Dehn Gilmore's research centers around the relationship between Victorian literature and 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. She is currently at work on two other book-length projects. "Large as Life": The Victorians' Disproportionate Reality, examines the Victorian obsession with "life-sized" representation and how this obsession both shaped and was shaped by Victorian ideas of political representation, scientific research, artistic depiction, and novelistic realism. Unknown Famous Names gives an account of the cultural history of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain by recounting the lives of the four extraordinary Schuster siblings. 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.
Research Summary
Victorian Literature and Cultural History; Visual Culture
Selected Awards
Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize
A grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will allow Caltech to create a new program in visual culture that will involve students, researchers, and artists.
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
"‘Preserving the Name Alive' vs. ‘Getting About': The Problem of Memorial Sculpture in Victorian London." Victorian Literature and Culture. (forthcoming)
"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
"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)
Curriculum Vitae