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 the monograph Invisible Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Rethinking Urban Modernity (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). He has also written articles and book chapters on Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Kingsley, Margaret Oliphant, Victorian childhood, Rem Koolhaas, the uncanny in literature, and Walter Benjamin, among other topics.

Ben is also interested in re-reading discourses of biology and the human in nineteenth-century literature, in light of recent debates around the Anthropocene. He published a short book on this topic, Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850-1895 (Palgrave) in 2023. 

His next major project is provisionally titled Spatialising Money in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. 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. An article on surplus in Oliphant's novel Hester (2021) and a book chapter on money and representation in Dickens and Gissing (2022) are the first outcomes of this work. 

Ben is Co-Editor of the Gaskell Journal, and a Trustee of the Dickens Society. For several years he has co-convened an ASCA reading group on Politics and Aesthetics in Critical Theory (details here), which culminated in a symposium on 'Troubling Universalisms' in June 2023.

Current PhD supervision topics include death in Victorian literature, pychoanalysis and horror cinema, Walter Benjamin and weather, and heterotopias in British and Chinese women writers from the 1920s-1960s. Students interested in supervision possibilities are welcome to get in touch.

In 2023-24 Dr Moore is co-ordinator for the BA English core course English Literature 4: The Nineteenth Century. He also teaches on the MA Critical Debates in English Studies course and contributes to the BA course English Literature 1. 

He is Co-Programme Director for BA English Language and Culture, and the UvA's Harting Programme representative.