: Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda'. Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 69 (April 2009): 97-114.

‘Knowing Bodies, Knowing Self: The Western Woman Traveller's Encounter with Chinese Women, Bound Feet, and the Half-Caste Child, 1880-1920'. Studies in Travel Writing 12:3 (Winter 2008): 265-290.

'The Strategies of the Popular Novel: Marie Corelli's Feminine Sublime and the Aesthetic of the Dream'. Journal of Popular Culture 41: 6 (2008): 975-993.

‘Je t'aime, moi non plus: Deconstructing love in Marie Corelli's Open Confession to a Man from a Woman'. Women's Writing 13:2 (June 2006): 225-245.

'When W. Somerset Maugham Met the Missionaries: Sketches from China and Malaya' (in Dutch). Transparant 16:3 (July 2005): 15-19.

'Marie Corelli: "the People's Own Prophetess". Popular Religious Fiction in the Late Nineteenth Century' (in Dutch). Ellips 28 (March 2003): 19-21.

Encyclopaedia Entries

'Novelists, Romantic', in: The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Love, Sex, and Culture. Ed. Susan Mumm. Vol. 5: The Nineteenth Century. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2008: 171-74.

'Marie Corelli's Love Letters to Arthur Severn', 'Corelli's Populist Post-Romantic Aesthetic', 'Corelli's Criticism of Tennyson and Swinburne', 'Corelli's Criticism of her Fellow Novelists', 'Corelli's Criticism of Kipling', 'John Everett Millais's Bubbles and the Commercialization of Art', 'Corelli on the Women's Vote'. The Victorian Web: Literature, History, & Culture in the Age of Victoria. Ed. George P. Landow. <http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/corelli/corelliov.html>.

'Arcadia', 'Hawksmoor', 'Travesties', 'Caryl Phillips' (co-authored with Paul Smethurst). The Literary Encyclopedia and Literary Dictionary. Ed. Robert Clark, Emory Elliott and Janet Todd. <http://www.LiteraryEncyclopedia.com>.

Various translations in Hongkong: Poems/ Gedichte. Eds. Louise Ho and Klaus Stierstorfer. Ed. (translations) Monika Gomille. Tubingen: Stauffenburg, 2006.

Miscellaneous

‘Exoticism in 19th-century Literature’. British Library ‘Discovering Literature’ website.

Plus a number of reviews in international journals including Transparant,
New Passages in Travel Writing: Journal of the International Society for Travel Writers,
Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics,
Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen,
Victoriographies: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790-1914.