Tutor information
Christopher Pittard
Dr Christopher Pittard is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth. He has published widely on Victorian literature and on detective fiction, including the books Literary Illusions: Performance Magic and Victorian Literature (2025), The Cambridge Companion to Sherlock Holmes (2019), Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction (2011), and a new critical edition of The Return of Sherlock Holmes (2023) for Oxford World’s Classics.
Courses
Detective fiction was born in the Victorian period. Join us in Oxford for this in-person day school and learn from leading scholars about the rich diversity of Victorian detectives and detective writing, including, of course, Sherlock Holmes.
Study the development of British detective fiction from Arthur Conan Doyle to Colin Dexter, taking in the golden age whodunit of Agatha Christie and the postwar crime writing of Margery Allingham.
Explore the crime fiction of Agatha Christie, examining her two most famous detectives: Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. We’ll look at the historical contexts and narrative structures of some of Christie’s most successful whodunits.
Study the development of British detective fiction and literary representations of Oxford, ranging from Sherlock Holmes to Inspector Morse, and taking in the ‘Golden Age’ of the whodunit with authors including Dorothy L Sayers and Edmund Crispin.
Delve into Agatha Christie’s detective fiction through Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Studying four classic novels, this course explores how Christie redefined the genre, blending social insight, innovation, and subversion beneath her elegant puzzles.
Explore the evolution of Gothic literature from the nineteenth century to today. This course traces how writers and artists transformed the Gothic to reflect cultural fears, from haunted castles to modern horrors in film, art, and fiction.