Rachel Teukolsky

Professor of English

My research has focused 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. In Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media (Oxford, 2020), I focus on the era’s newly mass-printed photographs, posters, cartoons, and illustrations—the visual media that transformed everyday life. Each chapter pairs a new type of picture with a foundational keyword in Victorian aesthetics. I study “character” alongside 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. The result is a kaleidoscopic account of the dreamworlds of the nineteenth century, as channeled by the era’s pictures.

I’m currently researching the intersection of politics and aesthetics in the nineteenth-century Atlantic—from Europe to the new world, including the Caribbean. How did aesthetic, literary, or media forms reflect the political transformations that inaugurated modernity? What are the myths that shaped senses of political belonging across revolution and nationhood?

I’m also the author of a textbook, Writing on Fire: A Fierce Yet Friendly Guide to Writing Humanities Essays in College (Broadview 2024). The book offers detailed advice on the fundamentals of paper-writing, with chapters on introductions, thesis statements, conclusions, and other key basics. It also includes short chapters on how to analyze humanistic subjects like novels, poetry, works of visual art, historical documents, and film.

I’ve published articles on anti-slavery in Dickens, newspapers and George Eliot, and the “white girls” of sensation fiction. My courses study topics like the nineteenth-century novel, word and image, colonial and postcolonial literature, graphic novels, film adaptation, children’s literature, the histories of criminality, and ideas of “nature.”