Christie Harner

|Senior Lecturer
Academic Appointments
  • Assistant Dean of Faculty for Fellowship Advising

  • Senior Lecturer in English

  • Faculty Director, Stamps Scholars Program

I teach and write about the intersection of narrative structure and Victorian scientific culture, including work in ecocriticism, animal studies, physics, and photographic technology. Recent and forthcoming publications include essays on photography and species relations (from the nineteenth century to the present), temporalities in The Jungle Books, and ecologies in Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey. My book project, The Realism of the Unseen, traces the emergence in Victorian culture of a vector of realism focused on what could not be sensed but was known to exist. In it, works by Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Lady Clementina Hawarden, Bram Stoker and others push against the boundaries of the senses to expand the categories of who could be represented (i.e. women, members of the working classes, and people of color) and to what ends. Other teaching and research interests include global Victorian fiction, children's literature, evolutionary thought, and nineteenth-century visual culture.  

Contact

Parker House, Room 205
HB 6032

Education

  • B.A. University of Virginia
  • M.A. Northwestern University
  • PhD Northwestern University

Selected Publications

  • "Can assessment-specific marking criteria and electronic comment libraries increase student engagement with assessment and feedback?" Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 2021. With Alison Graham and Sara Marsham.

    "Transgressive Seriality: Netflix, the Victorian Novel, and Student Novellas in the 2020 Classroom." “Teaching to Transgress” in the Emergency Remote Classroom, special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, edited by Kimberly Cox, Shannon Draucker, and Doreen Thierauf, vol. 17, no. 1, 2021. 

    “Animal and Social Ecologies in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey,” Victorian Literature and Culture 48.3 (2020): 577-99.

    "Bush Animals, Developmental Time, and Colonial Identity in Victorian Australian Children's Fiction," in Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture, eds. Brenda Ayres and Sarah Elizabeth Maier. New York: Routledge, 2019.

    “Geopolitical Temporalities and Animal Ecologies in The Jungle Books,” Victorian Review 45 (2019): 135-52.

    "The 'Animality' of Speech and Translation in The Jungle Books," in Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash, ed. Brenda Ayres. New York: Routledge, 2019.

    "Professional Victorianisms: Immediacy, Urgency, and Interdisciplinarity in/at Work," Nineteenth-Century Contexts 39.4 (September 2017): 249-67. With Winter Werner, Paula Krebs, and Liz McCabe. 

    “Physiognomic Discourse and the Trials of Cross-Class Sympathy in Mary Barton,” Victorian Literature and Culture 43.4 (2015): 705-724.

    “Reading the ‘Postal Effect’ of John Caldigate as a Challenge to Victorian Post-Colonialism,” Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature (March 2015).

    “‘Loose from Wholesome Guidance:’ Phrenology’s and Physiognomy’s Narrative of Anxiety,” ELN 47.2 (Fall/Winter 2009): 61-73.

Works In Progress

"Phylogenetic Alterities in the Photographic Anthropocene," in Futures Uncertain: Contemporary Art in the Anthropocene, ed. Chad Elias

"Displacements of British-Colonial Identity in the Convict Returnee Genre"