Elaine Hadley is a scholar of nineteenth-century British culture, a period that has generously left behind a wide range of materials to examine. She has been especially committed in recent years to thinking about popular culture broadly defined (theater, journalism, cheap fiction) and political culture, especially liberalism as a social formation. Hadley's latest book, Living Liberalism, addresses Victorian political culture through political theory, theories of embodiment and the material practices of citizenship. Her current project concerns war, war literature, and war journalism in the period. Hadley's work is generally grounded in archival research and her courses usually incorporate canonical and non-canonical literature, as well as non-literary texts, such as conduct books, cook books, parliamentary blue books, political pamphlets, sermons—in keeping with a period where print was cheap and literacy comparatively widespread. Other central interests include: gender theory, urban studies, the novel, melodrama, children's culture, theories of nationalism and histories of affect.