Catherine Wynne

“Forbear from crossing the moor in those dark hours when the powers of evil are exalted.” — The Hound of the Baskervilles

“The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.” — The Valley of Fear

Catherine Wynne is Reader in Victorian and Early Twentieth-Century Literary and Visual Cultures at the University of Hull, UK. She studied at the National University of Ireland, Galway, University College Dublin (MA, 1993) and the University of Oxford (DPhil, 1999). Her doctoral thesis was on Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker.

Catherine’s most recent major publication is a biography of the Victorian war artist, Lady Butler. Lady Butler: War Artist and Traveller, 1846-1933 (Four Courts Press, 2019) was a recovery project of what the Times, in its review of the book, describes as “one of Britain’s most spectacularly forgotten artists”. Catherine has also published Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage (Palgrave, 2013), Bram Stoker and the Stage: Reviews, Reminiscences, Fictions, 2 vols. (Pickering and Chatto, 2012). Colonial Conan Doyle: British Imperialism, Irish Nationalism and the Gothic was published by Greenwood Press in 2002. She has edited Bram Stoker and the Gothic: Formations to Transformations (Palgrave, 2016) and co-edited (with Sabine Vanacker) Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle: Multimedia Afterlives (Palgrave, 2012). Victorian Literary Mesmerism (Rodopi, 2006), which she co-edited with Martin Willis, features her work on Conan Doyle and spiritualism. She published a joint edition of two lesser-known Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker stories, The Parasite and The Watter’s Mou’, with Valancourt Press in 2009. The two stories had originally appeared as volumes one and two in Archibald Constable’s Acme Library Series (1894). She has also published essays and journal articles on Conan Doyle and boxing, the fictional afterlives of Holmes and Conan Doyle, war trauma in Conan Doyle, and psychic photography.

In 2009 she co-organized (with Sabine Vanacker) a conference on the afterlives of Holmes and Conan Doyle. She was guest expert on ‘Arthur Conan Doyle: The Man Behind Sherlock Holmes’, for ‘The Forum’ with Bridget Kendall on the BBC World Service (2017). She contributes articles to the journal of the Sherlock Holmes Society of Canada. During the UK Covid lockdown she delivered online ‘Alumni Materclasses’ at the University of Hull on ‘The Speckled Band’ (Gothic Meets Detection) and ‘Sherlock Holmes and the City’.

Her research has been funded by the British Academy, the Marc Fitch Foundation, the British Society for Theatre Research and various societies and trusts. At the University of Hull she leads the National Research Exercise Framework (REF) for English Language and Literature. She sits on the editorial board of Palgrave Gothic.

She is currently editing The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for Oxford University Press (World Classics) under the general editorship of Darryl Jones.