Clare Brant
Clare Brant is a British literary scholar and Professor Emeritus of Eighteenth-century Literature and Culture at King's College London. She is known for eighteenth-century literature, life writing, and blue humanities, authoring Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (2006), winner of the ESSE Book Award, and Balloon Madness: Flights of Imagination in Britain, 1783-1786 (2017). She co-founded the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s, serves as co-General Editor of the Palgrave Studies in Life Writing series, and is a published poet.
Early life and education
Brant spent her childhood abroad, fostering an early interest in literature. She earned a first-class degree in English Literature at New College, Oxford, where she held a scholarship, and completed a DPhil on eighteenth-century letters.
Career
Brant held Junior Research Fellowships at New College and St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and was Fellow and Tutor in English at Jesus College, Cambridge (1988-91). She joined King’s College London in 1991 as Lecturer, became Professor of Eighteenth-century Literature and Culture in 2009, and was named Professor Emeritus in 2025.
At King’s, she co-directed the Centre for Life-Writing Research from 2010 until her retirement in 2025 and led Strandlines: Lives on the Strand (2009-present). Since 2012, she has been a regular editor for the "Creative Matters" section of the European Journal of Life Writing.
Research
Brant researches eighteenth-century literature, life writing, and blue humanities. Her book Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (2006) examines how letters shaped social relations and gender dynamics in Britain, reshaping scholarship on epistolary culture.
Besides letters, her life writing scholarship includes work on digital forms, diaries, and obituaries. She also publishes on smells, past and present.
Her work in blue humanities, supported by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2022-25), includes Underwater Lives: Humans, Species, Ocean (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), which establishes underwater life writing as a subject and addresses climate crisis, advancing environmental humanities. Related articles include “‘Here for 450 Million Years, Going Now: Ocean Timelines, Climate Crisis, and Life Writing’” in Biography (2024), “Sharks and Lords of the Sharks” in Journal for the History of Environment and Society (2024), and “The Sentience of Sea Squirts” in Life Writing and the Posthuman Anthropocene (2021).
Publications
Books
- Underwater Lives: Humans, Species, Ocean (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026)
- Balloon Madness: Flights of Imagination in Britain, 1783-1786 (Boydell & Brewer, 2017)
- Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Palgrave, 2006) - winner of the ESSE Book Award (2008)
- Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London: John Gay’s Trivia (1716) (with Susan E. Whyman, Oxford University Press, 2007)
Selected edited volumes
- Fame and Fortune: Sir John Hill and London Life in the 1750s (co-ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Hardcover ISBN 978-1-137-58053-5. DOI 1.
- Life Writing and Death (co-ed., European Journal of Life Writing, 2020)
- Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760 (co-ed., Routledge, 1992)
Poetry
- Entering Sleep Mode (Shoestring Press, 2007)
- Dark Egg (Shoestring Press, 2011)
- Accidentals in the Main (Shoestring Press, 2016)
- Breathing Space (Shoestring Press, 2020)
- Marbled in Foam (Shoestring Press, 2023)
- Underwater Postcards (Shoestring Press, 2026)
Recognition
Brant received the Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2022-25) and was elected to the Academia Europaea in 2022. She won the ESSE Book Award in 2008 for Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture and joined GLOCAL, a global network for anthropological linguistics and cultural studies at SOAS University of London, in 2024. Her lectures on life writing and oceanic studies have been noted in academic media.
See also
- Life writing