Rachel Teukolsky
Associate Professor
Rachel Teukolsky received her B.A. from Harvard college in 1996, double majoring in English and art history. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, after which she taught at Penn State University. Since arriving at Vanderbilt in 2009, she has taught graduate and undergraduate seminars on Victorian literature, visual culture, poetics, the nineteenth-century novel, the histories of criminality, and ideas of “nature.”
Her first book, The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics, was published by Oxford University Press in 2009, and was awarded the Sonya Rudikoff Prize by the Northeast Victorian Studies Association in 2010. The book examines the large and influential archive of Victorian “art writing,” or essays and criticism addressed to the visual arts. Though scholars usually locate a break between aesthetic values of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially by contrasting the realist novel with later experimental art, The Literate Eye reveals a continuity between Victorian art writing and the ensuing modernist fascination with form, abstraction, and avant-gardism.
Her current research project also bridges the disciplines of literary and visual studies. Provisionally titled Aesthetic Networks: Victorian New Media and the Idea of Art, the book analyzes the ways that new media technologies influenced Victorian ideas about high art, especially in the realm of visual culture. Chapters consider different kinds of emergent visual media in the nineteenth century, including pictorial newspapers, photographs, stereoscopic views, illustrated magazines, and advertising posters. Though these objects have often been categorized as disposable ephemera, Aesthetic Networks shows how their ubiquitous visual codes helped to shape essential notions in Victorian aesthetics—keywords such as illustration, picturesque, realism, and sensation.
Teukolsky’s essays have appeared in PMLA, ELH, NOVEL, Victorian Studies, and edited collections on Walter Pater and the Great Exhibition. She is 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.
Representative publications
Book:
- The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Articles:
- "Novels, Newspapers, and Global War: New Realisms in the 1850s." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. 45:1 (Spring 2012). (forthcoming).
- "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).
Book Reviews:
- Review of Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, Performing the Victorian: John Ruskin and Identity in Theater, Science, and Education. In Victorian Studies, Spring 2008.
- Review of Colette Colligan, The Traffic in Obscenity from Byron to Beardsley: Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture. In Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, Feb. 2008.
- "Pursuing the Victorian Honeymoon." Review of Helena Michie, Victorian Honeymoons: Sexual Reorientations and the 'Sights' of Europe. In Nineteenth-Century Genders, Winter 2007.