Dr Sophie Franklin

Dr Sophie Franklin is a DOROTHY MSCA COFUND postdoctoral researcher in the English Literature departments at University College Dublin and the University of Reading (UK). She specialises in nineteenth-century literature and culture with specific expertise in representations of violence, the Brontës, and afterlives. More broadly, she is interested in the shifting understandings, perceptions, and depictions of violence throughout history, particularly how people write (about) violence. She has taught at several institutions in the UK and Germany, including LMU Munich, the University of Tübingen, Nottingham Trent University, and Newcastle University. She is currently an Associate Editor for the international Brontë Studies journal.

In 2019, Sophie received her PhD from Durham University, which considered the literary violences of Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë’s work in order to establish a genealogy between their fiction, conflicted nineteenth-century understandings of violence, and the cultural legacies of violence in recent artwork and adaptations inspired by their prose. Sophie’s first monograph, Violence and the Brontës: Language, Reception, Afterlives, is based on her thesis and was published with Edinburgh University Press in September 2025, as part of their ‘Nineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures’ series. 

Her latest project, funded through the DOROTHY COFUND programme, traces the “violence as contagious” narrative to the nineteenth century, to establish a clearer historicisation of the phenomenon of treating violence as a disease and to demonstrate how literary strategies can contribute to the ongoing global implementation of public health approaches to violence. Building on Ivan Perry’s (2009) public health theory of violence, the project offers an original literary approach to historical and ongoing conceptualisations of violence and health, specifically by illuminating the expansive possibilities and potential limitations of the “violence as contagious” narrative. In 2022, she was awarded a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Glasgow Library to explore the narrative strategies of representing intimate violence in relation to disease and health in nineteenth-century literary and scientific texts.

She has also been involved in several other projects. With Dr Claire O’Callaghan (Loughborough University), she co-edited a special issue of Brontë Studies (2019) on ideas of coarseness in relation to the Brontë family, which stemmed from their co-organisation of the official Brontë Society conference in 2017 during Branwell Brontë’s bicentenary. Alongside Dr Arya Thampuran (Durham University), Dr Hannah Piercy (University of Bern), and Dr Rebecca White (Durham University), she co-edited an essay collection, Consent: Legacies, Representations, and Frameworks for the Future, published with Routledge in 2023. In 2025, she also co-founded, alongside Dr Lara Ehrenfried (LMU Munich) and Dr Nikolina Hatton (LMU Munich), the Women Writing Violence Network. 

Sophie’s first book, Charlotte Brontë Revisited: A View from the Twenty-First Century (Saraband), was published in 2016 and reissued with new material in 2018, and considers the ongoing legacy of Charlotte Brontë’s work and life from a contemporary perspective. She has spoken regularly at book festivals and international events on the Brontë family.