Catherine Robson

Ph.D. 1995 (English), M.A. 1986 (English), University of California, Berkeley;

B.A. 1983 (English), Oxford

19th-century British Literature, Victorian Cultural Studies, Education and Childhood Studies

American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 2014-15; Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Fellowship, 2008-09; Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 2004-05; National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2003-04; UC President's Fellowship in the Humanities, 2003-04.
Winner (for Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem) of the North American Victorian Studies Association's 2012 Best Book of the Year award.
Winner (for "Standing on the Burning Deck: Poetry, Performance, History" in PMLA) of the North American Victorian Studies Association's 2005 Donald Gray Prize for the best essay in Victorian studies.

Catherine Robson specializes in nineteenth-century British cultural and literary studies. Her work has appeared in a range of scholarly journals, including PMLA, Victorian Literature and Culture, Dickens Studies Annual, and Journal of Victorian Culture; in 2003 she joined the Norton Anthology of English Literature as co-editor of The Victorian Age. To date her publications have focused most prominently upon childhood, memory, and death; she enjoys thinking about the bonds between individual literary works and shifts within widespread cultural understandings of these topics. She is also interested in the roles played in this process by the pedagogical practices of a broad range of educational institutions. Her next book project, a study of the little-known phenomenon of Germany's capture of British regional voices during World War I, draws extensively on previous work on oral performance (especially poetry recitation) and mass elementary education in nineteenth-century Britain. She teaches courses on a broad range of topics in Victorian literature and culture; in recent years she has been particularly concerned to encourage narratological and historical investigations of the properties and effects of first-person and third-person fictions.