Publications:
In preparation
Forming Empathy: Psychology, Aesthetics, Ethics, 1870-1920 [2012-13 Leverhulme Research Fellowship awarded to begin this research] Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labour (University of Edinburgh Press) New scholarly editionRecent publications
- ‘Sympathy – Antipathy in Daniel Deronda’, ‘George Eliot 18-19-2019 in 19’, special bicentennial issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 29 [forthcoming]
- ‘Vernon Lee’, Encyclopedia of Victorian Women Writers, ed Lesa Scholl (Palgrave Macmillan) [forthcoming]
- ‘Sympathy’, in Palgrave History of British Women’s Writing, 1830-1880, vol 6,ed. Lucy Hartley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 320-335
- ‘Walter Pater and Vernon Lee’, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism, 2 (Autumn 2016), 31-42
- ‘Emotions’, The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, ed. Juliet John (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 580-97
- ‘Olive Schreiner’, The Oxford History of the Novel in English: The World Novel to 1950, vol. 9, eds. Ralph Crane, Jane Stafford and Mark Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 345-358
- ‘Modernity, the Occult, and Psychoanalysis’, Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis eds Laura Marcus and Ankhi Mukherjee (Blackwell, 2014), pp. 49-65
- Olive Schreiner, Writers and their Work (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2013)
Editorial work
General Editor, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century https://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/Keynote /selected invited lectures
- Feb. 2020, ‘Social Darwin: hope, fear and modernity’, The Darwin Memorial Lecture 2020, Shrewsbury
- May 2019, ‘Being Moved: Bodies, Minds, Lines’, Keynote speaker at Vernon Lee 2019: An Anniversary Conference, British Institute of Florence /Il Palmerino, Maiano, Florence
- May 2018, ‘Sympathy Limits in Daniel Deronda’, Science, Medicine and Culture in the Nineteenth Century seminar, St Anne’s, University of Oxford
- August 2017, ‘Aesthetic Empathy, Group Psychology and World War: Vernon Lee’s Decadence’, Keynote speaker at Endgames and Emotions: the Sense of Ending in Modern Literature and Art, Universities of Tallinn, Estonia and Helsinki, Finland
- April 2017, ‘Woman and Labour: 1901’, Editing the Nineteenth Century, University of St Andrews
Public engagement
‘Experimenting in the Galleries / Working with Vernon Lee’ at https://experimentingwithvernonlee.com/
Luisa Calè works on Romantic period literature and visual culture; the emergence of museums and exhibitions; the intersections between reading, collecting and the history of the book, and critical disciplinarity. She has published Henry Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: ‘Turning Readers into Spectators’ (2006), Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts (2007, co-edited), Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Culture (2010, co-edited), a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies on ‘The Disorder of Things’ (2011, co-edited), and two issues of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth-Century. Her current book project, entitled ‘The Book Unbound’, explores practices of reading, collecting, and dismantling the book. She is also involved in experiments in durational and interval reading, which explore the potential of digital platforms and social media. She set up the Our Mutual Friend Reading Project, and worked with the MFA Theatre Directing at Birkbeck on an adaptation of William Blake’s The Four Zoas, which she describes in ‘Blake’s Dream: A Dramaturgical Experiment’.
Current Projects: Monograph
The Book Unbound (monograph on the material culture of books, ca. 1750-1850, with chapters on Walpole, Blake, and Dickens)
Current Projects: Edited Collections
- ‘Literature and Sculpture at the Fin de Siècle’, Word and Image, guest co-edited with Stefano Evangelista (deadline for submission winter 2015)
- 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 21 (2015), anniversary issue on The Digital Nineteenth-Century Archive, co-edited with Ana Parejo Vadillo.
- ‘A Romantic Gallery of Old Master Paintings: Spenser’s Faerie Queene 1833-44’, La Questione Romantica, special issue on Romantic Victorians, edited by Stefano Evangelista and Carlotta Farese (2013).
- ‘A Gallery in the Mind’? William Hazlitt, Edmund Spenser and the Old Masters’, Tate Papers (Autumn 2015), Special Issue on William Hazlitt’s Art Criticism
- ‘In the Cloud: Nineteenth-Century Visions and Experiments for the Digital Age’, co-authored with Ana Parejo Vadillo, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 21 (2015)
- ‘Blake, Young, and the Poetics of the Composite Page’, Huntington Library Quarterly, special issue on Blake’s Manuscripts edited by Mark Crosby (forthcoming)
- ‘Extra-Illustrations: The Orders of the Book and the Fantasia of the Library’, in Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences, ed. by Adriana Craciun and Simon Schaffer (Palgrave, 2016)
- ‘Extra-Illustration and Ephemera: Altered Books and the Alternative Forms of the Fugitive Page’, Eighteenth-Century Life (submission 2015, published 2016), special issue on literary ephemera edited by Sandro Jung
- ‘Historic Doubts, Conjectures, and the Wanderings of a Principal Curiosity: Henry VII in the Fabric of Strawberry Hill’, Word and Image, special issue on ‘Mediating History’s Materiality, 1700-1900’ (deadline for submission: Winter 2015)
- ‘“A Bright Erroneous Dream’: The Shelley Memorial and the Hermaphroditic Body of the Poet’, Word and Image, co-authored with Stefano Evangelista, special issue on ‘Literature and Sculpture at the Fin de Siècle’ (deadline: Winter 2015)
- ‘The Reception of Blake in Italy’, in The Reception of William Blake in Europe, 2 vols ed. by Morton Paley and Sibylle Erle (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2017)
- ‘Blake’s Bestiary: Pseudomorphosis, Remediation, and Monstrous Sights in Dante’s Commedia’, in Beastly Blake, ed. by Helen Bruder and Tristanne Connolly (abstract accepted; book proposal in progress)
- ‘Illustration’, in William Blake in Context, ed. Sarah Haggarty (Cambridge: CUP, forthcoming)
- The Disorder of Things, an international series of six events, 2009-2011
- Romanticism at the Fin de Siècle, Oxford, 14-15 June 2013
- Blake, The Flaxmans, and Romantic Sociability, Birkbeck, 18-19 July 2014
- Blake Apprentice and Master, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 23 January 2015
- Literature and Sculpture at the Fin de Siècle, Tate Britain, 23 March 2015
- ‘Hazlitt, Spenser and the Old Masters’, The National Gallery, 28 November 2014
- ‘Blake and the House of Death’, Blake Apprentice and Master, Ashmolean Museum, 23 January 2015
- ‘The Hours: The Public and Private Histories of a Commonplace’, Romantic Illustration Network, no 5, Tate Britain, 27 February 2015, podcast
- ‘Book Disorders: Composite Forms and the Alternative Possibilities of the Disbound Page’, Harvard University, 14 May 2015
- ‘Blake’s Visions of Hell: Monstrous Sights and Pseudomorphoses in Dante’s Commedia’, From Hogarth to Hellboy: the Transformation of the Visual Reader, London, Senate House, 16 December 2015

- ‘Vasari’s Lives and the Victorians’. The Ashgate Research Companion to Giorgio Vasari, ed. David J. Cast. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, pp.277-93.
- Russian translation of ‘The Language of Touch in Victorian Art Criticism’. New Literary Observer 125, 1 (2014), pp.43-56.
- ‘Art and the Literary’. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, ed. Juliet John. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015
- ‘Italy and Victorian Literature’. The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, ed. Dino F. Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert and Linda K. Hughes. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015
- ‘The Language of Mourning in Fin-de-Siècle Sculpture’. Word and Image (2015)
- Research Forum on ‘Women and the Culture of Connoisseurship’ at the University of Sussex (1-2 July, 2015)
- Symposium on ‘Sculpture and Literature at the Fin de Siècle’ at Tate Britain (27 March, 2015)
- The Sally Ledger Memorial Lecture at Birkbeck, University of London (16 July, 2015).



- ‘Walter Pater and Michael Field: The Correspondence, with Other Unpublished Manuscripts Materials’, Pater Newsletter, Spring Issue (no. 64) 2015.
- ‘Generational Difference in To the Lighthouse’. Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Ed. By Allison Pease. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. 122-135. [On Virginia Woolf, Alice Meynell and generational differences through fin-de-siècle fashion]
- ‘ “Gay Strangers”: Reflections on Decadence and the Decadent Poetics of A. Mary F. Robinson.’ Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens 78 (2014). Special Issue on Emprunts et empreintes de la langue étrangère dans la littérature victorienne et édouardienne. Ed. Emily Eells. Open acess: http://cve.revues.org/856
- ‘Another Renaissance: The Decadent Poetic Drama of A.C. Swinburne and Michael Field’ in Jason Hall and Alex Murray, eds., Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. 116-140.
- ‘Cosmopolitan Aestheticism: The Affective “Italian” Ethics of A. Mary F. Robinson’ in Comparative Critical Studies, 10.2 (June 2013), special issue on Fin-de-Siècle Cosmopolitanism, eds. Stefano Evangelista and Richard Hibbitt. Open acess: http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/ccs.2013.0086
- ‘Living Art: Michael Field, Aestheticism and Dress’ in Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski , eds., Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century. Artistry and Industry in Britain. Aldershot: Ashgate, October 2013. 243-271.
- Michael Field, Dramatic Poet, Institute of English Studies, Senate House