Katerina Garcia-Walsh

Katerina is an Associate of St Leonard’s at the University of St Andrews. Though her doctoral work focuses on Margaret Oliphant, Katerina has also given conference and seminar papers on Arthur Machen (CSWG Warwick 2019), Robert Louis Stevenson (Aesthetics of Decay Oxford 2020), Charles Dickens (VPFA 2021) and George Eliot (MLAIS Glasgow 2022).

Katerina has published articles on "Mesmerism in Late Victorian Theatre" (CJES 2020) and Oscar Wilde (VPFJ 2021) and has papers forthcoming in 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies and OGOM's ‘Ill met by moonlight’: Gothic Encounters with Enchantment and the Faerie Realm in Literature and Culture.

She has also co-organised a three-day conference with Dr Paul Thompson titled Rewriting Gender in An Age of Transition (1880-1940), which took place in September 2022.

EDUCATION

Katerina was recently awarded a PhD for her thesis on Spectral Trauma and Narrative Memory in Margaret Oliphant’s Gothic, supervised by Dr Katie Garner. Her thesis considers Margaret Oliphant’s Gothic fiction through the lens of memory and trauma studies. She also holds an MA in Literary Studies from the Complutense University of Madrid, an MSt in English Literature (1830-1914) from Oxford and a BA (summa cum laude) from Georgetown University, where she majored in English and Spanish literature alongside a minor in political philosophy through the School of Foreign Service.

RESEARCH, TEACHING, or OTHER INTERESTS

Literature and Literary Theory, Visual Arts and Performing Arts

Scopus Publications

INTRODUCTION
Katerina García-Walsh, Paul Thompson
Rewriting Gender in an Age of Transition 1880 1940, 2026
This Introduction explains how the volume emerged from a conference at the University of St Andrews in 2022. Rewriting Gender in an Age of Transition is a collection of essays on gender and queer studies across the fin-de-siècle and beginning of the twentieth century. Where existing scholarship often divides the years between 1880 and 1940 into two distinct categories, this volume proposes that studies of the nineteenth and early twentieth century will benefit from framing this period as one of transition in cultural attitudes towards gender and sexuality alongside political, economic, technological and cultural revolutions. This introduction highlights the interdisciplinary nature of the volume, embracing image and material culture. García-Walsh and Thompson lay out the structure and purpose of the volume, with its chapters divided into two overarching sections, titled ‘Identity in Transition’ and ‘Symbols of Self-Fashioning’. The former engages with changes in the conceptual understanding of gender and sexuality as internal, while the latter considers self-fashioning as a compromise between presentation and interpretation. The Introduction thus expresses the volume's purpose in showcasing a pivotal era rife with anxieties about gender and identity, a dynamic that still resonates with current debates.
REWRITING GENDER IN AN AGE OF TRANSITION: 1880-1940
Katerina García-Walsh, Paul Thompson
Rewriting Gender in an Age of Transition 1880 1940, 2026
Margaret Oliphant's Curative Gothic Literature
Katerina García-Walsh
Margaret Oliphant S Curative Gothic Literature, 2025
Prolific Scottish novelist Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897), remembered chiefly for her realist fiction and biting literary criticism of contemporary authors, also wrote nineteen supernatural tales. This monograph offers a comprehensive exploration of Oliphant’s Gothic literature, in the light of her religious beliefs, cultural context and experiences of death and mourning, as she survived her husband and all six of her children. Oliphant’s stories set in the afterlife depict the dead as inhabiting a new existence characterised by spiritual growth, while her tales set on earth attempt contact between the mortal and immortal planes. García-Walsh illustrates Oliphant’s unique theological conception of “afterliving”, which ultimately seeks to eradicate the divide between the living and their deceased loved ones, reimagining death as a liminal passage towards God and divine self-development. This book thus suggests a new direction for Gothic studies by showing how Oliphant’s supernatural fiction provided a means of “curative” writing, transforming the traumatic reality of death into a source of hope. The volume is suited for students, researchers and academics in the disciplines of literature and history, particularly the fields of nineteenth-century studies, Victorian studies and Gothic studies with an interest in women’s writing, theology and mental health/trauma studies.
Monstrous Gender in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan
Nineteenth Century Gender Studies, 2024
Oscar Wilde’s Misattributions: A Legacy of Gross Indecency
Katerina Garcia-Walsh
Victorian Popular Fictions, 2021
Drawing on correspondence and periodical advertising as well as paratextual and bibliographic detail, this paper compares editions of the three most prominent texts falsely associated with Oscar Wilde: The Green Carnation (1894), an intimate satire on Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas actually written by Douglas’ friend Robert Smythe Hichens; “The Priest and the Acolyte” (1894), a paedophilic story written by John Francis Bloxam and presented as evidence against Wilde during his libel trial and then privately reprinted; and the erotic novel Teleny (1893), which is still attributed to Wilde today. His name appeared in tandem with these novels over the course of a century, linking him further with sex and scandal. Two separate editions of Teleny in 1984 and 1986 feature introductions by Winston Leyland and John McRae, respectively justifying Wilde’s authorship and describing the work as likely a round-robin pornographic collaboration between Wilde and his young friends. By recognising and exposing these cases of literary impersonation, we can amend Wilde’s legacy.