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Simon Reader

Associate Professor

In 2015, I joined the English Department where I teach a range of courses in British literature, Victorian literature, and Queer Studies. I am the current president of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association, which hosts an annual conference at campuses across the northeastern United States and Canada. I also co-convene the CUNY Victorian Seminar at the Graduate Center.

My research focuses on the aesthetics of minor genres, such as notes, fragments, and aphorisms. My first book, Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style, was published by Stanford University Press in 2021. It argues that the nineteenth-century writer’s notebook is best understood as a genre unto itself. Subsequently, I am publishing two articles, one on the aesthetics of bitchiness with Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud (in Gay and Lesbian Quarterly) and another on Roland Barthes's ambivalence about fragments (in New Literary History). 

Degrees

PhD English Literature, University of Toronto (2014)

Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University (2014-2015)

Scholarship and Publications

Book

Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style. Stanford University Press, 2021. 

(Honorable Mention: 2021 Sonya Rudikoff Award)

Articles & Chapters

"Idols of the Fragment: Barthes and Schlegel." New Literary History (forthcoming Spring 2024) 

“The Importance of Being Bitchy" (with Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud). Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 30.2 (forthcoming in April 2024). 

“Reading Machine Print.” Technology and Literature. Cambridge Critical Concepts. Ed. Adam Hammond. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2024.

“Notebooks: The Lichtenberg Way.” The Unfinished Book. Eds. Alexandra Gillespie and Deidre Lynch. Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature. Oxford University Press, 2020.

“Hopkins’s Notebooks and Microsocial Form.” Victorian Literature and Culture. 48:2 (Summer 2020): 455-469.

“Wilde at Oxford: A Truce with Facts.” Philosophy and Oscar Wilde. Ed. Michael Bennett. Palgrave, 2017: 9-27.

“Social Notes: Oscar Wilde, Francis Bacon, and the Medium of Aphorism.” Journal of Victorian Culture. 18:4 (December 2013): 453-471.

“Oscar Wilde’s Notebook on Philosophy.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. 32.2. (Spring 2013): 21-31.

Associate Professor Simon Reader

Contact Information

Office: Building 2S Room 127
Office Hours

Tuesday 2:30-4:30 or by appointment