Gregory Vargo

Associate Professor of English

Education

Ph.D., Columbia University, 2010

M.F.A., Washington University in St. Louis, 1997

B.A. University of Chicago, 1995

Areas of Research/Interest

Nineteenth-century British literature; working-class literature and radical political culture; periodicals and serialization; anti-colonialism in British culture; melodrama and theater; popular fiction; the Bildungsroman

External Affiliations

Modern Language Association, Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, North American Victorian Studies Association, North East Victorian Studies Association

Fellowships/Honors

North American Victorian Studies Association’s Award for Best Book of the Year in Victorian Studies for An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel; Center for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship, New York University; New Faculty Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies; Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Fellowship, Columbia University; Mellon Summer Research Fellowship, Columbia University; Austrian Exchange Service Fellowship, Vienna, Austria; Fulbright Fellowship, Potsdam, Germany

Bio

Greg Vargo’s research focuses on the literary and cultural milieu of nineteenth-century British protest movements and the interplay between politics, periodical culture, the novel and theater. He brings these and other interests into the classroom in courses which examine the relationship between literature, history, and politics. His first book, An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel (Cambridge UP, 2018), won the 2019 North American Victorian Studies Association’s award for best book of the year in Victorian Studies. It suggests that underground newspapers affiliated with radical movements fostered an experimental literary culture, which stretched the contours of well-known Victorian genres, including the Bildungsroman, melodrama, and social-problem fiction. He has recently edited Chartist Drama (Manchester UP, 2020), a collection of four plays written or performed by members of the working-class movement for social and political rights known as Chartism. A new project focuses on anti-imperialism in nineteenth-century popular culture (across such media as penny novels and stage melodrama) as well as in radical politics.

Publications

  • Chartist Drama, Manchester University Press, 2020
    Chartist Drama
  • An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel, Cambridge University Press, 2018
    AN Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction by Gregory Vargo
  • "Chartist Drama: the Performance of Revolt."
    Victorian Studies. 66.1 (Autumn 2018.) 9-34
  • “Literature from Below: Radicalism and Popular Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture. 44.2 (Summer 2016). 439-53.
  • "Questions from Workers who Read: Education and Self-Formation in Chartist Print Culture and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton.” Victorian Literature and Culture. 44.1 (Winter 2016). 133-61.
  • “‘Outworks of the Citadel of Corruption’: The Chartist Press Reports the Empire.” Victorian Studies. 54.2 (Winter 2012): 227-53.
  • “A Life in Fragments: Thomas Cooper’s Chartist Bildungsroman.” Victorian Literature and Culture. 39.1 (Spring 2011): 167-81.
  • “Cobbett’s Political Register”; “Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser.” In Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism. Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, eds. London: Academia Press and The British Library, 2009. 130-31, 459-60. [“Northern Star” co-authored with Malcolm Chase.]
  • “Contested Authority: Reform and Local Pressure in Harriet Martineau’s Poor Law Novellas.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. 3.2 (Summer 2007). Web.