Dr Elise Garritzen

Elise Garritzen specializes in the cultural and social history of history writing, book history, and Victorian cultural history.

She is intrigued by the formation of scholarly practices, communities, networks, and institution in nineteenth-century Europe. Recently, she had discovered a new passion for celebrity history. Her current project “Scholarly Stardom; or Why Historians Became Celebrities in Victorian Britain” explores how and why scholarship and celebrity culture became intertwined in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Her previous book, “Reimagining the Historian in Victorian England: Books, the Literary Marketplace, and the Scholarly Persona” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) focused on the shift from Romantic history writing to history as “science” and examined how historians forged themselves a collective scholarly persona to reflect the new disciplinary status of history. She analyzed paratexts such as titles, footnotes and materiality of books as institutional spaces where historians fashioned their persona in dialogue with publishers and the wider reading public.

After completing her PhD at the University of Helsinki in 2011, Elise has worked as a lecturer, research fellow, and Academy Researcher Fellow at the University of Helsinki. She has been a Fulbright visiting Fellow at Princeton University and a guest researcher at Leiden University and KU Leuven.