Department of English

My most recent book, Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History, focuses on the history of the body, medicine and realism in the nineteenth century, with special attention to skin and surface. This is an extension of my long-term work on the history of the body and medicine in the period, and on the history of genre. Other areas of interest include popular literature and medical humanities. A new edited collection Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1860s (Cambridge UP, 2024) is just out.  Some recent essay publications include “Evidence”, Keywords for Health Humanities. Priscilla Wald and Sari Altschuler, Eds. NYU Press, 2023;  “Unsettling Affect” and the related essay “Antipathy” in Victorian Studies.  64.4 (2022); “Responsibility and Community: Narrating the Individual and the Collective in Pandemic Times.,” Special Issue Forum on the Pandemic; Journal of Victorian Culture, 27.2 (2022); “Skin Deep: Reading Race in the Nineteenth-Century Novel,” in  Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Skin, Silk, and Show.  Ed. By Sibylle Baumbach and Ulla Ratheiser. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021:  59-77; and “Cosmopolitan Skin: Tattoos and Travel in British Fiction”.  La Peaulogie. 5 (Feb, 2021): 20-43. I was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (2016), a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell (2016-17), and the Margaret Belcher Fellow in Victorian Studies at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford University (awarded 2021, resident in 2023). I am on the executive committee for NAVSA (the North American Victorian Studies Association) and am the series editor for the SUNY Press book series Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. At UF, I am affiliated with the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies and am a founding member of CISMaC, the Collective for the Interdisciplinary Study of Medicine and Culture. I regularly teach courses in Victorian Literature, Literature and Medicine, and topics in Victorian Gender and Class.

Professor Gilbert’s CV