Professor Catherine Waters

Cathy Waters (MA (Hons), DipEd Macquarie U, PhD USyd.) taught in Australia at the University of New England and the University of Sydney before coming to Kent in 2009. 

Cathy's research interests lie in Victorian literature and culture, with a particular focus on the writing of Dickens, the journalism of George A. Sala, and nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers. She has written Dickens and the Politics of the Family (Cambridge University Press 1997; rpt 2005) and Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Ashgate 2008, winner of the 2009 Robert Colby Prize by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals ) and Special Correspondence and the Newspaper Press in Victorian Print Culture, 1850-1886 (Palgrave Macmillan 2019). The latter monograph is based upon research from her AHRC Project investigating the writing of the first generation of Victorian special correspondents, from which she has also published a database, Journalism on the move: Victorian Specials Database, and curated an online exhibition with Ruth Brimacombe: Picturing the News: The Art of Victorian Graphic Journalism. She has co-edited several essay collections, including most recently The Oxford Handbook for Charles Dickens with Robert L. Patten and John O. Jordan (Oxford 2018). 

Catherine Waters is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Dickens Journals Online project , the Dickens Quarterly and of Victorian Periodicals Review.