Office Hours
By Appointment
Education
PhD, University of Southern California, 1994
About Me
Pamela K. Gilbert received her PhD from the University of Southern California. She specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and the history of the body and medicine. Her most recent fellowships include the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), a Society for the Humanities Fellowship at Cornell (2016-17), and the Margaret Belcher Fellowship in Victorian Studies at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford University (awarded 2021, resident in 2023). She is on the executive committee for NAVSA (the North American Victorian Studies Association) and is the series editor for the SUNY Press book series Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. She is also co-series editor for a new Cambridge Elements series, Elements in Victorian Literature, Science and the Environment, and is currently editing a collection for Palgrave on Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century.
Research Interests
19th Century British literature, the history of the body, the history of medicine, genre, popular literature and medical humanities
Publications
Books
Authored:
Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2019.
Cholera and Nation: Doctoring the Social Body in Victorian England. SUNY, 2008.
The Citizen’s Body: Desire, Health and the Social in Victorian England. Ohio State UP, August, 2007.
Mapping the Victorian Social Body. SUNY, 2004.
Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels. Cambridge UP, 1997.
Edited:
Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1860s. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Edited collection.
Rhoda Broughton, Cometh Up as a Flower, Broadview, 2010. Scholarly and teaching edition of Victorian novel: introduction, edited text, notes, appendices.
Imagined Londons. SUNY, 2002. Edited collection.
Co-edited:
Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature. 4 volumes. Blackwell. Co-edited (Dino Felluga, Editor: Pamela Gilbert and Linda Hughes; Co-Associate Editors), 2015. "Outstanding Reference Book" designation from the American Library Association, January 2016.
Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context. SUNY, 1999. Coedited collection, with Marlene Tromp and Aeron Haynie.
Series edited:
Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, Series Editor, SUNY book series, 2000-2009, 2014-continuing. Over 40 books.
Forthcoming:
Elements in Victorian Literature, Science and the Environment. Cambridge University Press Elements Series. Series co-editor with Dennis Denisoff. Contracted January 2025.
Recent Essays:
“Vernon Lee: Empathy, Mnemic Engrams, and Satanic Aesthetics.” Mind and Embodiment in Late Victorian Literature. Eds Marion Thain and Atti Viragh. Edinburgh University Press. 2025.
“Evidence”, Keywords for Health Humanities. Priscilla Wald and Sari Altschuler, Eds. NYU Press, 2023 (short essay/chapter). August, 2023.
“Antipathy.” Victorian Studies. 64.4 Winter 2022, published June 2023. 579-85. “Unsettling Affect.” Introduction to essay cluster, Editor. Victorian Studies. 64.4 Winter 2022 submitted June 2022, published June 2023. 592-94.
“Watering Holes: Healthy Waters and Moral Dangers in the Nineteenth-Century Novel” for Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History and Culture, edited by Sarah Schäfer- Althaus and Sandra Dinter. Palgrave, 2023.
“Responsibility and Community: Narrating the Individual and the Collective in Pandemic Times.” Special Issue Forum on the Pandemic. Journal of Victorian Culture, Published online: 13 April 2022. Paper edition: 27.2, 2022.
“Skin Deep: Reading Race in the Nineteenth-Century Novel,” in Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Skin, Silk, and Show. Ed. By Sibylle Baumbach and Ulla Ratheiser. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021: 59-77.
"The Other ‘Other Victorians’: Normative Sexualities in Victorian Literature." Ed Andrew Mangham. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge UP, May 2021.
"Cosmopolitan Skin: Tattoos and Travel in British Fiction". La Peaulogie. 5 (Feb, 2021): 20-43.
"‘He took my hand—oh, how I despise myself!’: Hands and the Will in ‘The Woman in White,’” Victorian Handedness: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Manual Culture. Peter Capuano and Sue Zemka, Eds. Ohio State University Press, 2020. 73-89.