“Victorian Theory?” Speakers

Tanya Agathocleous

Pamela Gilbert

Jonathan Grossman

Anna Jones

Caroline Levine

Peter Logan

Andrew H. Miller

Daniel Novak

Kathy Psomiades


Tanya Agathocleous

“Where in the World is Victorian Studies? Globalizing Victorian Literature, Then and Now”

Faculty Page
Tanya Agathocleous is Assistant Professor of English at Hunter College, CUNY. Her book, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, will be published by Cambridge University Press in Fall 2010. She recently co-edited a special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture on “Victorian Cosmopolitanisms” and an edition for Broadview of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent.

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Pamela Gilbert

“The Other Victorians: Sexuality and Feminist Readings of Victorian Popular Fiction”

Faculty Page

Pamela K. Gilbert is Albert Brick Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Florida. She has published widely in the areas of Victorian literature, cultural studies and the history of medicine. Her books include Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (1997), Mapping the Victorian Social Body (2004), The Citizen’s Body ( 2007), and Cholera and Nation (2008). She has edited a collection entitled Imagined Londons (2002), and co-edited Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context (1999). She is currently working on the history of the body in nineteenth century Britain, and editing Rhoda Broughton’s nineteenth-century novel Cometh Up as a Flower for Broadview Press. She is also editing the Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction.

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Jonathan Grossman

“Meantime”

Faculty Page

Jonathan Grossman’s first book concerns early nineteenth-century crime fiction’s relation to the law courts prior to detective fiction’s invention in the 1840s. It falls into the interdisciplinary field of law and literature as well as early Victorian studies. There are two chapters on Charles Dickens, who is a long-standing-and current-research interest. At present, he is completing a book manuscript about the rise of public transport, the standardization of time, and Charles Dickens, entitled The Transportive Work of Fiction in the Time of Charles Dickens.

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Anna Jones

“Self-Possession: Toward a Gothic Theory of Liberalism”

Faculty Page

Anna Maria Jones is Associate Professor of English at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self (Ohio State, 2007). Her current work, pieces of which are forthcoming in European Romantic Review and Victorian Literature and Culture, examines critiques of liberal individualism in the Gothic of the long nineteenth century.

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Caroline Levine

“Form’s Force: Louis Althusser or Elizabeth Barrett Browning?”

Faculty Page

Caroline Levine is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of two books: The Serious Pleasures of Suspense (Virginia, 2003), winner of the prize for the best book in narrative studies; and Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (Blackwell 2007). She is currently one of the editors of the new Norton Anthology of World Literature, and she is working on a book on form.

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Peter Logan

“Psychology and Anthropology, in Theory”

Faculty page

Author of several books on nineteenth-century British literature and science, Peter Melville Logan is Professor of English at Temple University and Director of the Center for the Humanities at Temple. He is currently completing work on the Encyclopedia of the Novel, which looks globally at the history and theory of the genre. Forthcoming in late 2010, he is General Editor of the two-volume work.

As a specialist in nineteenth-century British literature, critical theory, the history of the novel, and the history of the human sciences, he recently published Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), which examines the culture concept in Victorian writing. An earlier work, Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) outlined the connection between early nineteenth-century first-person narrative form and ideas about nervous disorders at the time.

Dr. Logan received his Ph.D. and B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. He has published articles in Cultural Critique, Victorian Literature and Culture, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, History of the Human Sciences, and elsewhere.

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Andrew H. Miller

Keynote Address

Faculty Page

Andrew H. Miller’s writing and teaching respond to the ways that literary form makes interesting trouble for a range of other fields of thought, including moral philosophy, psychology, and history. His first book, Novels Behind Glass, concerned the interplay between narrative form and the commodity culture of the Victorian period. More recently this preoccupation with literary form (and especially fundamental matters of perspective and orientation) has led him to consider the means by which novels frame our conceptions of particular ethical problems-and led him as well to study topics in moral psychology, including helplessness, knowingness, shame, and envy. Many of these interests are gathered together in The Burdens of Perfection, which aims to evoke and analyze the continuing powers, alluring and repellant, of nineteenth-century moral perfectionism. His current project is titled “On Not Being Someone Else.” Miller is a co-editor of the journal Victorian Studies and directs Indiana University’s Victorian Studies Program.

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Daniel Novak

“Theorizing Victoria’s ‘Accursed Race’: The Cagots, the West, and Victorian Racial Thinking”

Faculty Page

Personal Page

Daniel A. Novak is associate professor of English at Louisiana State University. He is author of Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge, 2008), and is currently working on two book-length projects. The first (Victoria’s Accursed Race) treats Victorian literature on the Cagots—an ethnic group of unknown origin, unclear history, and ambiguous race found in the Pyrenees. The second (Specters of Wilde) is on the formation of Wilde studies in the early twentieth century.

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Kathy Psomiades

“The Way We Read Then: Feminist Theory, Victorian Theory and the Historicity of Knowledge”

Faculty page

Kathy Alexis Psomiades works on Victorian literature and culture. She is author of Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford, 1997), and co-editor, with Talia Schaffer of Women and British Aestheticism (Virginia, 1999). Her current book project, Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology and the Novel, examines the intersections between the novel and anthropology in the second half of the nineteenth century.

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