Professor Janet Floyd taught nineteenth-century American Literature and Culture at King’s from 2002 until 2023, first in the Department of American Studies and then in the Department of English from 2010. Janet has a particular interest in students’ experience of transfer between school and university, and set up a project, Reading Further, to enable school students to learn about and relish literary study at university level.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• Nineteenth-century American Culture
• The American West
• Domesticity and domestic culture
• Networks of artists and writers

Professor Floyd's first monograph, Writing the Pioneer Woman (2002), engaged with debates in North America about the iconic figure of the female pioneer. Her second monograph, Claims and Speculations: Mining and Writing in the Gilded Age (University of New Mexico Press, 2012), looked at the writing generated by the great gold and silver strikes of the late 19th century.

Janet also has longstanding interests in the literature of the domestic and in debates about domesticity. This work has produced two collections of essays: Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior (1999), co-edited with Inga Bryden, Becoming Visible: Women’s Cultural Presence in Nineteenth-Century America (2010). She has also published widely on English and American cookbooks, including The Recipe Reader (2003), co-edited with Laurel Forster.

Currently, Professor Floyd is finishing a monograph on the networks developed by American artists and writers working alongside one another in the 1870s and 1880s.