Jill Galvan’s first book was The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult and Communication Technologies, 1859-1919 (Cornell University Press, 2010). 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, The Quiet Fight: Feeling, Time, and the Form of Marriage Fiction, argues for a pervasive genre of story, now common in novels, film, and television, about ordinary love troubles within married couples. Ranging from the Victorians (George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, George Gissing and others) up to 20th- and 21st-century authors (Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Jenny Offill, Tayari Jones and others) and filmmakers (including Ingmar Bergman and Charles Burnett), this book offers a new account of character, emotion, time and relationality in wedlock fiction. This account deliberately shifts away from a focus on the marriage plot. Focusing instead on plots of everyday wedlock difficulty revises our sense of realism, allowing us to recognize how challenging and formally flexible it is in its representation of race, gender, history and the human.

Galvan was awarded the OSU English Undergraduate Organization's Professor of the Year in 2021. She regularly teaches on the long nineteenth century British literature, as well as modern and contemporary literature. 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 Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies 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).

Curriculum Vitae