Barbara J. Black

Barbara Black is Professor of English at Skidmore College where she teaches courses in Victorian literature and culture. Her current book project, Hotel London: How Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and Its Stories, completes a trilogy of works on influential and era-defining institutions in nineteenth-century England. Coming out in fall 2019 from Ohio State University Press, Hotel London joins On Exhibit (Virginia 2000) and A Room of His Own (Ohio 2012; paperback 2013). These three studies, respectively, focus on the grand hotel, the museum, and the gentlemen’s social club, emergent institutions that were central to the rise of capitalism in the nineteenth century. Black’s essays have appeared in such venues as Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Poetry, the Dickens Studies Annual, and the Grolier Encyclopedia of the Victorian Era. The former Book Review Editor for the international journal Nineteenth-Century Contexts, she is also on the graduate faculty of the Sewanee School of Letters in Tennessee. Black’s career as both scholar and teacher has focused on questions pertaining to self and society; the distinctive spaces of the city; the matter of nation-making; and the mechanisms of social belonging.