Rebecca F. Stern

Assistant Professor

Office: 510 Humanities Office Building
(803) 777-2286
stern2@mailbox.sc.edu

Education

Ph.D., Rice University, 1997
B.S. New York University 1988

Specialization Areas

• Victorian Literature and culture,
• Gender Studies,
• Economic History
• Popular Culture

Recent Courses

See Course Descriptions for detailed information.

• ENGL 700 Introduction to Graduate Studies
• ENGL 830 Making the Secondary Primary: Scholarly Debates in 18th and 19th Century Studies (with Tony Jarrells)
• ENGL 725 The Victorian Novel
• ENGL 727 Victorian Prose
• ENGL 289 British Literature II
• ENGL 384 Realism
• ENGL 437 Women Writer

Current Research Project(s)

I am presently working on my second book, tentatively entitled Conjugating Victorians: Gerunds, Participles and other Living Forms. It is an unusual monograph, a series of short essays on Victorian culture inspired by nouns and adjectives that emerge from verbs. The essays themselves are meditative, both reflective and scholarly, with a basis in cultural history. More broadly, though, the project offers a model of scholarship that takes cultural forms (in this instance, grammatically inspired forms) as both its subject of inquiry and its organizing principle. In that they represent things and qualities that are both fixed and vibrant, both stable and active, the specific gerunds and participles that inspire the essays emphasize the mobile, flexible nature of cultural forms in general.

Fellowships and Honors

• NEH Summer Stipend Nominee (pending)
• Graduate English Association Teaching Award (with Tony Jarrells)
• Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Library
• Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center

Book Publications

Home Economics: Domestic Fraud in Victorian England. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Home Economics establishes fraud as a basic component of the Victorian popular imagination, key to its intimate, as well as corporate, systems of exchange. Although Victorian England is famous for revering the domestic realm as a sphere separate from the market and its concerns, actual households were hardly isolate havens of fiscal safety and ignorance. Rather, the Victorian home was inevitably a marketplace, a site of purchase, exchange, and employment in which men and women hired or worked as servants, contracted marriages, managed children, and obtained furniture, clothing, food, and labor. Alongside the multiplication of joint-stock corporations and the rise of a credit-based economy, which dramatically increased fraud in the Victorian money market, the threat of swindling affected both actual household commerce and popular conceptions of ostensibly private, more emotive forms of exchange. Working with diverse primary material, including literature, legal cases, newspaper columns, illustrations, ballads, and pamphlets, Home Economics argues that the climate of fraud permeated Victorian popular ideologies about social transactions. Beyond providing a history of cases and categories of domestic deceit, this book analyzes the diverse means by which Victorian culture engaged with, refuted, celebrated, represented, and consumed swindling in familial and other household relationships.

Essay Publications

“Our Bear Women, Ourselves: Affiliating with Julia Pastrana.” Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Marlene Tromp. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2008.

“Adulterations Detected: Food and Fraud in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market.’” Nineteenth-Century Literature 57 (2003): 477-511.

Review of Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body. Nineteenth-Century Literature 58 (2003): 127-30.

“A Use in Measured Language: Victorian Poetry and Poetic Criticism after September 11th. Victorian Poetry 41 (2003): 636-42.

“‘Personation’ and ‘Good Marking Ink’: Sanity, Performance, and Biology in Victorian Sensation Fiction.” Nineteenth Century Studies 14 (2000): 35-62.

“Moving Parts and Speaking Parts: Situating Victorian Antitheatricality,” ELH 65 (1998): 423-449.

Recent and Upcoming Presentations

“Structures of Regret: Promoting Strategic Investment in the Victorian Novel.” Modern Language Association Conference. Chicago, IL. December 2007.

“Debt and Décor: Business, Men, and the Well-Appointed Home.” Modern Language Association Conference. Chicago, IL. December 2007.

“Hedging: Circumventing the Worst in Love and Money.” North American Conference for British Studies. San Francisco, CA. November 2007.

“Time Bargains: Imagining Victorian Futures.” Modern Language Association Conference. Philadelphia, PA. December 2006.