Professor Catherine Wynne - Inaugural Lecture

What connects Dracula and Sherlock Holmes to the Victorian stage, the Battle of Waterloo, the paintings of Lady Butler, and the landscapes of Egypt and Whitby? This Inaugural Lecture explores the intersecting cultural worlds of Bram Stoker and Arthur Conan Doyle, two of the most iconic writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the networks of literature, theatre, art, politics, war and empire through which their work emerged.

Born in Dublin in 1847, during the worst year of the Irish Famine, Stoker experienced a serious and undiagnosed illness in childhood. He would become enduringly associated with the Gothic world of Dracula, but his fictional imagination was also shaped by his schooling in theatre. As manager for London's Lyceum Theatre, working closely with the celebrated actor-manager Henry Irving, Stoker was immersed in a world of performance. Shakespearean production and melodrama helped shaped the fictional visions that would find their most famous expression in Dracula.

In 1894, these worlds intersected directly when Stoker was sent a play by Arthur Conan Doyle, already famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Stoker encouraged Irving to produce A Story of Waterloo and to perform its central role, an aging soldier looking back on the Battle of Waterloo. In this encounter, literature meets theatre, fiction meets performance, and the history of war becomes cultural memory. A decade younger than Stoker, Conan Doyle had left medicine to become a full-time writer, as well as a social and political commentator.

Drawing together Professor Catherine Wynne's research and publications, the lecture follows these connections across cultural forms and geographical spaces. From Stoker and Conan Doyle's theatrical worlds, it moves to landscapes of war through the paintings of Lady Butler, and to the broader configurations of empire and colony that shaped the culture of the period. Its journey continues to ancient and contemporary Egypt and, finally, to Professor Wynne's recent work on Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, and on Bram Stoker in Whitby.

Spanning literature, theatre and visual culture, the lecture brings together the strands of a research career concerned with the ways writers and artists encounter, interpret and remake the worlds around them. In following those connections across people, places and cultural forms, it asks how cultural worlds are created and why, more than a century later, we continue to inhabit them.

About Professor Catherine Wynne

Professor Catherine Wynne studied at the University of Galway, University College Dublin for her MA and completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford. Catherine is currently the Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise in the Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences and Education, teaching undergraduates and supervising PhD students in the School of Humanities.

Catherine's research and publications cut across Victorian and post-nineteenth century literature and visual cultures to the contemporary, with particular focus on the Gothic, war art and memoir, Victorian theatre, travel writing and colony and empire.

She has published monographs on Bram Stoker (Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage) and Arthur Conan Doyle (The Colonial Conan Doyle) and a biography of Victorian Britain's leading war artist, Lady Butler (Lady Butler: War Artist and Traveller, 1846-1933). Catherine has also edited and co-edited books on Stoker's theatrical writings, Bram Stoker and the Gothic, the afterlives of Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, Victorian mesmerism, and two novellas by Conan Doyle and Stoker. She has also published numerous journal articles and book chapters which focus on the nineteenth century to the contemporary.

Catherine's research has been funded by the British Council, British Academy (Stoker and Butler), the Marc Fitch Fund (Butler), Society for Theatre Research (Stoker), Royal Society of Edinburgh (Conan Doyle), City of Culture Fund, Hull and East Yorkshire Charitable Trust and others.