Lucy Hartley is Professor of English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She was born and educated in the United Kingdom, and received a BA (Hons) from the University of Oxford and a D.Phil. from the University of York. After teaching at the University of Southampton for eleven years, she joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 2006.
She specializes in nineteenth-century literature and culture, and her work contributes to both the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Britain and the broad interdisciplinary project of understanding the social transformations of modernity. She is the author of two monographs, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (2001/2006), and Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Art and the Politics of Public Life (2017/2019), and the editor of The History of British Women’s Writing 1830-1880 (2018). She is currently working on a third monograph, Poverty and Progress: The Whitechapel Project of Henrietta and Samuel Barnett.