Staff profile

Professor Peter Garratt is Head of Department and Chair of the Board of Studies.

Peter's research interests lie mostly in Victorian literature and culture. He is currently finishing vol 2. of Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Philosophy (forthcoming from Routledge, 2024). Other books he has written and edited include Victorian Empiricism (2010); The Cognitive Humanities (2016); and Distributed Cognition in Victorian Culture and Modernism (2020), co-edited with Miranda Anderson and Mark Sprevak. During this time Peter has been the recipient of funding from the British Academy ('Making a Darkness Visible', 2013) and from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for 'Cognitive Futures in the Humanities' (2012-14) and then (as Co-Investigator) 'A History of Distributed Cognition' (2014-18). He has served on the Executive Committee of the British Society for Literature and Science, and has been a peer-reviewer for the AHRC, Carnegie Trust, Leverhulme Trust, and Wellcome Trust.

Peter was part of Durham's multidisciplinary research project 'Hearing the Voice', generously funded by the Wellcome Trust to investigate auditory hallucinations, and he continues to collaborate with colleagues in the Institute for Medical Humanities. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a member of the British Association of Victorian Studies, the North American Victorian Studies Association, and the American Comparative Literature Association, and he has given several international keynote lectures. 

Over the years Peter has taught widely in the Department, from Shakespeare to the Victorians, and supervised 6 PhDs to completion.

Research Grants

• 2014. (Co-I) AHRC standard grant (£600,000)
• 2013. (PI) British Academy small research grant (£6,980)
• 2013. (PI) AHRC collaborative skills development (supervisor) (£1,726)
• 2012-14. (PI) AHRC networking grant (£45,000)

• Victorian fiction
• History of criticism
• Nineteenth-century philosophy and psychology
• Mind, consciousness, cognition

Authored book

• Garratt, P. (2010). Victorian Empiricism: Self, Knowledge and Reality in Ruskin, Bain, Lewes, Spencer and George Eliot. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Chapter in book

• Garratt, P. George Meredith and the Psychology of Style. In A. Viragh, & M. Thain (Eds.), Mind and Embodiment in Late Victorian Literature. Edinburgh University Press
• Garratt, P. Household Ghosts and Personified Presences. In B. Alderson-Day, A. Woods, & C. Fernyhough (Eds.), Voices in Psychosis: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (153-160). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192898388.001.0001
• Garratt, P. (2020). The Victorian Extended Mind: George Eliot, Psychology, and the Bounds of Cognition. In M. Anderson, P. Garratt, & M. Sprevak (Eds.), Distributed Cognition in Victorian Culture and Modernism. Edinburgh University Press
• Garratt, P. (2018). Out of Breath: Respiratory Aesthetics from Ruskin to Vernon Lee. In A. Rose (Ed.), Reading breath in literature (65-90). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99948-7_4
• Garratt, P. (2017). On Entanglings: Disciplines, Materiality and Distributed Cognition. In N. Gardini, A. X. Jacobs, B. Morgan, M.-S. Omri, & M. Reynolds (Eds.), Minding Borders: Resilient Divisions in Literature, the Body and the Academy (150-168). Legenda. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv16km0d5.15
• Garratt, P. (2017). Scientific Literary Criticism. In J. Holmes, & S. Ruston (Eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science (115-127). Routledge
• Garratt, P. (2016). Victorian Literary Aesthetics and Mental Pathology. In A. Whitehead, A. Woods, S. Atkinson, J. Macnaughton, & J. Richards (Eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (428-443). Edinburgh University Press
• Garratt, P. (2016). Cognitive Science and Critical Theory. In S. Sim (Ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Theory (456-473). Edinburgh University Press
• Garratt, P. (2016). The Cognitive Humanities: Whence and Whither?. In P. Garratt (Ed.), The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture (1-15). Palgrave Macmillan
• Garratt, P. (2015). Sublime Transport: Ruskin, Travel and the Art of Speed. In B. Murray, & M. Henes (Eds.), Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form, 1760-1900 (194-212). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543394_10

Edited book

• Garratt, P., & Whiteley, G. (Eds.). Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Philosophy, vol II: 1830-1872. Routledge
• Anderson, M., Garratt, P., & Sprevak, M. (Eds.). (2020). Distributed Cognition in Victorian Culture and Modernism. Edinburgh University Press
• Garratt, P. (Ed.). (2016). The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan

Journal Article

• Garratt, P. (2016). Romantic Refractions: Light Effects in Ruskin's Poetry. Romanticism, 22(3), 279-288. https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2016.0289
• Garratt, P. (2015). Voices and the Imaginative Ear. The Lancet, 386(10010), 2248-2249. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736%2815%2901114-9
• Bloomfield, M., Garratt, P., Mackay, D., Richardson, A., Spector, T., & Temple, K. (2015). Beyond the Gene: Roundtable Discussion. Textual Practice, 29(3), 415-432. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236x.2015.1020094
• Garratt, P. (2012). Moving Worlds: Fictionality and Illusion After Coleridge. Literature Compass, 9(11), 752-763. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2012.00908.x
• Garratt, P. (2012). Death and Variations: North and South and the Work of Adaptation. Gaskell Society journal, 26, 73-87
• Garratt, P. (2009). 'That Old Glasgow Suit': Middlemarch, Scotland and the Universities. George Eliot - George Henry Lewes Studies, 56-57, 49-61
• Garratt, P. (2009). Ruskin's Modern Painters and the Visual Language of Reality. Journal of Victorian Culture, 14(1), 53-71. https://doi.org/10.3366/e1355550209000599

Newspaper/Magazine Article

• Garratt, P. (2014). Hearing voices allowed Charles Dickens to create extraordinary fictional worlds

Other (Print)

• Garratt, P. (2020). Introduction, Last Words: Poetry and Readings, Flame Tree/Simon & Schuster
• Garratt, P. (2019). Foreword, Short Stories from the Age of Queen Victoria, Flame Tree/Simon & Schuster
• Garratt, P. (2019). Introduction, On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, Flame Tree/Simon & Schuster