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 book on the 1820s African-American London busker Billy Waters, Billy Waters is Dancing: Or, How A Black Sailor Found Fame In Regency and Victorian Britain will be published by Yale in late 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.

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 teaching resource:

https://teachingtransatlanticism.tcu.edu/sample-page/books/digital-anthology/travel-and-tourism/william-thomas-moncrieff-1794-1857-act-2-scene-6-tom-and-jerry-or-life-in-london-cumberlands-british-theatre-vol-33-london-john-cumberland-n-d/

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)