Biography

Michelle Witen obtained her DPhil from the University of Oxford, where she was also a Visiting Fellow in 2016, and holds an MA in Comparative Literature as well as a Scholars' Electives Honours BA in English and Comparative Literature from the University of Western Ontario. She has also worked at the University of Basel as an Oberassistentin.

Her monograph, James Joyce and Absolute Music (London: Bloomsbury 2018) appeared in paperback in 2019, and examines Joyce's incorporation of musical structure across his opus. Other publications include articles and book chapters on The Story of Brexit, Darby O'Gill and the Little People, Frankenstein, and T. S. Eliot alongside multiple publications on James Joyce. She has also co-edited a volume on Shakespeare and Space: Theatrical Explorations of the Spatial Paradigm (Houndmills: Palgrave 2016), the special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly on "Joyce and the Non-Human," and a forthcoming collection on Modernism in Wonderland (Bloomsbury 2022).

Her current research interests include 19th- and 20th-century British and Irish Literature, particularly within the contexts of music, interdisciplinarity, intermediality, and genetic criticism. Her second book focuses on 19th-century periodicals from 1850 onwards in the fiction of Thomas De Quincey, A. C. Doyle, Wilkie Collins, and Bram Stoker.