By Arts & Humanities news staff

Photo by Alice E. Harvey

October 16, 2025

Josephine McDonagh, Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Chair of the Development of the Novel in English and Distinguished Service Professor, has been elected an International Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. One of only 30 scholars worldwide recognized each year, the honor recognizes research that advances knowledge for public benefit and brings insight to pressing questions of culture, history, and society.

An intellectual leader in 19th-century British literature, McDonagh examines Britain’s global relations and how literature shapes ideas about migration, settlement, and international exchange. Her most recent book, Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815 – 1876 (2021), reveals the active role played by 19th-century novels—by Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, and others—in settler colonial cultures, even shaping the very movement of people across continents. By placing imaginative literature in dialogue with wider print culture—books, magazines, newspapers, and ephemeral migration documents such as pamphlets, timetables, and maps—McDonagh offers a comprehensive model for understanding how technologies of transport, communication, and finance revolutionized the period, and the ways people thought about them.

McDonagh has also authored books on Thomas De Quincey, the so-called “English Opium Eater,” and the novelist George Eliot, and published a wide-ranging cultural history of child murder in 18th- and 19th-century Britain. Across her work, McDonagh analyzes the place of the literary within wider historical and global contexts. She has initiated several international and interdisciplinary collaborations, including a project on culture and commodities in the British colonial world, tracing how local cultures in Asia, Africa, and Europe were transformed by global interactions. Her current research continues to focus on literature and migration, particularly the figure of the migrant child. McDonagh says she is intrigued by the ways that British cultural imaginary is haunted by specters of transnationally displaced children—a haunting that continues today.

 Before joining the University of Chicago in 2017, McDonagh held appointments at King’s College London and the University of Oxford. At UChicago, she serves as Director of the Nicholson Center for British Studies, a hub for interdisciplinary scholarship on the British Isles, its former colonies, and their legacies. She has served on the boards of leading journals, including as an editor of Modern Philology.

“I am thrilled to have been elected to the British Academy as an international fellow,” said McDonagh. “For a British academic now based in Chicago, there is no higher honor in academic life, and I am humbled to be its recipient. I look forward to working with colleagues in the Academy in its work supporting and defending the humanities in Britain and across the world.”   

Read more about the British Academy Fellowship and Josephine McDonagh’s research here: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/fellows/profiles/josephine-mcdonagh-fba/