Dr. Deven Parker

Biography

Deven Parker joined the School of Critical Studies as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in 2024 to carry out a research project titled 'Performing Authorship: Theatre, Print, Intellectual Property.' She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2019 and became a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Queen Mary University of London in 2020, working on the British Academy 'Romantic Melodrama' project. Her research focuses on the media history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, specifically how new media technologies impact creative expression. Deven is an expert in literature and theatre of the Romantic period, with additional interests in media technology studies, copyright, and book history. She is the author of the forthcoming book, 'Romantic Media Wartime Networks,' to be published by Stanford University Press in 2026. Currently, she is working on a new project that examines how divergent copyright regimes in the theatre and book trade shaped the careers of Romantic writers and contributed to modern conceptions of intellectual property. Additionally, Deven collaborates with colleagues on an AI digitization project to make a large collection of eighteenth and nineteenth-century playbills publicly searchable.

Research Interests

Experience

Awards