Andrew King (born 1957) is Professor of English Literature and Literary Studies at the University of Greenwich. He specialises in nineteenth-century periodicals and popular fiction.
Contents
Early life
Born in Wales from mining and shop-keeping stock, he was encouraged to read Classics at University by his school, Porth County Grammar School for Boys. He did a degree in classical and medieval Latin at the University of Reading, followed by an MA in Medieval Studies at the same university. An abortive PhD in Medieval French in Cambridge meant that he went to teach English at the University of Catania, Sicily, where apart from returning to the UK to complete a PGCE and teach for a year in a secondary school, he spent most of the 1980s. In 1990 he married a British council officer and accompanied her on her postings for the 1990s, completing a second MA, this time in English at the University of Sussex, in 1992. In 2000 he completed a PhD in English at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Academic life
In 2003 Andrew obtained his first full-time academic post in the UK. Canterbury Christ Church University appointed him as a senior lecturer in the Media Department. In 2009, after a year's research fellowship at the University of Ghent, he was promoted to Reader in Print History. It was while at Canterbury Christ Church that he published his monograph on The London Journal, and edited two collections of primary sources with John Plunkett from Exeter University: Victorian Print Media and Popular Print Media, 1820-1900
Later he guest edited three special numbers of learned journals, including one on Angels and Demons in Critical Survey, another (with Marysa Demoor of the University of Gent) on the V ictorian professions, the press and gender in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, while the third was on work and leisure in Victorian Periodicals Review.
Collections of essays he has edited with colleagues comprise Ouida and Victorian Popular Culture (with Jane Jordan) and, with Alexis Easley and John Morton, the Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and Newspapers.
He has also published a critical edition of The Massarenes, the last full-length novel by Ouida, and written a considerable number of articles, chapters and book reviews as listed on his staff profile page.
In May 2012 he was appointed Professor of English at the University of Greenwich. He blogs on a variety of subjects, mainly Victorian, but also on international media history.