- Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2007
Rae Greiner
she/her/hers
Associate Professor, English
Editor, Victorian Studies
she/her/hers
Associate Professor, English
Editor, Victorian Studies
My broad area of study is the British nineteenth century, where I specialize in the theory and history of the novel. Particular interests include moral philosophy, theories of sympathy and of realism, and narrative theory, but I teach a variety of subjects and approaches. My first book, Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Johns Hopkins 2012), considers nineteenth-century fiction in relation to Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments to argue for the development of a literary realism for which sympathetic protocols are necessary for confirming and maintaining social reality. My book in progress, Stupidity after Enlightenment, is a study of stupidity's value for scientists and artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am co-editor of the journal Victorian Studies.
“Stupid Dickens” (curated forum), Introduction and “Dickensian Stupidity: Response,” Dickens Studies Annual 46 (2015): 321-4 and 377-83.
“The victorian Subject: Thackeray’s Wartime Subjects.“ In The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, Ed. Juliet John. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
“Bleak House: Pastoral,” Critical Quarterly.55.1 (2013): 75-93.
“Adam Bede: History’s Maggots,” The Blackwell Companion to George Eliot, eds. Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw (2013).
“1909: the Introduction of 'Empathy' into English,” Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History (BRANCH), online-only journal (2012).
“Thinking of Me Thinking of You: Sympathy v. Empathy in the Realist Novel,” Victorian Studies 53.3 (2011): 417-26.
“The Art of Knowing Your Own Nothingness,” ELH 77.4 (Winter 2010): 893-914.
“Sympathy Time: Adam Smith, George Eliot, and the Realist Novel,” Narrative 17.3 (2009): 291-311.
“Routes into Realism,” King’s College London (2015)
“Stupidity after Englightenment,” Yale University, Baylor University, LSU, University of Missouri, Oxford University, Johns Hopkins University (2015-2016)
“On Not Knowing in Jane Austen” (lecture), IU Theater Circle Lectures Series (2014)
"Wartime Idiots in Thackeray and Scott" (symposium), "On and Around 1814, " UC Berkeley (2014)
"Stupid Thackeray, or, Barry Lyndon,” Rutgers University and Harvard University (2013)
"Charity, Sympathy, and the Victorians" (Master Class), University of Notre Dame (2013)
"Bleak House: Pastoral," (keynote lecture), The Dickens Universe, UC Santa Cruz 2012
“Persuasion's Cases the Forms of Realism,” Nineteenth-Century Forum, University of Michigan 2008
“New Approaches to the Novel” (symposium), UC Berkeley 2007