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headshot of Jessie Reeder

Jessie Reeder

Associate Professor

English, General Literature and Rhetoric

Background

Professor Reeder's research focuses on 19th-century British literature and narratives of power and catastrophe.

Her first book, The Forms of Informal Empire: Britain, Latin America, and Nineteenth-Century Literature (Johns Hopkins 2020), explores the way Britain's informal influence in post-independence Latin America disturbed and challenged dominant narratives of imperial power on both sides of the Atlantic. It won the Sonya Rudikoff Prize for the best first book in Victorian studies from the Northeast Victorian Studies Association.

Reeder is also a founding member of Anglophone Chile (anglophonechile.org), a collaborative project with the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile and several other scholars to digitize the 19th-century anglophone periodical press of Chile.

Both within and beyond these two projects, Professor Reeder is interested in narrative, form, temporality, gender, politics and apocalypse, subjects that inform her research and teaching. Her work has appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, Studies in English Literature, Studies in Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies and more.

Featured publications:

  • “Civil War and Uncivil Nationalism: The Britannia and Montevideo Reporter” in The Edinburgh History of the Transnational British Press in Non-Anglophone Countries, 1800-1914. Edinburgh University Press, 2024.
  • “Strange Neighbours: Victorians in South America.” Global Nineteenth-Century Studies 2.1 (May 2023): 27-42.
  • “Nations and States” in The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English. Routledge, 2023.
  • “Toward a Multilingual Victorian Transatlanticism.” Victorian Literature and Culture 49.1 (Spring 2021): 171-195.
  • The Forms of Informal Empire: Britain, Latin America, and Nineteenth-Century Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020.

Education

  • PhD, MA, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • BA, University of Delaware

Research Interests

  • Romantic and Victorian literature
  • Empire
  • Narrative
  • Form
  • Latin America
  • Apocalypse

Teaching Interests

  • The nineteenth-century British novel
  • Forms of British imperialism
  • Literature of the weird, the monstrous, and the apocalyptic

Awards

  • Honorable mention, Harter Family Mentoring Prize (Harpur College, 2023)
  • Winner of the Sonya Rudikoff prize for the best first book in Victorian studies (NVSA 2022)
  • Honored Instructor (Services for Students with Disabilities, 2022)
  • Field Development Grant from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP), with co-investigators Jennifer Hayward and Michelle Prain Brice, to develop a digital archive of the English-language press in Chile (2018)
  • Curran Fellowship from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) for research in Buenos Aires (2016)
  • Nominated for Harpur College teaching award, Binghamton University (2016, 2017, 2018, 2020)
  • Winner: NASSR/Romantic Circles Pedagogy Contest (2015)