Ivan Kreilkamp
Email | 812-855-6132
Associate Professor
PhD: Brown University, 1999
MA: Brown University, 1994
BA: Yale University, 1991
My main research interests focus on the British novel over the long nineteenth century, and on the literature and culture of Victorian Britain more generally. I also have research and teaching interests relating to print culture, media studies, popular culture (I’ve published on pop music in places like the Village Voice and the Nation), literary theory, and animal studies. My first book, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (2005), aimed to complicate our thinking about Victorian literature’s relationship to and representation of speech and orality by, for example, considering literary texts in relation to shorthand manuals, phonographs, and oral storytellers. Lately I’ve been working on the links between domestic fiction and domestic animals in Britain, considering animals as objects of sympathy and enmity, as companions and co-habitants, as subjects of experiment, as minor or vulnerable characters, and as figures of radical alterity. This project involves attention to historical topics, such as the rise of the animal welfare or anti-cruelty movement in Britain in the early Victorian period, and of the anti-vivisection movement in later decades; it also asks theoretical and philosophical questions regarding the relationship of animals to personhood, subjectivity, and ethics. I teach a range of courses on topics mostly (but not only – I like getting the chance to teach the likes of Ovid, Charles Chesnutt, or Werner Herzog) relating to nineteenth-century British literature. I am also co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Victorian Studies.
Recent Courses
E303: Nineteenth Century Literatures in English
L208: Topics in English and American Literature and Culture: the Literary Animal
L335: Victorian Literature and Sexuality
L348: Nineteenth Century British Literature: Mystery, Suspense, Detection
L369: Late Realism: English Fiction 1880-1910
L371: Critical Practices: the Ends of Interpretation
L390, Children's Literature
L743: Victorian Literature: Protagonists, Persons, and Non-Persons
L743: Victorian Literature/ Media/ Communications
L758: Life and the Living
V611: Introduction to Victorian Studies
Recent Publications (click images for more information)
Book:
Voice and the Victorian Storyteller. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.
Articles:
"The 1850s." A Companion to the English Novel. (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture.) 2013.
"1822: The Ass Got a Verdict." BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. 2012.
"Novel Theory for Homo Sapiens." (Review essay.) Novel: a Forum on Fiction, 44(2), Summer 2011.
“Anthroprosthesis: or, Prosthetic Dogs.” Victorian Review: 35.2 (fall 2009)
“Pitying the Sheep in Far From the Madding Crowd.” Novel: a Forum on Fiction, 42 1/2,Fall 2009. "Theories of the Novel Now" special issue.
"Dying Like a Dog in Great Expectations." In Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Ed. Deborah Morse and Martin Danahay. Ashgate, 2007.
"'One More Picture:' Robert Browning's Optical Unconscious." ELH 73 (2), Summer 2006.
"Elizabeth Gaskell." Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. General Editor David Scott Kastan. 18th-19th Century Editor Nancy Armstrong. 2005.
"Petted Things: Wuthering Heights and the Animal." Yale Journal of Criticism, 18(1), April 2005.
"Getting Real about Failure in the Classroom." Pedagogy 5.2, Spring 2005.
"Speech on Paper: Victorian Phonography, Charles Dickens, and the Reform of Writing," in Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture, ed. Leah Price and Pam Thurschwell, Ashgate, 2004.
"Victorian Poetry's Modernity." Victorian Poetry 41 (4), Winter 2003.
"Fear of a Punk Planet." The Nation, Jan 13/20, 2003.
Selected Honors and Awards
Midwest Victorian Studies Association First Book Award, for a book published in 2005 or 2006, for Voice and the Victorian Storyteller, 2008
Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, I.U., 2005-6
Harrington Faculty Fellow, University of Texas, Austin, 2005-6
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship, 2003
Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, University of Chicago, 1999-2001
Additional Information
Co-editor of Victorian Studies, 2002-
Executive Board member, ex officio, North American Victorian Studies Association, 2002-
Executive Committee, MLA Discussion Group on Literature and Media, 2005-2008
