My research interests revolve around visual and verbal media and their intersemiotic, interdisciplinary, interhistorical, and intercultural relations. I have a particular interest in relations between literature and film and am currently investigating the troubled relations between adaptation studies and mainstream humanities theories in a project entitled Theorizing Adaptations/Adapting Theories. I have further interests in literature and culture of the long nineteenth century, especially the rise of picture identification. I am working on a sequel to Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction: The Rise of Picture Identification, 1764-1835 (Johns Hopkins 2012) that continues that research to 1918.
late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century literature and culture, especially interdisciplinary projects involving verbal and visual representations
adaptations (especially but not limited to literature and film); theories of adaptation
ENGL203 Victorian Literature
ENGL203 Literature and Film
ENGL204 American Literature to 1900
ENGL301 Undergraduate dissertation unit
ENGL431 Literature and Film (MA)
ENGL426 Victorian Literature and Film (MA)
Also contributes lectures to ENGL100, CREW103, and ENGL207.
Kamilla Elliott grew up in the UK, moving to the US after A levels. She received her B.A. in Mass Communications and Theatre from the University of Colorado in 1980 and pursued postgraduate studies in film at Boston University from 1981-82. After years away from academics, she returned in 1989, earning an A.L.M. degree through Harvard's adult education programme in 1991. From there, she entered Harvard University, where she completed a Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Language in 1996. She taught Victorian studies and interdisciplinary literature/film studies at the University of California at Berkeley from 1996-2004. During that time she wrote articles on literature and film and published Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge UP, 2003).
At Lancaster University, she has continued to write and speak on intermedial adaptation theory and practice and is currently writing a monograph entitled, Theorizing Adaptations/Adapting Theories. Most of her recent research, however, has been on intersections between British fiction and the rise of mass picture identification from the late eighteenth century to 1918. Her monograph, Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction: The Rise of Picture Identification, 1764-1835, has been published by Johns Hopkins University Press (2012). A sequel, Victorian Fiction and the Rise of Picture Identification, 1836-1918, is being researched.
