MEEGAN KENNEDY, Associate Professor, Ph.D. Brown University
(2000), M.A. University of Virginia (1992), B.A. Yale University (1988). Dr. Kennedy's research interests include Victorian literature and culture, the British novel, Victorian science and medicine, periodical studies, gender studies, and literature and medicine. She is particularly interested in nineteenth-century theories of visuality and representation. She is an affiliated faculty member with the History and Philosophy of Science Program.
REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS
- "A True Prophet"? Speculation in Victorian Sensory Physiology and George Eliot's "The Lifted Veil" Nineteenth-Century Literature, forthcoming, 42 pp.
- "The Victorian Novel and Medicine," in Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel, ed. Lisa Rodensky (forthcoming).
- "Medicine and Sensation," in Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. Pamela Gilbert (Blackwell: 2011): 481-92.
- Revising the Clinic: Vision and Representation in Victorian Medical Narrative and the Novel. Ohio State University Press, 2010.
- "Some Body's Story: The Novel as Instrument," NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 42.1/2 (Winter 2009, special issue on "Theories of the Novel Now").
- "Diagnosis or Detour? The Uses of Medical Realism in the Victorian Novel," Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 48 (February 2008, special issue on "Interdisciplinarity and the Body"). http://www.erudit.org/revue/ravon/2008/v/n49/017858ar.html?lang=en
- "'Poor Hoo Loo': Sentiment, Stoicism, and the Grotesque in British Imperial Medicine." Victorian Freaks, Ed. Marlene Tromp. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. 79-113.
- "The Ghost in the Clinic: Gothic Medicine and Curious Fiction in Samuel Warren's Diary of a Late Physician," Victorian Literature and Culture 32.2 (Fall 2004).
- "Syphilis and the Hysterical Female: The Limits of Realism in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins," Women's Writing, 11.2 (June 2004).
RECENT REVIEWS AND OTHER PUBLICATIONS
- Review of Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840-1900. Social History of Medicine 2011; doi: 10.1093/shm/hkr150
- Review of Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, by Martha Stoddard Holmes. Literature and Medicine, 25.1 (Spring 2006): 172-75.
- Review of Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body, by Anna Krugovoy Silver. Victorian Studies 47.2 (Winter 2005): 285-86.
CURRENT RESEARCH
My current book project, Beautiful Mechanism, examines Victorians' romance with the microscope and its analogue, the eye. In other work, I am also exploring how nineteenth-century British novels and medical texts begin to use and resist using visual quantitative narratives, specifically tables, charts, and statistics. Please check out my website, meegankennedy.wordpress.com, for more information.