Amy Wells

I completed a BA in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary, University of London, where I developed my interdisciplinary interests and wrote a dissertation on rural flânerie in Thomas Hardy's poetry in comparison with Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. Following this I received an MA in Library Science at City, University of London, writing a comparative thesis on the affective experience of serendipitous information encountering and contradictions of order and disorder in libraries. Wishing to build more bridges between Library Science and English Literature I studied for the MSt in English (1830-1914) at St Hugh's College, Oxford, during which I worked as an RA to Professor Sophie Ratcliffe who is now supervising my CDA. My DPhil research in collaboration with the National Trust, co-supervised by Dr Siân Pooley and Nicola Thwaite, explores playfulness in the development of reading behaviours from childhood to adulthood through the study of nineteenth-century book collections in country houses. By drawing on my comparative and interdisciplinary background I hope to shed light on the seriousness of play's impact in the history of reading, and how 'childishness' is something to be celebrated rather than derogated in literary encounters both at the level of the organisation of books as material objects, and within texts themselves. Alongside my DPhil I am also a Junior Dean at Pembroke College as a part of the decanal team.