Emily Steinlight specializes in nineteenth-century British literature, with a focus on the relationship between political thought and literary form, as well as the history and theory of the novel, mass politics, the Victorian natural and social sciences, and critical theory. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University, where she held a Graduate Fellowship at the Cogut Center for the Humanities and the Roland G. D. Richardson Fellowship in the Department of English. She has taught at Trinity University and, before that, at the University of Chicago, where she was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities. She is currently completing revisions on a book manuscript titled "The Biopolitical Imagination: Literary Form and the Politics of Population," which reveals how Romantic and Victorian writing gave form to a theoretical surplus of human life and recast that surplus as the necessary condition for modern politics. Her next book project, "Unmanageable Thoughts," examines the interplay of Victorian psychological theory and the social division of labor in order to consider why consciousness emerges as one of the defining problems of the nineteenth century. Steinlight’s essays appear in such journals as ELH, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and Narrative.
19th-Century British Literature
English