Wendy Graham

I am a professor of English at Vassar College. My first book, Henry James’s Thwarted Love (Stanford 1999), reflects my central interests: American and British literature, literary theory, gender and culture studies. The book locates the novelist and his works within the key discursive frameworks that emerged during his lifetime: mental hygiene, sexology, psychology, and anthropology. Though widely published on James (on film, painting, the city), I have resisted turning James scholarship into a cottage industry. My second book, Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity (Columbia UP 2017), documents the symbiotic relationship between journeymen critics of the Victorian period and the artists and poets they helped make famous. Celebrity is an area of interest to a diverse range of readers across temporal and geographic borders as a well as departments of instruction. As a scholar, I am inclined to uncover an older provenance for concepts, such as aesthetic celebrity, the birth of the homosexual subject, or the avant-garde. I am attentive to the situation of the literary work and consistently strive to reveal the contemporary (in many cases that means 19th-century) understanding of class, race, gender, and modernity. I consider myself a close reader notwithstanding these extra-curricular interests.

Education: U.C. Berkeley undergraduate; M.A. and Ph.D., Columbia University.

I consider that my education is continuing…