PhD in English, Vanderbilt University, 2005  

MA in English, University of Central Oklahoma, with honors, 2001

BA in English, University of Central Oklahoma, cum laude, 1992

Assistant Professor of English, Spelman College, 2007-present

Primary responsibilities include teaching three courses per semester, publishing significant research in my field, and participating in departmental and college-wide service.

Lecturer in English, Vanderbilt University, 2005-2007

Primary responsibilities included teaching three courses per semester, pursuing research in my field, and serving as a faculty mentor to graduate teaching fellows.

Graduate Teaching Fellow, Vanderbilt University, 2002-2004

Primary responsibilities included teaching one course per semester, while maintaining a full course load and pursuing independent research.

Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Central Oklahoma, 1999-2000

Primary responsibilities included teaching two courses per semester while maintaining a full course load.

Courses Taught at Spelman (2007-present): Developed All Syllabi

All courses have a significant writing component and incorporate multi-modal assignments into the curriculum. Class size ranges from fifteen to twenty-five students per section.

First-Year Composition (ENG 103)

I design this course as a semiotics-based analysis of popular culture, which introduces students to complex critical thinking skills through familiar cultural forms. Students critically read, think, and write about television, music, print advertising, websites, literature, and film. Individual assignments include argument essays, research papers, blogs, Power Point presentations, and response papers. Group assignments include creating websites, advertising campaigns, or short films to present an argumentative stance about a cultural medium.    

Images of the Grotesque in Literature (ENG 412B)

This is a senior seminar that I created to explore how the paradigm of the grotesque is represented through a broad range of literary texts, primarily those of the nineteenth century. Students read the literature through an interdisciplinary theoretical approach, including psychoanalytic theory, gender theory, race theory, disability studies, and age studies. This course intersects with my research interest in age studies, as the class engages the question of how these representations of the grotesque shape an understanding of contemporary cultural questions, ranging from the pathologization of the aging body to the vulgarization of the Other.

Introduction to Critical Studies (ENG 285)

Drawing on the departmental revision of this course as an introduction to literary theory, critical analysis, and research methods, I have designed a series of fourth-hour enhancement assignments that train students in the art of abstracting theoretical texts, and have designed a series of professionalization workshops that introduce students to current bibliographic and research methods in the discipline of literary studies.

Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Literature (ENG 317)

Rather than structure my syllabus for this survey course in strict chronological order, I organize it into four socio-historical units: 1) “The Restoration of Culture,” which examines the artistic and aesthetic implications of Charles II’s coronation; 2) “Vagabonds, Rakes, and Rogues,” which examines the literary fascination with shifting mores and criminality; 3) “Reading Race and Empire,” which examines the relationship among imperial expansion, abolitionist movements, and racial identity; and, 4) “Gender and Genre,” which examines the rise of the novel as a feminized form. Teaching the course in this way provides students with a clearer view of the shifts in both literary and cultural discourses for particular ideological debates across the long eighteenth century.

Romantic and Victorian Literature (ENG 327)

In this survey course, I offer an approach that provides in-depth cultural analysis of the nineteenth-century in a primarily student-driven manner. Students are assigned social issues or topics that resonate with particular literary texts that we are studying as a class. They are required to research and present their topic to the class and relate it to the course readings. For example, student presentations on Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species might coincide with a reading of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four, a Sherlock Holmes mystery that takes up the issue of evolutionary theory through its characters. By asking students to become “experts” in a particular piece of nineteenth-century culture, I find that they are much more engaged in examining the relationship between literary and cultural discourses.

Publications

Book in Progress

“Producing Age: Gender, Work, and the Victorian Body.” ms. 237pp. Manuscript revisions in progress. My book-in-progress analyzes nineteenth-century discourses of productivity through the medium of literary and cultural texts about aging. The most significant, yet understudied factor in the debate over productivity, age offers new perspectives on the Victorian concept of productivity as an articulation of the gendered body. I examine cultural debates surrounding the “Age Question” between the 1834 Poor Law Reform Act and the 1908 Old Age Pensions Act in Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Margaret Oliphant, as well as related social texts.

Refereed Articles and Book Chapters

“Illness, Aging, and Deformity.” Poe in Context. Ed. Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming 2012. ms. 15pp.

“Trollope’s Short Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope. Eds. Carolyn Dever and Lisa Niles. Cambridge University Press. 2011.

“Owning the ‘dreadful truth’; Or, Is Thirty Five Too Old To Marry?: Age and the Marriageable Body in Wilkie Collins's Armadale.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 65 (2010): 65-92.

“Malthusian Menopause: Aging and Sexuality in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford.” Victorian Literature and Culture 33 (2005): 293-310.

“‘May the married be single, and the single happy’: Blackwood’s, the Maga for the Single Man.” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 25 (2002): 102-21. Rpt. in Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture. Ed. Kim Wheatley. London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003.

Edited Book

The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope. Co-editor with Carolyn Dever. Cambridge University Press. 2011.

Book Reviews

Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain, by Kay Heath. SUNY Press, 2009. Journal of British Studies. Forthcoming in 2011.

Recent Presentations

Invited Presentations

"The Power of Work: Ageism and Anthony Trollope." The Cultural Politics of Ageing in the Nineteenth Century Conference. University of Regensburg (Germany), November 2011.

“Everything Old is New Again: The Aging New Woman in Business.” South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA). Atlanta, GA. November 2010.

“A “man old enough to be her father”: Anthony Trollope’s Paternal Marriage Plot,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association (INCS), University of Texas, Austin, TX, April 2010.

“‘The Ashes of Cleopatra’: Dickens and the Cosmetics of Aging,” Modern Language Association (MLA), San Diego, CA, December 2003.

International, National, and Regional Conferences

"When New Women Become Old and Old Women Become New: The Nature of Doing Business in Margaret Oliphant's Hester."  Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, Claremont College,  Claremont, CA, April 2011.

"In Pursuit of 'Prime': Masculinity, Aging, and Work in Anthony Trollope,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, April 2009.

“‘Forger…adulteress, murderess, and thief, aged thirty-five’: Reviewing the Character of Cosmetics in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale,” Research Society of Victorian Periodicals, University of Roehampton, London, England, July 2008.

“Nice Work if You Can Get It?: The Serious (Dis)Pleasure of Retirement,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, April 2004.

“‘Have you not now written a tarradiddle to your friend?’: Ladies, Letters, and Lies in Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage,” Midwest Modern Language Association, Minneapolis, MN, November 2002.

“(Un)natural Trust: Defamiliarizing the Familiar Letter in Doctor Thorne,” Nineteenth Century Studies Association, Savannah, GA, March 2002.

“‘Un Vieux Celibataire’ and Blue Stocking Ladies: Re-writing Intellectuality as Domesticity in Blackwood’s Magazine,” South Central Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, South Padre Island, TX, February 2002.

Updated 20 December 2010

Copyright © 2011 Lisa Niles