Dr Octavia Cox

Profile details

 

Departmental Lecturer in Lifelong Learning (English Literature)

Biography

Dr Octavia Cox is a Departmental Lecturer in Lifelong Learning (English Literature), specialising in the literature of the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She holds an Undergraduate MA in English and Philosophy from the University of St Andrews, followed by an MA with Distinction in Romantic and Victorian Literary Studies from Durham University. She completed her DPhil from the University of Oxford on "Pope’s Poetic Legacy, 1744-1830."

With over a decade of experience, Octavia has taught a wide range of students, including those in open access, undergraduate, and postgraduate courses. She has taught at the Department for Continuing Education, various University of Oxford colleges, Middlebury College, University of Nottingham and elsewhere. Her academic contributions include several peer-reviewed articles and chapters, reflecting her deep engagement with literary scholarship.

You can find her online video lectures on classic literature and literary analysis on her YouTube channel, @DrOctaviaCox.

Research Interests 

  • Literary self-consciousness, including intertextuality, metatextuality, and paratextuality
  • Literary inheritances and legacies, canonicity and counter-canonicity
  • Women’s writing

Publications

  • ‘Reforming Taste through Pope’s “celebrated moonlight scene”: Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth’s A Night-Piece’, Romanticism 29.1 (April 2023), pp.56-67.
  • ‘“& Not the Least Wit”: Jane Austen’s Use of ‘Wit’, Humanities 11.6 (2022), article 132.
  • ‘“I am disappointed with England”: Reverse-Robinsonades, and the Transatlantic Woman as Social Critic in The Woman of Colour (1808)’, Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688-1843, ed. Misty Krueger (Bucknell University Press, 2021), pp.144-66.
  • ‘Historicising Keats’s Opium Imagery through Neoclassical Medical and Literary Discourses’, Psychopharmacology and British Literature: 1650 to 1900, eds. Natalie Roxburgh and Jennifer Henke (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp.23-46.
  • ‘The Lady’s Poetical Magazine (1781-82) and the Fashioning of Women’s Literary Space’, Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820s, eds. Jennie Batchelor and Manushag Powell (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp.129-48.