Ben Moore joined the UvA in 2017 as Assistant Professor in English Literature. Previously he taught at Cardiff University (2015-16) and the University of Manchester (2011-15), where he also completed his BA (2007), MA (2010) and PhD (2014). His research has focused mainly on modernity, cities, vision, space and architecture in the nineteenth century. This work has led to a monograph, Invisible Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Rethinking Urban Modernity, which will be published by Edinburgh University Press. He has published articles and book chapters on Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Kingsley, Margaret Oliphant, Victorian childhood, Rem Koolhaas, and Walter Benjamin, among other topics.
Dr Moore's next major project is provisionally titled Spatialising Money in Modern Literature and Culture: 1821 to the Present. It will look at the interaction between money and space in authors including Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Margaret Oliphant. It examines the role of specific locations in disrupting, suspending or bypassing the 'normal' processes of economic circulation. Such locations include the pawnbroker's shop, the debtors' prison, the bank in crisis and the European spa town. Conceptually, this project examines the relations between the symbolic and allegorical sides of money, in Walter Benjamin's sense of allegory as fractured, broken and incomplete, as opposed to the fullness of meaning associated with the Romantic symbol. The project aims to extend this interest into reading the cultural role of money and value in contemporary society. A recent (2021) article on surplus in the novel Hester is the first outcome of this work.
A third interest is in re-reading discourses of biology and the human in nineteenth-century literature, in light of recent debates around the Anthropocene. Dr Moore is developing this work under the title Human Tissue: Ambiguous Anthropocentrism in the Realist Novel, 1850-1895.
Dr Moore is Reviews Editor and an editorial board member for the Gaskell Journal, and a former editor of the Everyday Analysis collective. He co-convenes an annual ASCA reading group on Politics and Aesthetics in Critical Theory (details here).
Current or potential students interested in supervision possibilities are always welcome to get in touch.
In 2021-22 Dr Moore is co-ordinator for the BA English core courses Texts in Focus 1 and English Literature 3: The Long Nineteenth Century and the elective course Authors in Focus: Nineteenth Century, which this year is on "Charles Dickens and the Making of the Modern Age". He also teaches on the MA Thesis Seminar course and contributes lectures to the BA courses English Literature 1 and Literature, Empire and the Postcolonial World.
He is Chair of the BA English Programme Committee (opleidingscommissie) and the UvA's Harting Programme representative.