Biography

Michelle Witen obtained her DPhil from the University of Oxford. She also holds a MA in Comparative Literature and a Scholars' Electives Honours BA in English and Comparative Literature, both from the University of Western Ontario. She has also worked at the University of Basel as an Oberassistentin and held Visiting Fellow positions at Exeter College (2016) and Merton College (2024), both at the University of Oxford.

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. Her other publications include articles and book chapters on The Story of Brexit, Darby O'Gill and the Little People, Frankenstein, modernism and music, Lewis Carroll, T. S. Eliot,  the non-human, and multiple publications on various aspects of James Joyce's works. She has also co-edited a volume on Shakespeare and Space: Theatrical Explorations of the Spatial Paradigm (Houndmills: Palgrave 2016, w Ina Habermann ), the special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly on "Joyce and the Non-Human" (w Katherine Ebury), and the edited collection, Modernism in Wonderland (Bloomsbury 2024, w John Morgenstern).

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, with case studies on L. T. Meade, Annie S. Swan, Annie E. Holdsworth, A. C. Doyle, and Bram Stoker.