Our faculty specialize in the Long Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, researching and teaching the intersections between literature, culture, and society that define contemporary scholarship, and we welcome students with interests in all genres throughout the period.
Scholars at Penn State have particular interests in the following topics:
Material Culture
History of the book, print culture, and the political economy of the public sphere.
Visual Culture and Visual Arts
Histories of aesthetic value; the Gothic revival; photography, Pre-Raphaelite painters, and Victorian avant gardes; Aestheticism, Decadence, and fin-de-siècle culture.
Gender and Sexuality
Victorian feminisms and the “Woman Question”; “Muscular Christianity”; sexuality, gender and religion; the rise of queer culture and the invention of sexology.
Class, History, Politics
Marxism, working-class culture and the rise of labor politics; industrial revolutions, Crystal Palaces, and conditions of England; parliamentary reform, Catholic emancipation; transatlantic exchanges between Britain and America; liberalism, liberty, anarchy, free trade; the rise of Modernism and modernity.
Genre
Realism, the novel and narrative theory; literary canons and the invention of English studies; “new canons” of Romantic and Victorian poetry; poetics and gender; Romantic dramas, Victorian melodramas; poetics of Catholicism and atheism; Romantic poetry and critical theory.
Literature and Empire
Romantic slave narratives and the subjectivities of empire; British colonial interventions in and representations of Ireland, India, Africa; the “Eastern Question”; travel writing; postcolonial theory; subaltern studies.
Mass Culture
Medievalism; conduct guides, illustrated magazines; sensation, gothic, and detective fictions; vampires, prostitutes, criminals, “savages.”
Science Studies
Literature and the history of science, medicine and psychology; Darwinism and evolutionary theories of culture and the body; Romantic and Victorian anthropology and race theories; monsters and monstrosity in Romantic writing; nineteenth-century utopianism and science fictions.
Modernist Studies
Penn State’s English department has played a major role in fostering exciting new directions in modernist studies. The Modernist Studies Association was founded here in 1998 by Penn State faculty Mark Morrisson and emeritus Sanford Schwartz, along with faculty from other institutions, and the first MSA conference, “The New Modernisms,” was held here at Penn State in October 1999.
Scholarly Resources at the Penn State Library
The Penn State Library provides access to Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), which includes electronic facsimilies of essentially all book and pamphlet titles published in England or in English, 1701-1800, and Gale’s Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Burney Collection Newspapers in the British Library. Our holdings of original editions in Rare Books are also astonishingly good.
Some Recent Graduate Seminars
- Japanism and its Reversals
- Surfing in the W@ke of the Wake
- The Victorian Novel
- Writing Lives by Hand in 18th Century England
- Modern Literature and Modern Art
- Collectors and Gleaners
- Modernist Little Magazines
