Christina Lupton

Christina Lupton is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, School of Arts. She is currently on secondment to the University of Copenhagen, where she directs the School of English, Germanic, and Romance Languages and leads the Carlsberg-funded research project Lockdown Reading. Her work bridges literary history, media theory, and cultural studies, with a focus on the material and temporal dimensions of reading.

• University: University of Warwick
• School: School of Arts
• Department: Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
• Current Affiliation: University of Copenhagen (secondment)
• Email: C.Lupton@warwick.ac.uk

Christina Lupton holds a PhD from Rutgers University and an MA from the University of Sussex. Her research explores the interplay between literature, time, and materiality, particularly in the eighteenth century and contemporary periods. She investigates how reading is shaped by codex formats, institutional contexts, and socio-political histories of work and leisure.

Her research interests include:

• Eighteenth-century literature
• History of reading
• Theories of the novel
• Media and mediation
• Material cultural studies
• Temporal experience in literature
• Autofiction and life writing

Lupton’s recent publications reveal a sustained engagement with how literary forms register temporal and material conditions. Her work moves from the eighteenth-century codex to contemporary digital reading, examining how narrative structures reflect changing conceptions of time, work, and personal agency. She frequently draws on systems theory (e.g., Bruno Latour, Michel Serres) and queer temporality to analyze reading as both a historical practice and a phenomenological experience. Her forthcoming book Love and the Novel blends memoir with literary criticism, exploring affective relationships between readers and fiction.

Her scholarly contributions have been recognized through prestigious fellowships:

• Leverhulme Fellowship
• Humboldt Fellowship
• Carlsberg Fellowship

Lupton supervises postgraduate students in eighteenth-century literature, media history, and literary theory. She has not listed specific advisees in the provided text. She is currently not accepting new PhD students due to her secondment. She has been actively involved in international research collaborations, including the Lockdown Reading project, which investigates novel reading during the 2020 pandemic through interviews and surveys, culminating in the co-authored monograph Viral Novels: What We Read in 2020. She delivers frequent invited lectures at major universities across Europe and North America.

She is affiliated with the following research initiatives:

• Lockdown Reading Project: A Carlsberg-funded interdisciplinary team studying reading during global crisis
• Books Out of Place Workshop: Hosted at University of Warwick, exploring displaced texts
• Novel Worlds Seminar: Collaborative research on computational and theoretical approaches to the novel