Professor Regenia Gagnier is a
committed critical thinker who always historicizes. Her books have shaped the
study of Victorian and modern culture with highly influential work on
decadence, aesthetics and aestheticism, lifewriting and subjectivity, economics,
individualism, and globalization. Idylls of
the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford,
1986) considered the role of the artist in market society. Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832-1920 (Oxford, 1991) analyzed the relationship of
social class and gender to literary form. The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market
Society (Chicago,
2000) traced the moment when aesthetics and economics shifted from substantive
to formal models and production to consumption. Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: on the Relationship of
Part to Whole 1859-1920 (Palgrave
2010) explores the relation of the
individual to increasingly larger social units, from the dyad to the world
citizen. Her current research is on the global circulation
of the literatures of liberalism.
Gagnier is Editor in Chief of Literature Compass (the leading online
journal of the discipline as a whole, with 18 international sub-editors);
associate editor, Feminist Economics;
associate editor, Occasion:
Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities; editorial
advisor to Women: A Cultural Review;
and on the editorial boards of Victorian
Studies, Victorian Literature
and Culture, Nineteenth-Century
Literature, English Literature
in Transition 1880-1920, Partial
Answers, 19: Interdisciplinary
Studies in the Long 19C, Australasian
Journal of Victorian Studies, Kritika
Kultura, and RaVoN
(Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net).
Gagnier has won numerous awards and fellowships
for teaching as well as research in North America, Britain,
and Europe and reads widely for journals and
academic presses. She has served on five MLA Division Executive Committees in
the USA and the AHRC
Research Panel and CCUE Executive in the UK as well as other national
and international professional bodies. In 2006, she was made Honorary
Centenary Fellow of the English Association and in 2008 elected to the Royal
Society of Arts. She is the President of the British Association for Victorian
Studies.
Gagnier is a native Californian who took
her undergraduate and graduate degrees in English at the University
of California at Berkeley. She was tenured and made full
professor at Stanford
University, where she
taught for fourteen years in English, Modern Thought and Literature, Institute
for Research on Women and Gender, and the Cultural Studies Group. In
1996, she moved to the UK
and the University
of Exeter, where she is
Professor of English, Director of the Migrations Research Network, and Senior
Fellow of the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis). In 2008, she was
appointed the Director of Exeter's Interdisciplinary Institute (EII).
Research Specialisms:
-
Victorian
Britain, esp. the fin de siecle;
-
literary
and social theory;
-
gender
and feminist studies;
-
interdisciplinary
studies;
-
migration
studies and the global circulation of British literature and culture;
-
digital
humanities.
Professor Gagnier's other professional passion is working with graduate students for academia's next generation. From 2001 through 2004, she was the Dean of Exeter's Graduate School, overseeing 3500 MA and Ph.D. students across the arts, humanities, and sciences. She is currently the Convenor of the MA in Criticism and Theory, and teaches the core course on Current Debates. She also teaches the third-year option in Advanced Critical Theory, whose students often go on to MAs and Ph.D.s. She alternates with English's ten Victorianists in teaching on the MA in Victorian Studies. And she supervises Ph.D. students on Victorian and theoretical topics.
