Professor Delia da Sousa Correa

Professional biography

I joined the English Department in 1998 and served as Head of Department from 2020-2024. Born in the UK, I grew up in New Zealand and was educated at Nelson College for Girls and at the Nelson School of Music, followed by the University of Canterbury (NZ), Kings College London and New College, Oxford, where I completed my D.Phil in 1993. Before joining the Open University I taught at the Universities of Oxford, Worcester and St Petersburg.

Contact Details

Department of English, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK76AA, United Kingdom.
Tel. 0044-(0)1908-652092
Email: delia.dasousa@open.ac.uk

Research interests

My research focusses on connections between literature and music, with particular interests in the writing of George Eliot and Katherine Mansfield. My monograph on George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture was published in 2003. I edited Phrase and Subject, a collection of essays on literature and music published in 2006. In 2009 I was the founding editor of the Katherine Mansfield Studies, an annual book series published by Edinburgh University Press. I am editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music, published in 2020 and out in paperback in May 2025. This volume of over 70 original research essays by literary scholars and musicologists charts relations between literature and music over nine centuries from the Middle Ages to the present day. With Kirsty Gunn I am currently co-editing the Selected Letters of Katherine Mansfield for Oxford World's Classics. 

I am co-founder of the Open University Literature and Music Research Group and have helped to organise several conferences in this field, including the biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Word and Music (WMA) in London in August 2013 and, most recently, two public-lecture recitals on the topic of 'Words, Music and Silence' in partnership with the University of Bournemouth. I have supervised doctoral dissertations on a wide range of literary and interdisciplinary topics.

Publications

For details of my publications follow this link.

Teaching interests

My teaching interests are chiefly in Victorian literature and early modernism. I chaired the Open University’s MA English for 8 years from its intial production and served as chair of The Nineteenth-Century Novel and of English Literature from Shakespeare to Austen. I have written teaching chapters for The Nineteenth-Century Novel, Twentieth-Century Literature: Texts and Debates, Words and Music, the MA English, Reading and Studying Literature, Literature in Transition: 1800 to the Present, Cultures, MA English Literature, and Literature Matters. 

Impact and engagement

I have given talks at the Oxford Literary Festival, with the writer Kirsty Gunn, and at the South Bank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival where I convened a discussion of Woolf, Mansfield and music with Kirsty Gunn and Gabriel Josipovici. I am a founder member of the Katherine Mansfield Society which holds an annual birthday lecture and other public events in addition to academic conferences. I participated in a Gresham College symposium on ‘Debussy: Texts and Ideas’ and was academic consultant for the BBC4 television series In their own words on the history of the twentieth-century novel. I also contributed to a BBC Radio 3 programme on ‘Claiming Schubert’. 

External collaborations

I serve on the Advisory Board of the International Association for Word and Music Studies and on the executive of University English (formerly CCUE), the body that represents the interests of English in Higher Education.