Amanpal Garcha specializes in nineteenth-century British literature, the theory and history of the novel and literary theory. He is the author of From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2009) as well as numerous essays and reviews.

Recent publications include the following:

• “Emma’s Choices: Economics and Modern Narratives of Decision-Making,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 55.2 (2022) forthcoming.
• “The Fixed Period and Ecologies of Choice,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 62 (2020): 128-48.
• “Narrating Choice in Later Nineteenth-Century Novels and Neoclassical Economics,” in From Political Economy to Economics: Theory, History, Literature, Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter, eds. (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 197-218.
• “The Fixed Period and the Ecologies of Choice,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, forthcoming.
• “Career” (keyword entry), Victorian Literature and Culture 46 (2018): 598-601.
• “Cybernetics,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Literary and Cultural Theory, Jeffrey DiLeo, ed. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 432-3.
• “Forgetting Thackeray and Unmaking Careers,” Victorian Literature and Culture 46 (2018): 531-45.
• “Imagining a Professional Future: Cognitive Criticism in Our Era of Information Work,” Symploke 24 (2016): 385-409.

• “Choosing Nature: Affect and Economics in Wordsworth’s The Prelude,” in Green Romantics: Affect and Ecology in the Nineteenth Century, Lisa Ottum and Seth Reno, eds. (Boston: University Press of New England, 2016), 186-207.

His current book project, tentatively titled Preference: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Modern Forms of Choice, focuses on the connections between economic theories of decision-making and literary representations of choice in nineteenth-century culture.

Garcha regularly serves as a faculty member for the Dickens Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has won the Department of English's award for Graduate Professor of the Year three times, in 2005, 2014, and 2016. 

In 2020, he won the department’s Marlene Longenecker Award for Teaching and Leadership