Dr Penny Bradshaw | University of Cumbria

Penny Bradshaw studied in Lancaster both as an undergraduate and as a postgraduate. Her PhD explored the newly recovered work of two female Romantic poets: Anna Barbauld and Charlotte Smith, and Penny continues to work and publish primarily within the field of British Romanticism. Penny worked briefly at Lancaster University before taking up her present post at the University of Cumbria. Penny was Programme Leader for the English Literature programme from 2001-2021 and is currently Programme Leader for the MA in Literature, Romanticism, and the English Lake District, which is based at our Ambleside campus.

Penny has a BA in English, an MA in Contemporary Literary Studies, and a PhD from Lancaster University. She is Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a member of both the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE-UK). Penny is also an Editorial Board Member for Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape - a digital resource which allows scholars of Romanticism unique access to the digitised manuscript collections of the Wordsworth Trust, including the working notebooks, verse manuscripts and correspondence of Wordsworth and his circle.

Undergraduate Teaching

Penny has taught on a number of undergraduate English Literature modules, including Romantic Literature, Victorian Writing, Children’s Literature and Contemporary Women’s Writing. She developed a final year module which grew out of her research on British Romanticism and the Lake District and a second year module which looked at the wider relevance of English studies within the world of work, and especially within the regional cultural heritage industry.

Postgraduate Teaching

Penny currently teaches on the MA in Literature, Romanticism, and the English Lake District. She leads on modules which explore Romantic literary circles based in the Lakes, Children's Literature and the Lake District, and Poetry and Place. In addition Penny teaches on a module which considers how literary tourism has shaped our perceptions of Cumbria and which explores the contemporary regional cultural heritage industry.

Research interests and current projects

Romanticism and especially women’s writing of the Romantic period; nineteenth-century poetry; place writing – particularly Romantic regionalism and the legacy of Romanticism within later Cumbrian poetry and fiction. Penny's most recent book is An A-Z of Beatrix Potter which was published by Bloomsbury Academic in January 2026 - see here for further details.

Penny is also very interested in literary tourism. She works with various external partners and regularly runs literary-themed walks and tours. She also recently led on a UKRI funded project to explore the role of literature in promoting more diverse engagement with rural landscapes. This resulted in the commissioning of new poetry by the Indian-born poet, Reshma Ruia. The poems have been published on the University's Centre for National Parks and Protected Areas website.

Areas of possible research supervision

Poetry and fiction by Romantic–era women writers; religion and Romanticism; politics in Romantic literature; regional Romanticism; place writing; contemporary Cumbrian poetry and fiction; environmental writing for children.

Current and Recent Doctoral Supervisor roles:

Meghann Hillier-Broadley: 'Norman Nicholson and the Anthropocene'.

Greta Kelly: Celestial Bodies and Beings: Angels and Astronomy in the Work of Norman Nicholson.

Garth Lindrup: Poetry as Property: An Investigation into the concepts of authorship, originality and literary property as they evolved [in England] in the period from Pope to Wordsworth.

Abi Palmer: ‘I feel neither man nor woman in society’: Space, Place and Queer Identity in the Writing of Anne Lister.

Nada Saadaoui: An exploration of the Female Walker and the Transformative Effect of Walking in Jane Austen’s Landscapes.

Gail Stanley: From Dove Cottage to Rydal Mount: Wordsworth’s pivotal decade, (1805-1815).

Carole Thirlaway: Tuberculosis and Poetry: an investigation into the way in which tuberculosis affected the poems and literary lives of John Keats, Katherine Mansfield and Norman Nicholson.

Kira Welland: The Spatial Contexts of Rydal Mount and how these influence the writings of Mary, Dorothy and Dora Wordsworth.

Dr Patricia Lean: Kiss the Cold Goodbye - Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain in painting practice: an ecocritical analysis (completed 2025).

Dr Tony Peart: Lost and Unexamined Aspects of the Arts and Crafts Movement, with a Particular Focus on the Design Works of C. F. A. Voysey: Evolving Methodologies for Recovery and Study.

Books

An A-Z of Beatrix Potter (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026)

Edited and Introduced, Ann Radcliffe's Observations during a Tour to the Lakes (Hobnob Press, 2024)

Edited and Introduced, The Lake Poems of John Wilson (Bookcase, 2012)

Tour Guides

A Literary Walking Tour of Carlisle (Inspired by Lakeland, autumn 2023)

A Literary Walking Tour of Ambleside (Inspired by Lakeland, 2021)

Literary Lancaster (Lancaster City Council, 2016)

Journal articles

'Experiments in Travel Writing and Romantic Constructions of Place: Ann Radcliffe’s 1795 Account of Tours in Continental Europe and the English Lake District', European Romantic Review, 36: 4 (2025) Full article: Experiments in Travel Writing and Romantic Constructions of Place: Ann Radcliffe’s 1795 Account of Continental Europe and the English Lake District
‘Romantic Recluses and Humble Cottages: Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde and the Literary Construction of Grasmere’, Women’s Writing (August 2017) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09699082.2017.1355516
'“A task of glory all thine own”: Hannah More and Early Nineteenth-Century British Women’s Biblical Poetry,’Women’s Studies 43:5 (2014), 641-664
‘“Living at our Full Compass”: Michael Roberts and the Poetry of Mountaineering’,The Alpine Journal 116 (2012), 229-237
‘Romantic Poetic Identity and the English Lake District’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 11 (2011), pp. 65-80.
‘The Limits of Barbauld’s Feminism: Re-Reading “The Rights of Woman”, European Romantic Review, 16:1 (January 2005), 23-37
‘Dystopian Futures: Time Travel and Millenarian Visions in the poetry of Anna Barbauld and Charlotte Smith’, Romanticism on the Net, 21 (February 2001)
‘Gendering the Enlightenment: Conflicting Images of Progress in the Poetry of Anna Letitia Barbauld’, Women’s Writing, 5:3 (Autumn 1998), 355-373

Essays / Chapters in books

'Romantic literary geographies', The Routledge Handbook of Literary Geographies, ed. Neal Alexander and David Cooper (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2025), pp. 187-197.
'Defined "as much by their absence as their iconography": Reimagining Wolves in Cumbria in Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border,The Wolf: Culture, Nature, Heritage ed. by Ian Convery et al (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2023), pp. 99-106.
‘Our “great entail”: Romantic Literary Travel Writing and the Concept of Natural Heritage’, in Shifting Interpretations of Natural Heritage, ed. Ian Convery (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2016), pp. 63-71.
‘Cumbrians and their ‘ancient kingdom’: Landscape, Literature and Regional Identity’, in Making Sense of Place, ed. Ian Convery ed. Ian Convery et al (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2012), pp. 33-41.
‘Women Romantic Poets,’ in The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 383-96
‘The Politics of the Platter: Charlotte Smith and “The Science of Eating,”’ in Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism, ed. by Timothy Morton (Palgrave: New York, 2004), pp. 59-76
‘Charlotte Brontë’ and ‘Amelia Opie’ in Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850, ed. by Christopher John Murray, 2 vols (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), pp. 122-124 (vol. 1) and pp. 830-831 (vol. 2)

2024-(current) Working with colleagues at the University of Geneva on an SNSF-funded three-year project: 'Landscapes of the Mind: Literature of Place, Displacement and Recovery'.
2024-25 On project group for development of the 'Wordsworth Way', launched April 2025: https://www.ullswaterheritage.org/wordsworth-way
2023-(current) On Board of Trustees for The Armitt Museum and Library.
2022-(current) On Board of Trustees for the Cumbria County History Trust
2021-2025 External Examiner for MLitt Environment, Culture and Communication, University of Glasgow
2020-(current) On Board of Directors for the Norman Nicholson House Community Interest Company
2017-18 Member of Borderlines: Carlisle Book Festival steering group
2012 External Examiner for MA thesis on 'Hardy and Landscape,' Manchester Metropolitan University
2011- 12 Editorial Board Member for Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape (digital resource published by Adam Matthew Digital and Adam Matthew Publications using archives held by The Wordsworth Trust, 2012)
Reviewer for Green Letters (Peer Reviewed journal for the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment - ASLE-UK).