Supporting Postgraduates and Early Career Researchers has always been an important part of the remit of the British Association for Romantic Studies. As such, we are thrilled to announce the appointment of a PGR representative and two ECR representatives to the BARS Executive for the period 2026-2028.
Welcome to Emma Butler (Edge Hill University), who will take the position of PGR representative. Emma will represent our Postgraduate members and students in the field more generally.
Emma is a current PhD researcher at Edge Hill University working on her thesis, ‘From Health to Leisure: The Seaside in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination’. Emma’s research interests span the Romantic and Victorian period and include Jane Austen, seaside literature, disability studies/health humanities, and the Gothic. She was the 2025 BARS Chawton House Visiting Fellow, where she spent a month engrossed in obscure novels set in coastal spaces.
We also welcome Dr Laura Brook (University of Edinburgh) and Dr Serena Qihui Pei (University College London), as ECR representatives. Laura and Serena will represent our early career members and early career researchers in the field more broadly.
Laura Brook holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh. Her research centres on the representation of early nineteenth-century patienthood in the life and works of John Keats, with a particular focus on medicine ‘from below’. Laura’s other research interests include disability studies, medical periodicals, and the history of anatomy.
Serena Qihui Pei is currently a Teaching Assistant at University College London, where she completed her PhD in English and Comparative Literature in 2025. Her research focuses on the intersections of British Romanticism, Chinese philosophy, Sino-British cultural exchange during the 18th and 19th centuries, and the environmental humanities. Her peer-reviewed articles and book reviews have appeared in The Coleridge Bulletin, the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and The Charles Lamb Bulletin, as well as in the edited collection Non-Western Approaches in Environmental Humanities (Göttingen: Brill|V&R unipress, 2025). Her research has received support and recognition through the Stephen Copley Research Award and funding from BARS, the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, the Friends of Coleridge, and the Charles Lamb Society. She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA) and was recently elected an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (RHS).
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Thank you to all who applied for these roles – competition was fierce. Thank you too to our outgoing PGR representatives Kate Nankervis and Zooey Ziller, for their hard work over the past two years. A huge thanks also to our outgoing ECR representative Dr Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman for her diligence and commitment to BARS during her terms as PGR and ECR representative – we’ll miss you all!
BARS Executive
23/07/26