Andrew King

Andrew King is Professor of English at the University of Greenwich.

He's passionately committed to understanding the marginal - not to replace the centre with the marginal, but to reflect on what's at stake in the often violent hierarchies we make between the two. His aim is realised mainly through an exploration of Victorian periodicals, especially popular ones, and those other marginalised printed texts, trade and professional magazines (which far outnumbered fiction-based and "literary" publications). His other focus is on Victorian popular fiction, especially the sentimental, in which tradition he places the writer Ouida, about whom he's published a good deal.

His career has not at all been conventional: he arrived in full-time academia only in 2003 after decades on temporary contracts in universities overseas while supporting his wife in her career as a cultural diplomat in the British Council. This experience has given valuable insight into how culture works and is worked by social groups to try to gain advantages of many kinds, an insight he puts to work in his writing.