Rachel Teukolsky
Professor of English
My research focuses on aesthetics, art writing, and media history in nineteenth-century Britain. I wrote The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (Oxford, 2009), which was awarded the Sonya Rudikoff Prize by the Northeast Victorian Studies Association. The book explores how Victorian writers turned to the visual arts to imagine new modes of living, thinking, and feeling. Their art writing, which gained a huge following, paved the way for later experimental art movements fascinated by form, abstraction, and avant-gardism.
My second book studies the invention of the modern media landscape in the nineteenth century. New industrial techniques generated a deluge of affordable pictorial items, mass-printed photographs, posters, cartoons, and illustrations. Though these new kinds of pictures transformed everyday life, they have received remarkably little scholarly attention.
In Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media (Oxford, 2020), I use these fascinating visual objects as entryways into the nineteenth century’s key aesthetic concepts. Each chapter pairs a new type of picture with a foundational keyword in Victorian aesthetics, a familiar term reconceived through the lens of new media. “Character” appears differently when considered with the caricatures and comics appearing in the mass press in the 1830s; likewise, the book approaches “realism” through pictorial journalism; “illustration” via illustrated Bibles; “sensation” through carte-de-visite portrait photographs; “the picturesque” by way of stereoscopic views; and “decadence” through advertising posters. Each chapter also tracks the afterlives of these objects into our present-day media world—from Bible-themed amusement parks, to 3D films like Avatar, to the photo albums of Facebook. The relics of a previous era’s cultural life uncover the Victorian world’s most deeply-held values, while also leading to insights about our own media age.
I’ve published articles on anti-slavery in Dickens, newspapers and George Eliot, and the “white girls” of sensation fiction. I’m currently a co-organizer of Vanderbilt’s 18th-/19th-C Colloquium, which invites scholars from across the country to present work-in-progress to faculty and students. My courses study topics like Victorian poetics, the nineteenth-century novel, word and image, colonial and postcolonial literature, film adaptation, the histories of criminality, and ideas of “nature.”
Representative publications
Books:
Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media (Oxford University Press, 2020)
The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Selected Articles:
“Van Gogh Experiences: Immersive Art in the COVID Era.” Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB). Dec. 11, 2021. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/van-gogh-experiences-immersive-art-in-the-covid-era/
“On the Politics of Decadent Rebellion: Beardsley, Japonisme, Rococo.” Victorian Literature and Culture. Vol. 49, No. 4, Special Issue: Scales of Decadence (Winter 2021): 643–666.
"Victorian Erotic Photographs and the Intimate Public Sphere.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts. Special issue on Victorian photography. 42:2 (May 2020), 1–19.
“Visuality.” In the inaugural “Keywords” issue of Victorian Literature and Culture. 46: 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2018), 937–941.
“Cartomania: Sensation, Celebrity, and the Democratized Portrait.” Victorian Studies 57:3 (Spring 2015), 462–475.
“Why Does the Historical Novel Need to Be Rescued?” (considers Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel.) Public Books. Spring 2013. http://www.publicbooks.org/
“Walter Pater’s Renaissance (1873) and the British Aesthetic Movement.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History. A peer-reviewed online resource. http://www.branchcollective.org/. Fall 2012.
"Novels, Newspapers, and Global War: New Realisms in the 1850s." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. 45:1 (Spring 2012): 31-55.
"White Girls: Avant-Gardism and Advertising after 1860." Victorian Studies 51.3 (April 2009): 422-437.
"Pictures in Bleak Houses: Slavery and the Aesthetics of Transatlantic Reform." ELH 76 (2009).
"Modernist Ruskin, Victorian Baudelaire: Revisioning Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics." PMLA (May 2007). Also, a "Forum" response, PMLA (March 2008).
"This Sublime Museum: Looking at Art at the Great Exhibition," Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace, eds. James Buzard, Joseph Childers, and Eileen Gillooly (University of Virginia Press, 2007).
"The Politics of Formalist Art Criticism: Pater's 'School of Giorgione,'" Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, eds. Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams (ELT Press, 2002).