Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott

Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott recently completed her PhD at the University of Portsmouth on Victorian magician autobiographies and fictional representations of conjuring in 19th-century literature. She has most recently published on illusions in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance and Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, and previously on the lesser-known novel Conjurer Dick by Angelo Lewis.

In 2018, she completed a research placement at the British Library on the ‘In the Spotlight: Playbills in Context’ project. Her other research interests include occulture, Romanticism and contemporary Japanese literature, which she currently teaches at CityLit. She has been awarded a JSPS short-term postdoctoral fellowship at Waseda University in Tokyo for 2022.