Dehn Gilmore
Dehn Gilmore
Professor of English; Executive Officer for the Humanities
Profile
Dehn Gilmore's research focuses on the literary, cultural, and intellectual history of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain with a special concentration on the relationship between the Victorian novel and visual culture.
Her first book, The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art: Fictional Form on Display (Cambridge, 2013), argues for the crucial importance of visual culture (the art market, museums, large-scale exhibitions, and critical discourse) as a force shaping the formal development and reading history of the Victorian novel.
Her forthcoming book, The Improvers: The Schuster Siblings and the Remaking of Modern Britain (Princeton 2027) recovers the lives of the four remarkable Schuster siblings (scientist, banker, lawyer and philanthropist) to offer a panoramic account of Britain's cultural and intellectual history from 1870 through 1918.
She is currently at work on another book-length project: "Large as Life": The Victorians' Disproportionate Reality, in which she examines the Victorian obsession with "life-sized" representation, and charts how this both shaped and was shaped by Victorian ideas of political representation, scientific research, artistic depiction, and novelistic realism.
Her other work has appeared in Victorian Studies, History of Photography, Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Dickens Studies Annual and Los Angeles Review of Books among other places.
- Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize
- Gates Cambridge Scholar
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Selected Publications
Books
- The Improvers: The Schuster Siblings and the Remaking of Modern Britain (Forthcoming from Princeton University Press in October 2027
- Large as Life and Twice as Natural: The Victorians' Disproportionate Reality (Book Manuscript in Progress)
- The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art: Fictional Form on Display (Cambridge University Press; 2014)
Selected Articles
- "George Eliot and the Visual Arts" Solicited Contribution to the Routledge Companion to George Eliot (Forthcoming)
- "Caroline Schuster: Recovering the Life of a Scientific Salonnière" (Article in Progress)
- "Egypt and the "Scientific Concert of Europe": A Story of Missed Connections and the Eclipse of 1882" (Article in Progress)
- "The Life Size" Special Keywords Issue of Victorian Literature and Culture 51.3 (Fall 2023)
- "'Preserving the Name Alive' vs. ‘Getting About': The Problem of Memorial Sculpture in Victorian London." Victorian Literature and Culture. (Fall 2022)
- "The Dream of Life Size Photography: Robert Crawshay and the Quest for the Victorian ‘Wholeograph.'" History of Photography 43.4 (2019)
- "'Pigmies and Brobdignagians': Arts Writing, Dickensian Character, and the Vanishing Victorian Life Size." Victorian Studies 57.4 (Summer 2015)
- "'These Verbal Puzzles': Wilkie Collins, Newspaper Enigmas, and the Victorian Reader as Solver." Victorian Literature and Culture 44.2 (2015)
- "The Difficulty of Historical Work in the Nineteenth-Century Museum and the Thackerayan Novel." Nineteenth-Century Literature (June 2012)
- "Terms of Art: Reading the Dickensian Gallery." Dickens Studies Annual (June 2011)
- "Rehearsals, Refutations, Representation: Gissing's New Grub Street and the Problem of an Urban Realism." A Mighty Mass of Brick and Smoke: Victorian and Edwardian Representations of London. ed. Lawrence Phillips. (Rodopi: October 2007)
- "Vacuums and Blurs: The Related Responses of Thomas Hardy and the French Impressionists to the Modern City." Literary London 2.1. (2004)
Selected Reviews
- Review of Ornament, the Novel and the Victorian Real by Irena Yamboliev (Forthcoming in Nineteenth-Century Literature)
- "Particle Physics: On Nell Freudenberger's Lost and Wanted." Los Angeles Review of Books (July 2019)* (2500 words)
- "Review of Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Lucy Hartley." Nineteenth-Century Literature 73.1 (June 2018)
- "The Comfort of War: Pat Barker's WWII Trilogy." Los Angeles Review of Books (May 2016)* (1800 words)
- "Bildungsroman in the Postmodern Era: Review of Hannah Tennant-Moore's Wreck and Order." Los Angeles Review of Books (March 2016) * (2400 words)
- "Review of Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction: The Rise of Picture Identification 1764-1835 by Kamilla Elliott." Nineteenth-Century Contexts (May 2015)
- "Review of Victorian Art Criticism and the Woman Writer by John Paul M. Kanwit." Nineteenth-Century Literature. (December 2014)
- "Review of Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture by Lara Kriegel." Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. (May 2009)