Purdue University College of Liberal Arts
Information for
19th Century Literary Studies
The nineteenth-century area at Purdue offers graduate students a wide array of different methodological, pedagogical, and theoretical approaches to the study of literature and culture. English Department faculty members, Emily Allen and Dino Felluga, support the North American Victorian Studies Association; and are both members of NAVSA's founding Executive Council. Faculty strengths include nineteenth-century drama, poetry, prose and the novel; poststructuralist, Lacanian, and feminist theory; science and literature; new historicism; cultural studies; and postmodernism. Four of our faculty also participate in the Theory and Cultural Studies Concentration in the department. In addition to numerous books, the nineteenth-century group at Purdue has published essays and reviews in a number of major period and discipline journals: Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Dickens Studies Annual, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association, ELH: English Literary History, SEL: Studies in English Literature, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Language and Style, and Criticism. Faculty and students in the Nineteenth-Century Group have numeous ties to interdisciplinary programs, departments, and concentrations such as Theory and Cultural Studies, Philosophy and Literature, Women's Studies, and Comparative Literature. Students are encouraged to broaden their knowledge of the nineteenth century by taking courses in these areas or in other departments (particularly Foreign Language and Literature, History, Art History, and Philosophy).
Students at Purdue have at their disposal numerous nearby collections of nineteenth-century material, including the John M. Wing Foundation collection dedicated to the art of printing at the Newberry Library, Chicago, and the impressive nineteenth-century holdings of the University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champagne (the third largest academic library in the United States, after Harvard and Yale), particularly the William Allingham Papers, the Bentley, Richard and Son Papers, the Charles E. Mudie Collection, as well as their famous Dickens and Twain Collection. Thanks to funding from the Purdue Teaching and Research Incentive Grant, Emily Allen has undertaken to put together for Purdue's English department its own collection of slides dedicated to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art and architecture.
We welcome applications from students interested in all aspects of nineteenth-century literature and culture.