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Jason Rudy

Photo of Jason Rudy wearing blue shirt

Professor, English
Director of Graduate Studies, English

2116B Tawes Hall
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Education

B.A., English, Princeton University
Ph.D., English, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Research Expertise

LGBTQ Studies
Poetics
Postcolonialism
Romantic
Transatlantic Studies
Victorian

My teaching and research concentrate on nineteenth-century literatures in English, especially poetry, in a global context. Recent courses include "Indigenous and Imperial Archives," "Nineteenth-Century Fiction," "Transatlantic Poetry and Poetics," and "British Aestheticism." I'm currently writing an authorized biography of the Indigenous Australian painter Gordon Syron. 

Please click over to my personal website for more details.

Courses

Awards & Grants

Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies (2014)

Rudy was awarded a semester fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for 2015.

English

Author/Lead: Jason Rudy
Dates:
ACLS is a nonprofit federation of 75 scholarly organizations. As the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences, ACLS holds a core belief that knowledge is a public good.

Publications

Imagined Homelands

Imagined Homelands chronicles the emerging cultures of nineteenth-century British settler colonialism.

English

Author/Lead: Jason Rudy
Dates:
Focusing on poetry as a genre especially equipped to reflect colonial experience. Jason Rudy argues that the poetry of Victorian-era Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada—often disparaged as derivative and uncouth—should instead be seen as vitally engaged in the social and political work of settlement. The book illuminates cultural pressures that accompanied the unprecedented growth of British emigration across the nineteenth century. It also explores the role of poetry as a mediator between familiar British ideals and new colonial paradigms within emerging literary markets from Sydney and Melbourne to Cape Town and Halifax.

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Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies

Imagined Homelands chronicles the emerging cultures of nineteenth-century British settler colonialism, focusing on poetry as a genre especially equipped to reflect colonial experience.

English

Author/Lead: Jason Rudy
Dates:

Imagined Homelands chronicles the emerging cultures of nineteenth-century British settler colonialism, focusing on poetry as a genre especially equipped to reflect colonial experience. Jason Rudy argues that the poetry of Victorian-era Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada—often disparaged as derivative and uncouth—should instead be seen as vitally engaged in the social and political work of settlement. The book illuminates cultural pressures that accompanied the unprecedented growth of British emigration across the nineteenth century. It also explores the role of poetry as a mediator between familiar British ideals and new colonial paradigms within emerging literary markets from Sydney and Melbourne to Cape Town and Halifax.

Rudy focuses on the work of poets both canonical—including Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow, and Hemans—and relatively obscure, from Adam Lindsay Gordon, Susanna Moodie, and Thomas Pringle to Henry Kendall and Alexander McLachlan. He examines in particular the nostalgic relations between home and abroad, core and periphery, whereby British emigrants used both original compositions and canonical British works to imagine connections between their colonial experiences and the lives they left behind in Europe.

Drawing on archival work from four continents, Imagined Homelands insists on a wider geographic frame for nineteenth-century British literature. From lyrics printed in newspapers aboard emigrant ships heading to Australia and South Africa, to ballads circulating in New Zealand and Canadian colonial journals, poetry was a vibrant component of emigrant life. In tracing the histories of these poems and the poets who wrote them, this book provides an alternate account of nineteenth-century British poetry and, more broadly, of settler colonial culture.

Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics

Victorian poetry shocks with the physicality of its formal effects, linking the rhythms of the human body to the natural pulsation of the universe.

English

Author/Lead: Jason Rudy
Dates:
In Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics Jason R. Rudy connects formal poetic innovations to developments in the electrical and physiological sciences, arguing that the electrical sciences and bodily poetics cannot be separated, and that they came together with special force in the years between the 1830s, which witnessed the invention of the electric telegraph, and the 1870s, when James Clerk Maxwell’s electric field theory transformed the study of electrodynamics.

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