Mary L. Shannon

Research activity per year

Qualifications

PhD (King's College London), MA (King's College London), PGCE (Institute of Education), BA (Hons) (Cambridge)

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy; Fellow of the Royal Historical Society

Research interests

I am a cultural historian, writer, and broadcaster. I research and write about Regency and Victorian popular culture, fiction, plays, images, and the press. I'm fascinated by the cultural world of nineteenth-century London and its teeming history: the places, the people, and the streets. My latest book is a biography of 1820s African-American London busker Billy Waters, Billy Waters is Dancing: Or, How A Black Sailor Found Fame In Regency and Victorian Britain (Yale 2024). This work is funded by grants from the Leverhulme Trust and the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. I speak on the Radio and TV about nineteenth-century culture and I do historical consultancy work.

Together with Dr Alex Bubb (Roehampton) and Dr Briony Wickes (Royal Holloway) I co-convene the London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar at the Institue of English Studies, Senate House, University of London.

Latest media:

BBC Radio 3/BBC Sounds 'Busking and Billy Waters': https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0fb2ppm

Famous People You've Never Heard Of podcast: https://tinyurl.com/y7xjtyrm

Billy Waters FREE KS3 teaching resources:

https://ageofrevolution.org/home/billy-waters/

I'm always delighted to hear from students wishing to pursue PhDs in any of these areas:

periodicals, popular culture and book history
cultural geography and literary London
nineteenth-century Black British history
nineteenth-century print culture and visual culture
Victorian drama and theatre
nineteenth-century literature including Charles Dickens and G.W.M. Reynolds
nineteenth-century adventure fiction

Research projects

Nov. 2024 - Jan 2026: Susanna Wesley Foundation Grant

'Assessing Research Impact Through the Life of Billy Waters - Phase 2'

Jan 2024- December 2024: 'Songs From the Shadows: Billy Waters' (in collab. with University of Kent Impact Accelerator Scheme)

Jan. 2022 - April 2023: Leverhulme Research Fellowship

‘The Celebrated Billy Waters and the circulation of popular culture 1800-1860’

Sept. 2021 - Dec. 2021: Linda H. Peterson Fellow, Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

https://www.roehampton.ac.uk/humanities-and-social-sciences/news/research-latest-dr-mary-shannon-wins-second-prestigious-research-award-in-three-months/

‘Billy Waters, Periodicals, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture’

Upcoming projects:

Adventures in Ageing (under development)

I was awarded the 2016 Colby Prize for my monograph, 'Dickens, Reynolds and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street'.

Consultancy work

Research Consultant to nineteenth-century historical fiction writers:

Anthony Horowitz, Moriarty (Orion: 2014) and Foyle’s War, Eleventh Hour Films;
Sam Christer House of Smoke (Sphere: 2015);
Jess Kidd, Things in Jars (Canongate: 2019)