First Lewis Carroll Visiting Fellow announced

The Lewis Carroll Visiting Fellowship was established jointly by Christ Church Library and the Bodleian Libraries as part of the scholarly programme connected to the Michelson Alice – Lewis Carroll’s own copy of the rare 1865 suppressed first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, donated to the institutions in 2025 by the American philanthropist and bibliophile Ellen A. Michelson. The fellowship supports research drawing on the exceptional Carroll collections held at Christ Church and the Bodleian Libraries.

Professor Halsall is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities at York University, where her research focuses on Victorian and modernist literature, visual culture, illustration, comics and graphic narratives, and multimodal storytelling.

She will visit Oxford in August 2026 to undertake research for her project, Lewis Carroll: Early Transmedial Storyteller. Her work will explore how Lewis Carroll and illustrator John Tenniel developed innovative forms of visual storytelling in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, helping to shape modern multimodal narrative practices.

Professor Halsall said: ‘Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland does more than tell a story. From the playful typography to the illustrations, Carroll helped invent visual, interactive storytelling and taught children (and adults) to read across words and images. My project will use materials held at Christ Church Library and the Bodleian Libraries to explore how Carroll and illustrator John Tenniel developed foundational visual storytelling techniques together. 

‘I hope to prove what I have long suspected: that this Carroll–Tenniel collaboration demonstrates visual storytelling in formation and traces a clear line from Victorian page design to multimodal storytelling practices that shape contemporary media culture. I could not be more excited to start work on my project, “Lewis Carroll: Early Transmedial Storyteller,” as a visiting fellow at the Bodleian and at Christ Church, Oxford.’

The Lewis Carroll Visiting Fellowship supports researchers from outside Oxford whose work engages with Lewis Carroll and his interests, including children’s literature, literary illustration, 19th-century photography, Oxford history, and the cultural impact of mathematics.