Rae Greiner

Assistant Professor

Ph.D., English, University of California, Berkeley, 2007
M.A. (1996) and B.S. (1992) in English, Radford University

Email

---

Rae Greiner received her PhD from the University of California Berkeley in 2007 and joined IU’s Department of English that year. Her broad area of study is the British nineteenth century, where she specializes in the novel. Particular interests include the study of aesthetic forms, affect, moral philosophy, narrative theory, and ethical criticism. Her first book, Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Johns Hopkins University Press), reads nineteenth-century fiction in relation to Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments to argue for the development of a literary realism for which sympathetic protocols are necessary for confirming and maintaining social reality. She’s written on “maggots” in Adam Bede — freakish, sometimes sublime ideas that lodge intractably in the mind — for the Blackwell Companion to George Eliot (forthcoming). Her second book project, The Idiocy of Human Life: the Science of Intelligence and the Uses of Stupidity, 1790-1870, is in part a study of stupidity and intelligence as these were used to distinguish forms of biological life along the "animal/vegetable/mineral" divide. She has published essays in ELH, Narrative,Victorian Studies, and BRANCH, and regularly attends the Dickens Universe.