Dr Sara Lyons

About

Dr Sara Lyons specialises in nineteenth-century literature and culture, with particular interests in aestheticism, decadence, and the culture of the fin de siècle; religion, secularism, and debates over the concept of secularisation; education; science, especially psychology, evolutionary science, and eugenics; and feminism and women’s writing.  
  
Sara’s most recent monograph is Assessing Intelligence: the Bildungsroman and the Politics of Human Potential in England, 1860-1910 (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). The book traces the Victorian genealogy of the modern concept of IQ and the phenomenon of the intelligence test. It examines how five novelists – George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, HG Wells and Virginia Woolf – used the bildungsroman to wrestle with the moral and political implications of the IQ model of intelligence. The monograph is an outgrowth of an AHRC Early Career research grant entitled Literary Culture, Meritocracy, and the Assessment of Intelligence in Britain and the United States, 1880-1920. Sara was the Principal Investigator on the project, which ran between 2017 and 2019. 
  
Sara is currently at work on a new project provisionally entitled Awful Knowledge: Anthropology, Feminism, and the Literary Imagination, 1870-1920. This project explores the impact of anthropological theory on the development of feminist thought and literature in English from the Victorian period into modernism. It focusses on the fact that feminist writers of this period often felt compelled to speculate about the prehistoric origins of patriarchy. The project considers the representational and conceptual challenges posed by this desire to understand deep origins. More broadly, it examines the intersection between feminism and primitivism in women’s writing.   
  
Sara also maintains a strong interest in the research areas associated with her first monograph Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walter Pater: Victorian Aestheticism, Doubt, and Secularisation (Legenda, 2015): Victorian poetry and critical prose; aestheticism and decadence; and both modern and nineteenth-century debates over the concept of secularisation. She would be glad to hear from potential MA or PhD students who are interested in working on projects related to any of her research interests.