About
CHRISTINA JEN is an Assistant Professor of English at Southern University and A&M College. She specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and culture, and her research interests include the Victorian novel, theater and performance studies, gender studies, women’s literature, and global melodrama. Her dissertation and current book project, “Reading as Acting: The Novel’s Casting Call and Readerly Performance in the British Nineteenth Century,” explores the relationship between representations of reading and theater culture—especially ideas about acting, respectability, and identification—in works by Jane Austen, William M. Thackeray, Mary E. Braddon, Charles Dickens, and others. She is also currently working on an article exploring the ways in which Dion Boucicault’s use of Scottish folk song ironizes the colonial politics of his stage melodrama on the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Jessie Brown; or the Relief of Lucknow. Education
Ph.D., English, Rutgers University, NJ (conferred 2022)
M.A., English, Rutgers University, NJ (conferred 2014)
B.A., English and Political Science, Montclair State University, NJ (conferred 2011) Publications
“‘Drop the Curtain’: Astonishment and Anxieties of Authorship in Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz,” Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 49, no. 2, 2018, pp. 249-78. Projects
Book Project: “Reading as Acting: The Novel’s Casting Call and Readerly Performance in the British Nineteenth Century” Upcoming Talks and Conferences
“The Sound of Empire in Dion Boucicault’s Jessie Brown; or the Relief of Lucknow.” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) Conference: “Nineteenth-Century Movements,” University of Tennessee Knoxville, Apr. 13-16, 2023.
“Subjects, Sovereigns, and the Dissonance of Imperialism in Jessie Brown; or, The Relief of Lucknow.” Midwest Victorian Studies Association (MVSA) Conference: “Ruling Visions: Citizens, Subjects, Sovereigns,” Washburn University, Mar. 24-26, 2023.
“Playing Actress: Female Readers and Bodies in the Fiction of Flaubert, Braddon, and Moore.” British Women Writers Conference (BWWC), Baylor University, May 19-21, 2022. Memberships
Modern Languages Association (MLA)
North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA)
Nineteenth-Century Theatre Caucus, NAVSA (19CTC)
British Women Writers Association (BWWA)
Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS)
Melodrama Research Consortium (MRC)
