Rebecca Rainof

Dr. Rebecca Rainof is an Associate Researcher in the Department of English. Her research specialty is Victorian and Modernist literature, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary studies of literature and the visual arts. Her scholarship and teaching also focus on novel and narrative theory, religion and literature, gender and authorship, as well as the personal essay and memoir. She is the author of The Victorian Novel of Adulthood (Ohio UP, 2015), which charts an alternative novelistic tradition to the bildungsroman, narratives of midlife. She is currently completing a book manuscript on “Van Gogh and the Victorians,” which explores the artist’s devotion to Victorian literature and how artistic adaptation as an art form evolved alongside changes in print culture and art exhibition. Her Van Gogh scholarship was recently featured in the catalogue for an exhibit, “Through Vincent’s Eyes: Van Gogh and his Sources,” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2022, Yale UP). Dr. Rainof also writes about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII through the lens of her mother’s experience at the Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Early work related to a family memoir has been published in the journal Hyphen: Asian America Unabridged and in an essay, “Mixed Feelings” (Literary Imagination, 2022). Her research and teaching have been supported by grants and fellowships including a Princeton Mellon Fellowship for Faculty Innovation (2018), Curran Fellowship from the, Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (2015), Faculty Research and Book Publication Grant, Catholic University (2015), Josephine De Kármán Fellowship (2007), the Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellowship at Princeton University (2006). Prior to joining the English faculty at UC Berkeley, Dr. Rainof was a faculty member at Princeton University and at the Catholic University of American in Washington, DC.