简介

I'm interested in the "long nineteenth century" (c. 1780-1900) because the period faced so many of the same challenges we do today with such optimism and energy. That's one reason its writers, like Austen, Dickens, or Lewis Carroll remain popular. We're also prone to some of the long nineteenth century's vices—materialism, imperialism, sexism—and so can learn from the period's social critics, like Wollstonecraft, Gaskell, Hardy, and Wilde. Finally, nineteenth-century writers were the first mass-entertainers, providing generations of readers with Dr. Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes, Count Dracula, Black Beauty, and Alice in Wonderland. In my various courses in Victorian Literature, Women and Literature, or Literature and Law, I want students to explore how and why a culture so close to our own turned to literature not only for entertainment, but social change as well. The questions that I find the most engaging, like this one, call for interdisciplinary responses. I have published on topics concerning gender, religion, law, and history in British culture, including The Reader's Repentance: Women Preachers, Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse (Chicago, 1992) Reading for the Law: Gender Advocacy and British Literary History (Virginia, 2010) and Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time (Ohio, 2002). My current book projects are "Making History: a Life of Mary Anne Everett Green" and “Likely Stories: Probabilistic Reasoning in Victorian Narrative.” I am past director of the University Core of Common Studies, past president of the scholarly organization Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies, and recipient of the inaugural Way-Klingler Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching.