Priyanka Jacob

Assistant Professor

I work on the form and theory of the novel; Victorian literature; media, information, and epistolarity; material culture; detection, sensation, and the Gothic; gender; and empire. My book, The Victorian Novel On File: Secrets, Hoards, and Information Storage (Oxford, 2024), demonstrates how the capacious nineteenth-century novel was shaped by the period’s information explosion, gathering more data than it can use. I offer a formal account of the novel, interwoven with media and information studies and thing theory. Embedded with potential, gesturing toward the future, and delaying action and accountability, the Victorian novel enacts the culture’s aesthetics and ethics of deferral.

My courses include: ENGL 340, a global approach to “Victorian” literature; ENGL 343, on how secrets ripple through nineteenth-century fiction, from the Gothic and detective genres to the domestic and realist; ENGL 390, an advanced seminar for majors that begins with 18^th-century epistolary novels and traces the role of the letter and communication technology in narrative form to the present day; ENGL 478, a graduate seminar that follows the paper object—legal, literary, financial, telegraphic, or otherwise—through the Victorian novel; and ENGL 475, an intensive six-week graduate seminar on Richardon’s Clarissa, an epistolary novel of sexual violence and one of the longest novels in the English language.  

Education

• BA, Amherst College (2007)
• PhD, Princeton University (2015) 

Research Interests

• The Novel and Narrative Theory
• Victorian Literature'
• Eighteenth-Century British Fiction
• Material Culture and Thing Theory
• Media and Information Studies
• The City
• Gothic, Detective, and Sensation Fiction  

Publications/Research Listings

Books:

• The Victorian Novel On File: Secrets, Hoards, and Information Storage, (2024) 

Articles:

• “The Pocket-book and the Pigeon-hole: The Files of Victorian Fiction,” Victorian Studies 61.3 (2019), pp. 371-394.
• “Surfaces and Signs: On the Pond in Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond,” Fall 2017 in Arcade.
• “The Relic and the Ruin: Equivocal Objects and the Presence of the Past in Daniel Deronda,” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 44, no. 4, 2016.