ProfessorPorscha Fermanis

Porscha Fermanis, MRIA, is professor of Romantic and nineteenth-century literature at University College Dublin. Her research interests lie in the fields of global nineteenth-century studies, British Romanticism, the philosophy of history, the history of emotions, and book history, with a special interest in the literatures of the colonial southern hemisphere and Southeast Asia. Her most recent book is Settler Fiction from the Southern Hemisphere, 1820-1890 (OUP, 2026). 

From 2016-2021, Prof. Fermanis was principal investigator of the European Research Council Starter Grant SouthHem on the literary cultures of nineteenth-century Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, and Malaysia. She is now principal investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant PanAsia (2027-2032), which investigates cooperative cultural endeavours between different ethnic groups across Southeast Asia. Alongside Prof. Omar F. Miranda (U of San Francisco), she is the general series editor of the Bloomsbury Academic book series, The New Nineteenth Century.

Prof. Fermanis is an elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy (2024) and has served on the Executive Committees of the International Australian Studies Association (2021-2025) and the Irish Humanities Alliance (2014-2016). She is currently on the editorial board of ‘Critical Studies in South-South Literary Engagements’ (Edinburgh UP) and ‘Studies in the Global Nineteenth Century’ (Liverpool UP). In 2026, she was the S. W. Brooks Visiting Fellow at the University of Queensland. Originally from Perth (Australia), she is a graduate of the University of Western Australia and the University of Oxford.

Other books by Prof. Fermanis include Romantic Pasts: History, Fiction, and Feeling in Britain, 1790-1850 (Edinburgh UP, 2022); Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere (Palgrave, 2019; with Lara Atkin et al); Romanticism: A Literary and Cultural History (Routledge, 2016; with Carmen Casaliggi); and John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment (Edinburgh UP, 2009). She is also co-editor of Worlding the South: Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern Settler Colonies (Manchester UP, 2021; ed. with Sarah Comyn); and Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770-1845 (Oxford UP, 2014; ed. with John Regan).