Jill Galvan
Associate Professor
She/her/hers
533 Denney Hall
164 Annie & John Glenn Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210
Areas of Expertise
- Victorian literature and culture
- Twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction
- Aesthetics and genre
- Posthumanism and alternate humanisms
- Media theory and history
Education
- PhD, University of California – Los Angeles
- MA, University of California – Los Angeles
- BA, University of Texas – Austin
Jill Galvan’s first book was The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult and Communication Technologies, 1859-1919 (Cornell University Press, 2010). More recently, her interests have turned to realist aesthetics as seen in stories of marriage. She is co-editor of the essay collection Replotting Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (The Ohio State University Press, 2018). Her current monograph project, After Romance: Troubled Marriage and the Sense and Time of Lifelikeness, offers a theory of the common elements of strained-marriage fiction. Secondarily, it argues that this fiction provides an exceptional avenue for understanding the form and dynamics of realism (distinctly from conventional literary historical definitions). After Romance’s analysis extends from the Victorians, beginning with George Eliot and Oscar Wilde, to modern and contemporary narrative, ending with James Baldwin and Tayari Jones. Galvan was awarded the OSU English Undergraduate Organization's Professor of the Year in 2021. She regularly teaches courses on long nineteenth-century British literature and culture, often juxtaposed with later works. Some topics of recent specialized courses: undoing Victorian realism; rethinking the marriage plot; the fin de siècle; Charles Dickens, satire, and modern Gothic; and Oscar Wilde.
Selected Articles
- “Love Story’s Ontology: Species Feeling in New Grub Street.” Victorian Review, vol. 48, no. 1, 2022, pp. 69-90.
- "Marital Realism: Beauty and Pettiness in Middlemarch." Novel, vol. 54, no. 2, 2021, pp. 189-209.
- “Character.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, no. 3/4, 2018, pp. 612-16. (Keywords issue.)
- “Occult Networks and the Legacy of the Indian Rebellion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” History of Religions, vol. 54, no. 4, 2015, pp. 434-58. (Winner of annual INCS essay prize.)
- "Corelli’s Caliban in a Glass: Realism, Anti-Realism and The Sorrows of Satan." English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, vol. 57, 2014, pp. 335-60.
- "Tennyson's Ghosts: The Psychical Research Case of the Cross-Correspondences, 1901-c. 1936.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga. (Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 2012).
- "The Victorian Post-Human: Information, Transmission and the Séance." The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn. (Ashgate, 2012).
