UVA Hire – Assistant Professor in 19th-century British literature and culture – Review begins Nov 15, 2023

The University of Virginia’s Department of English invites applications for a full-time tenure-track, assistant professorship in nineteenth-century British literature and culture, expected to begin August 25, 2024. We are receptive to many approaches within the long period and orbit of the British empire. Thus, we welcome candidates with specializations in Romanticism, Victorian studies, postcolonial and diasporic studies, formal or affect studies, critiques of gender, race, and class, cultural histories of media, exhibitions, or performances, nineteenth-century natural or social science, archival or data-driven studies. The department hopes to extend its longstanding strengths in literary history as well as theory, studies in poetry, bibliography, and book history as well as digital humanities. 

Qualifications

Applicants should expect to complete a PhD (required) in a relevant mode of literary, cultural, or historical studies by August 25, 2024, have a promising record of publication, and an innovative research program. Candidates should demonstrate interest in teaching and mentorship of students and a willingness to contribute to the scholarly life of the Department of English and its MA and PhD programs.

Application Instructions

Visit http://apply.interfolio.com/130424 FOR MORE DETAILS ON POSITION AND APPLICATION

Review of applications is expected to begin on November 15, 2023 and will continue until the position is filled. The University will perform background checks on all new hires prior to employment.

We will only consider complete applications. Questions about this position should be directed to Chair of the Search Committee Alison Booth at [email protected] or Chair of the Department Andy Stauffer at [email protected]. Procedural questions may also be directed to Melanie Sponaugle, Academic Recruiter, at [email protected].

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Cluster Hire in Global Anglophone Literatures – Position #3 Long-Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literature – Submit by 1 Oct 2023 (11:59 PM PST) for full consideration.

The Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego invites applications for three tenure-track Assistant Professor appointments in Global Anglophone Literatures to begin Fall 2024. The Literature Department seeks to hire three specialists across the fields of medieval/early modern studies, the long eighteenth century, and the long nineteenth century. This cluster hire aims to attract applicants with a research focus on race and empire who employ multilingual/comparative approaches that situate Anglophone literatures in a global frame. Expertise in additional fields of study or transhistorical theoretical approaches (such as critical race studies, disability studies, ecocriticism, gender studies, Marxism, queer or trans studies, among others) would be viewed favorably.

The cluster hire intends to attract a group of scholars and teachers whose projects anticipate a new vision of language, literary, and cultural studies in higher education for the 21st century. We seek candidates who are able to teach the history and development of British literature but who are also eager to reimagine an innovative curriculum that presents Anglophone literature in a global frame. New hires will work closely with one another as a team, as well as with the department, in crafting new approaches to Global Anglophone Literatures. Position #1 in Medieval and/or Early Modern Anglophone Literature, Position #2 in Long-Eighteenth-Century Anglophone Literature, and Position #3 in Long-Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literature.

Position #3: Long-Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literature

The successful candidate will conduct research that historicizes the geographies of the “global anglophone” from the perspective of nineteenth-century studies and that pushes the boundaries of traditional nineteenth-century British and Anglophone literary studies. The candidate will teach courses and advise graduate students in nineteenth-century British literature and culture and will have the opportunity to teach and advise students beyond this area as well.

Department of Literature faculty work across disciplines in a variety of languages and time periods; many of us also employ both creative and critical methods in our work. Thus, we welcome applicants that approach their fields in capacious modes that may be less legible in traditional English or Comparative Literature departments.

Faculty in the Literature department are expected to produce original research publications, to teach courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, to supervise and mentor graduate students, to contribute to service activities at the department, campus and system-wide levels and to contribute to UC San Diego’s goal of creating and sustaining diverse, equitable and inclusive communities on campus and beyond.

Authorization to work in the US is a prerequisite of employment (Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1985).

To read the full job posting or apply: https://apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF03654

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INCS Stein Prize 2022:

Winner: Anat Rosenberg, “Ways of Seeing Advertising: Law and the Making of Visual Commercial Culture.” Law and Social Inquiry (2021): 1-45.

This article focuses on a little-known yet significant mid-Victorian development in commercial culture, the hoarding–a dedicated space on which sellers could put up posters to advertise their wares. Rosenberg’s analysis strikingly complicates a conventionally imagined art-versus-capitalism binary. While we typically think of commercial display as unartful, in fact, she argues, the hoarding played a substantial role in negotiating ideas of public art. In a particularly fascinating comparison, she likens the hoarding to the public space of the museum. The committee was also impressed by the strong interdisciplinary nature of this argument. Rosenberg brings together the field of law with the field of art history, proposing that, over the course of the nineteenth century, legal disputes and regulations around the hoarding helped to shape modern aesthetics. This essay points our way to a necessary object of study for further inquiry around the law, art, and industry.

Honorable Mention 1: Nicholas Robbins, “John Constable, Luke Howard, and the Aesthetics of Climate.” The Art Bulletin 103.2 (2021): 50-76.

This essay asks, “How does momentary sensory experience relate to systems that spread beyond the frame and scale of representability? What does painting have to do with data?” Through close attention to painter John Constable’s artist’s notes and compositions, as compared with climate scientist Luke Howard’s notebooks and calculations, the essay challenges assumptions that Victorian skyscapes are arbitrarily rendered.  The essay tracks “the particular challenges that climate posed to visual representation,” and how mathematical and aesthetic seeing requires prolonged attention to atmospheric conditions and events. The committee praised Robbins’ well-developed and convincing argument, clear and vibrant writing, and interdisciplinary engagement across statistics, aesthetics, ecology, and meteorology. 

Honorable Mention 2: Rebecca Mitchell, “Victorian Faddishness: The Dolly Varden from Dickens to Patience.” Journal of Victorian Culture 26.2 (2021): 153-171.

This article analyzes the concept of the fad as a Victorian phenomenon by tracing the cultural significance of a dress known as the Dolly Varden.  From its 18^th century continental origins to its appearance in Dickens’s 1841 Barnaby Rudge to the culmination of the dress’s popularity after its appearance in Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1881 Patience, when it became a “symbol of pop-culture-based Aestheticism,” the Dolly Varden, for Mitchell, exemplifies the “insistently presentist” nature of the fad.  Mitchell studies a diverse array of subjects in this interdisciplinary essay, which also draws on a wide body of critical sources. The committee was impressed by the way the essay wove together the complex storylines of the Dolly Varden’s origins and afterlives, by its engaging style, and by this particular case study’s broader intervention about Victorian popular culture.

Stein Prize Committee: Jill Galvan (Chair), Anne O’Neil-Henry, and Melissa Jenkins.

INCS Susan Morgan Graduate Essay Prize 2022:

Winning Entry: Oriah Amit, “H. Rider Haggard’s Doctor Therne and the Liberal Politics of Public Health” 

This paper analyzes H. Rider Haggard’s lesser-known Dr. Therne, a “vaccination novel” that anticipates a dystopian future in which public health is jeopardized for political gain. The committee commended the essay’s thoughtful attention to temporal complications for public health and for individual bodies when thinking about vaccine fictions. The paper’s layering of medical and narrative chronologies was thought-provoking, highlighting the novel’s anticipation of retrospection, which Amit links to the temporality of vaccination. Tracing the novel’s “epidemiological form and function,” the author argues that “the narrative present is haunted by a future that is always already past.” The paper contextualizes the nineteenth-century anti-vaccination movement as part of a radical left resistance to the statist oversight of private citizens and links the defense of vaccination to Haggard’s conservative politics. A very timely and important reminder of the complex prehistory of the anti-vaxx movement and the tension between individual liberty and the public good.

Honorable Mention: Grace Franklin, “The Layered History of Psychosocial Gaslighting”

Taking the explosion of uses of the term “gaslighting” and its diffusion of meanings as a starting point, this paper considers the multiple competing versions of the original Gaslight play and its subsequent film adaptations, in the context of the early twentieth-century energy shift from gas distribution networks to electricity. Compellingly written, this paper skillfully pulled together nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary sources with energy studies to present an effective examination of the role of power infrastructures and technology in relation to the heroine’s agency (or lack thereof) with each iteration of the story.

Susan Morgan Prize Committee: Alexandre Bonafas (Chair), Jen Camden, Elizabeth Chang, and Ruth McAdams.