Dr Katherine Inglis
Sabbatical Fellow, January - April 2026
Home Institution: University of Edinburgh
Dr Inglis is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the School of Literature, Languages & Cultures, based in the Department of English and Scottish Literature. Her recent work explores the censorship of printed literature: “Skim, Quote, List” (2024) examines book challenger reading protocols and tactics in the modern United States, and she is the author, with Matthew Fellion, of Censored: A Literary History of Subversion & Control (British Library Publishing; McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017). Her research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century British literature and the medical humanities.
Project title: Obscene Quotation
Building on my recent work on book challenger reading practices and the revival of old ideas of literary obscenity in the present-day United Status, my focus in this project is the use and abuse of quotations at key junctures in the development of Victorian and modern ideas of obscenity, from the formulation of the ‘Hicklin test’ of obscenity in 1868 to the so-called ‘end of obscenity’ in the 1960s. During my IASH fellowship I will analyse Victorian obscenity cases involving anthologies, or compilations of quotations, that proved critical in their contributions to twentieth-century Anglo-American obscenity law. I will explore the abortive free speech movement that agitated in support of a mid-Victorian anti-Catholic pamphlet’s distributors and the curious history of an anti-censorship anthology that was indicted for obscenity, then pirated and republished as erotica. How do now-standard literary critical ideas of the relation of the literary part to the whole develop alongside and in resistance to legal protocols for evaluating obscene texts, in which the quote taken out of context can be treated as a fair proxy for the original text, or even a text in itself? Understanding the fraught status of the quotation in Victorian and early twentieth-century obscenity proceedings illuminates what is at stake in the present moment’s reconfiguration of standards of literary obscenity: how stable is the convention that a potentially obscene text should be judged as a whole?