Nicole Dufoe is a postdoctoral fellow for the 2025-2026 year, working under the supervision of professor Tina Choi in the Department of English. Dufoe’s current project, “Victorian Fictions of Wellness,” brings together her background in nineteenth-century literary studies and the health humanities to investigate the relationship between Victorian ideals of self-improvement, epitomized by Samuel Smiles’s popular 1859 manual Self-Help, and nineteenth-century fiction. In doing so, she hopes to uncover antecedents to contemporary wellness culture and its industries.
This research builds upon Dufoe’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council-funded doctoral project, “Sleep Work and The Victorian Novel” (University of Toronto, 2024), which unpacks how novels, in both form and content, reflect changes in work, rest and temporal experience in nineteenth-century Britain and the Anglo-Caribbean. She will use this postdoctoral fellowship to continue to explore how Victorian fiction may model rhythms of living that value unproductive periods of recreation and leisure, and foster social and community bonds. In doing so, this project aims to complicate the individual progress narratives behind both the Victorian self-help movement and our current pursuit of so-called wellness.
Read Dufoe’s research in The Conversation, Intermediality, Representations and The Journal of Medical Humanities.