2015: “The Way We Read Victorians Now” Speakers

CUNY annual victorian conference for speakers

Rachel Sagner Buurma 

Nicholas Dames

Paul Fyfe

Lisa Gitelman

Natalie Houston

Patrick Leary

Deidre Lynch

Meredith Martin

Elizabeth Miller

Andrew Stauffer


Rachel Sagner Buurma

Rachel Sagner Buurma is Associate Professor of English Literature at Swarthmore College, where she works on Victorian literature and culture, the novel, book history, and the connections between literary-critical inquiry and information science. Her essays have recently appeared in New Literary HistoryRepresentationsVictorian Studies, and The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel, and she is a project lead on the Early Novels Database. She is currently finishing a project on the material history of narrative theory, and beginning one on how Victorian novelists did research. With Laura Heffernan, she is also currently working on a new disciplinary history for English studies titled “The Teaching Archive.” http://rachelsagnerbuurma.org/

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Nicholas Dames

Nicholas Dames is Theodore Kahan Professor of Humanities at Columbia University. He is the author of Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 (2001) and The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (2007). His current project is a study of the chapter, from the editorial practices of late antiquity to the modern novel.

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Paul Fyfe

Paul Fyfe is an assistant professor at North Carolina State University in the English Department and the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media (CRDM) program, and an Andrew S. Mellon Fellow in Critical Bibliography at Rare Books School. He has formerly served as Project Manager of the Rossetti Archive and as a NINES Graduate Fellow. He has written on Victorian topics for publications including Nineteenth-Century Literature and Victorian Periodicals Review and has just published a monograph, By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis (Oxford UP, 2015). His essays on digital humanities topics appear in Digital Humanities Quarterly, the Journal of Victorian Culture, and the edited collection Debates in Digital Humanities.

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Lisa Gitelman

Lisa Gitelman is a media historian at NYU Steinhardt whose research concerns American book history, techniques of inscription, and the new media of yesterday and today. She is particularly concerned with tracing the patterns according to which new media become meaningful within and against the contexts of older media. Her most recent book is entitled Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Duke University Press 2014). She has an edited collection, “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron (MIT 2013). Previous works include Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (MIT Press 2006). She holds a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and is a former editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. She joined Steinhardt after teaching at Harvard University and at The Catholic University of America.

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Natalie Houston

Natalie M. Houston is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston. She is currently writing a book entitled Digital Reading: Poetry and the New Nineteenth-Century Archive, which uses computational methods to explore the cultural function of poetry within Victorian print culture. She directed an NEH-funded project to develop VisualPage, a software application to identify and analyze visual features in digitized printed books and is currently part of a related Workset Creation through Image Analysis of Document Pages project with the HathiTrust Research Center. She is also a Co-Director and Technical Director for the Periodical Poetry Index, a research database of citations to English-language poems published in nineteenth-century periodicals. Her research on Victorian poetry and print culture has appeared in journals such as Victorian StudiesVictorian Poetry, and the Yale Journal of Criticism.

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Patrick Leary

Patrick Leary is the author of The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London (2010) as well as a number of articles in 19th-century media history. Co-founder of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) and founder and manager of the long-running VICTORIA discussion list, he has been writing about digitally-assisted research in Victorian Studies since the mid-1990s. He is currently at work on a cultural geography of literary life in Victorian London.

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Deidre Lynch

A graduate of the University of British Columbia and Stanford University, Deidre Shauna Lynch is Professor of English at Harvard University. She has published widely on the literature and culture of late- eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century Britain, on the history of women’s writing, on the theory and history of the novel, and on the history of reading. Her first book The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning won the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book in 1999. Other books include (as editor or co-editor) Cultural Institutions of the Novel (Duke University Press), Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees (Princeton University Press), the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the Norton Critical Edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and the Romantic Period volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. She has just published Loving Literature: A Cultural History, a study that engages the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prehistory of English studies in order to give a new account of the state of the discipline and of the state of our literary affections.

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Meredith Martin

Meredith Martin specializes in anglophone poetry with interests in historical poetics, poetry and public culture, and disciplinary and pedagogical history. She is the Faculty Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton. Her book, The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860-1930, was the winner of the Warren Brooks Prize for Literary Criticism, co-winner of the Sonya Rudikoff Prize for the Best First Book in Victorian Studies and winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book. She has published articles and reviews in Victorian PoetryVictorian StudiesModernism / ModernityThe Victorians Institute Journal Online Annex and has work forthcoming in ELHNineteenth-Century Literature, and Literature and History. In 2011, she co-edited a special issue of Victorian Poetry on Victorian prosody as well as a special issue of The Hopkins Quarterly on the prosody of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Since 2007, she has edited and overseen the Princeton Prosody Archive, an archive of writing on prosody that includes thousands of searchable manuscripts, manuals, articles, grammar books, and materials; she also edits the “Poetry@Princeton” website. Her next book, The Invention of English Poetry, is about the various non-English (both nationality and academic discipline) valences of English poetry.

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Elizabeth Miller

Elizabeth Carolyn Miller is Professor and Chair of English at the University of California, Davis. Her book Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture appeared in 2013 and received the award for Best Book of the Year from the North American Victorian Studies Association as well as Honorable Mention for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. Her first book, Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle, appeared in 2008. She is now working on a new project focused on extraction and environmentalism in the nineteenth century, but her paper today reflects work toward a side project on the Victorian book review.

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Andrew Stauffer

Andrew Stauffer is an associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, where he also directs the NINES digital initiative and the crowdsourced library project Book Traces. He is the author of Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge UP, 2005) and the editor of works by Robert Browning (Norton, 2006) and H. Rider Haggard (Broadview, 2006). He served at PI on a Google grant for the development of Juxta Commons and an NEH grant for an institute on the evaluation of digital scholarship (http://institutes.nines.org). His current work focuses on the history and future of the nineteenth-century print record, with specific attention to issues of digitization, book history, and library collections management. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1998. Professor Stauffer is the Pine Tree Foundation Fellow in the History of the Book at The Graduate Center, CUNY for 2014-15.

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