░    ░    ░    ░    ░    ░

Jamie Horrocks:  Having completed undergraduate and graduate degrees in both Victorian literature and art history, I am particularly interested in aesthetic theory and its intersection with late nineteenth-century British culture. Currently, I am writing a dissertation that considers the manner in which the language and ideas encompassing a perfectionist ethic of self-cultivation typically associated with a minor strand of liberal philosophy are taken up by a handful of fin de siècle aestheticist writers. By thinking about aestheticist and liberal philosophy in terms of their similar investments in the progressive shaping of human character and by reading aestheticist texts for their conceptions of agency, self-cultivation, and authenticity, I hope to contribute to the critical revaluation of authors such as Elizabeth Pennell, Vernon Lee, John Oliver Hobbs, and George Fleming, for whom the ethical work of self-perfection became a defining aspect of         aestheticism. 

John Paul M. Kanwit: My dissertation, “Seers as Writers: Art Criticism and Victorian Visual Literacy,” rethinks recent attention to visual cultures by examining the development of what became an important Victorian literary genre: art criticism.  The explosion of Victorian visual culture in a period when art education was a national concern for Britain provided professional art critics with unprecedented social power.  Scholarship to date, however, has often been restricted to a narrow collection of writers on art: John Ruskin, Walter Pater, William Morris, and Oscar Wilde.  By treating influential, but now less well-known critics such as Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, and Emilia Dilke, and by focusing on critical debates rather than celebrated figures, “Seers as Writers” allows a more penetrating and accurate understanding of this pervasive aspect of Victorian society.  Most prominently, the dissertation refines our conception of a complicated tension in the period: that between a heightened access to high culture and a renewed reliance on authority figures.  Much recent theory argues that little changed from the elitist and controlling aesthetics of the eighteenth century, when viewers were supposed to appreciate art without outside assistance.  But Victorian critics actually display an increased willingness to democratize visual art through the use of verbal mediation. While some of their commentaries reinforce class and gender divisions, women art critics demonstrate with particular force a tendency to subvert traditional ways of seeing--a revisionist aesthetic evident in the novels of Charlotte Brontë, Anne Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot.  These novelists read Victorian art critics--including those now less famous--and used their lessons to reconfigure the power relationships represented in key moments of spectatorship in Villette, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, North and South, and Middlemarch.

Laura Kasson: I am interested in the connections between music and text, particularly in the Victorian period.  This brings me to a range of subtopics, from the language of vocal pedagogy to feminist criticism of opera to the status of the term "voice" as a metaphor.  My master's thesis (at the University of Birmingham in England) was on a slightly different topic, Charlotte Brontë's discussions of her reading in her letters, but I am now starting to think about that piece in relation to canon formation along gender lines, which relates to the gendered (or ungendered) nature of the writer's voice.   I have a strong interest in Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas as a site of music/text tension and collaboration.  I am in my first year in the PhD program, but it is probable that my dissertation will treat the relationship between music and text in the nineteenth century and will probably involve non-literary as well as literary texts.

Jason Lindquist: My dissertation, “A ‘Pure Excess of Complexity’: Tropical Surfeit, the Observing Subject, and the Text, 1773-1871” draws on a range of genres—travel narrative, natural history writing, aesthetic theory, and the novel—to show how excess, hyperfecundity, and complexity became the subject of active reflection during the nineteenth century. Worried that unfamiliar natural and cultural “minute particulars” had power to overwhelm received aesthetic and generic schemas such as the travel narrative, the picturesque view, or the bildungsroman, Victorian observers including Harriet Martineau, Charles Kingsley, Charles Darwin, Alexander von Humboldt, and John Tyndall, began to conceptualize a new kind of observer, one who could confront, manage, and even derive aesthetic satisfaction from the provocations of excess.

Abby Mann: I am working on my dissertation, currently titled "Darwin's Sisters: Observational Experiments in Sisterhood in the Late Nineteenth-Century." Twentieth and twenty-first century feminisms have not been kind to Darwinism, yet at the end of the nineteenth century, many women turned to Darwinian ideas to offer support for feminism.  My project seeks to understand exactly how Darwinism was deployed as a pro-female rights discourse at the end of the nineteenth century in both England and America. Examining the fiction of George Eliot, Mona Caird, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, I trace their observational experimentation of potentialities, a methodology drawn from Darwinian ideas which focuses on the idea of creating and observing constant minute variations in conditions with the recognition that there are no fixed narratives, but multiple possibilities. Developing Darwinian ideas in fiction allows these writers to examine the multiplicity of ways in which both men and women have hindered female development, and to outline the elements required for change, developing aesthetic depth while maintaining a feminist political agenda.

Amy Manning: My dissertation investigates how the illustrated literary text imagines a national past. The questions I am interested include: What historiography is produced by the interaction of words and images? What special means does the illustrated text have for producing facticity? How does the illustrated text mediate between modernity and historicity? What is the special role of medievalism within the illustrated past? I am also interested in pedagogy.

Ashley Miller: I work on nineteenth-century poetry, both Romantic and Victorian, and I’m also interested in nineteenth-century physiology.  My dissertation (currently under construction) will explore the relationship between bodies and media in the discourses surrounding the poetry of the period.  In particular, I’m interested in the ways in which print poetry imagines a very physical reading body.  I grew up in Michigan, and I got my BA at Vassar College before coming here to Bloomington.  Recently, I had the chance to serve as co-chair for our national interdisciplinary graduate student conference, “Going Awry.”

Bryan Rasmussen : “The Serpent and the Dove: Gender and Epistemology in Victorian Culture” is a cultural history of Victorian women’s social writing. It rethinks the genealogy of the social sciences by examining women’s literary contribution to the production of social knowledge. Against the grain of traditional histories that trace this genealogy in the Victorian material sciences of statistics and population theory, my project identifies a competing spiritual, moral epistemology. This narrative, subordinated for reasons of gender, genre, and religion, has been critically undervalued as a source for social science. However, by seeing women novelists, spiritual autobiographers, nurses, and urban missionaries as part of the history of knowledge, and by rethinking the history of sociology through the lens of gender, genre, and religion, I hope to force a reevaluation of our understanding of the concept of knowledge in the human sciences.

Julie Wise: My dissertation, "The Lamp and the Ledger: Victorian Poetry and Liberal Thought," uncovers an intimate link between Victorian poetry and liberalism, the period’s dominant mode of political and philosophical thought.  Focusing on poetry from the 1860s, a decade when increasing numbers and varieties of people gained the right to vote, I argue that the genre models not only the quality of thought and feeling that comes with having an autonomous liberal self but also ways in which that self might participate in a democratic community.  This connection had its beginnings in the poetic and political theory of John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold--for both writers, the former anticipated the latter.  But it also became a critical factor in the work of poets from Isa Craig and Christina Rossetti to Robert Browning and Augusta Webster.