Professor Ann Heilmann

Ann is Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University, where she teaches and writes on Victorian and contemporary literature, gender and sexuality, Gothic, and neo-Victorianism.  

She previously held professorial positions at the Universities of Hull and Swansea and lectureships in English and Women’s Studies at Manchester Metropolitan and Bradford universities. German born and educated, she graduated from Tübingen University and made the UK her home at the start of her PhD studies, initially teaching German at the University of Leeds and in Adult and Further Education (including the WEA).  

The author of some sixty articles and book chapters, she has written four monographs, on the late-Victorian New Woman, neo-Victorianism (co-authored) and James Barry. Co-/edited work includes a critical edition and a volume of essays on the turn-of-the-century Anglo-Irish writer George Moore, three further essay collections on early twentieth-century to contemporary women’s writing. She has also edited four multi-volume anthologies and eight special journal issues. Her most recent publication is a new edition of the Franco-Welsh writer Cecily Mackworth’s Lucy’s Nose (2026), which reimagines one of Freud’s case studies.