Catherine Gallagher, Professor

Office: 229 Wheeler

Phone: 510-642-4580

Areas of Interest

19th-Century British Literature. Gender & Sexuality Studies. Narrative & the Novel.

Current Research

My current work examines the connections between alternate history novels, counterfactual histories, social policies, and political debates. One part of the project examines current intersections of these four phenomena, explaining what they tell us about the state of our collective historical imagination. The second part explores the thesis that non-linear narrative forms, which develop alternate paths that a story might take, have been used since the eighteenth century, when counterfactual history was first used by military historians to help train future officers. The project is more broadly a study of how narrative form meets historical ambition, especially during periods of national redefinition.

Professional Statement

Catherine Gallagher is the Eggers Professor of English Literature and has taught at Berkeley 1980. Her teaching and research focus on the British novel and cultural history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In recent years, she has taught courses on the history of the British novel, the historiography and theory of the novel, alternate-history narratives, and various other topics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. She has received NEH, ACLS, and Guggenheim fellowships and has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the National Humanities Center. She is the co-chair of the editorial board of the journal Representations and a member of the Editorial Board of Flashpoints, a University of California Press book series. Her other editorial projects have included: Advisory Board of the PMLA; co-editorship of the book series Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature & Culture; co-editorship of The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century; and editorship of the Bedford Cultural Edition of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave. She has served as a Senior Fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory, on the Advisory Board of the Stanford Humanities Center, and is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Humanities Center. Her 1994 book, Nobody's Story, won the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize for an outstanding literary study. In 2002, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Selected Publications and Papers Delivered

Books

The Body Economic. Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006.

Practicing New Historicism. With Stephen Greenblatt. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000.

Nobody's Story. The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction. Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832-67. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985

Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave, by Aphra Behn. Bedford Cultural Edition. Ed., intros, and headnotes. Bedford Books, 1999. With Simon Stern.

The Making of the Modern Body. Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. and intro. with Thomas Laqueur. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

RECENT ARTICLES

“Historical Scholarship.” Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures. Ed. Nicholls, David G..   New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2007. Pp. 171-194.

“Forum: Counterfactual Realities” and “When Did the Confederate States of America Free the Slaves?” Representations 98 (Spring, 2007). Pp. 51-61.

“War, Counterfactual History, and Alternate-History Novels.” Field Day Review, 3 (2007). Pp. 53-66.

“Literary History.” Introduction to Scholarship in the Modern Languages and Literatures. Modern Language Association, 2007. Pp. 171-194.

“World War II As Seen From Other Worlds.” Journal of Contemporary Thought, (Summer, 2006):5-19. Also in Shiso [Thought] #984 (2006.4), 95-110.

“The Rise of Fictionality.” The Novel, Volume I: History, Geography, and Culture. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006.

“The Industrial Novel.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. II. Ed. David Scott Kastan. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006. Pp. 241-3.

“Theoretical Answers to Interdisciplinary Questions or Interdisciplinary Answers to Theoretical Questions?” Victorian Studies, 47:2 (Winter 2005). Pp. 253-260.

Office Hours

Wednesday, 3-5, or by appointment in 322 Wheeler