Rate My Professor Annika Bautz

Professor Annika Bautz joined the University of Surrey in 2023 as Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Business and Social Sciences. In summer 2025, she was seconded to the role of Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Education. She is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and serves as an Executive Board Member and Executive Board Lead for EDI and Athena Swan. Her academic qualifications include a BA from the University of Hamburg, an MA from the University of Zurich, and a PhD from Newcastle University.

Annika is Professor of nineteenth-century literature. Her work focuses on book history, particularly reception studies, and centres on notions of canonicity and popularity. It asks how the quantitative and qualitative receptions of authors vary across centuries and cultures as readers bring the concerns of their own times to their interactions with a text, receive them in new ways, create new interpretations and derive new meanings. Her current monograph studies the reception of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s medieval romances for what their appeal can tell us about the receiving culture and its publishing industry, interrogating how nineteenth- and twentieth-century mentalities allowed the myths the novels contained to live on to today. Previous work considers the afterlives of Jane Austen, the diverse and changing approaches to her and her writings through the centuries, and what these approaches tell us about each receiving culture, including our own. Selected publications include Austen in a Competitive Literary Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Editions (2024), Bicentennial Essays on Jane Austen’s Afterlives (2021), and The Reception of Jane Austen and Walter Scott (2007). She has also contributed chapters and co-edited volumes on transatlantic literature and Victorian judgment.