Timothy Spurgin
Associate professor and Bonnie Glidden Buchanan Professor of English Literature

Education
Carleton College, B.A.
University of Virginia, M.A., Ph.D.

Interests
The history of the novel
Nineteenth-century British literature
Dickens

Publications and other projects

“Cultural Studies and the Novel,” Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory. London: Wiley, 2010.

The Art of Reading. 24-part lecture series. Produced on CD and DVD by the Teaching Company. Released summer 2009.

“Recent Dickens Studies, 2006,” Dickens Studies Annual 39 (2008): 397-446.

The English Novel. 24-part lecture. Produced on CD and DVD by the Teaching Company. Released summer 2006.

“My Students Love Derrida,” The Chronicle Review. 5 November 2004: B5.

“The Times Magazine and Academic Megastars,” the minnesota review n.s. 52-4 (2001): 225-38.

“’It's Me Wot Has Done It!’: Letters, Reviews, and Great Expectations,” Dickens Studies Annual 27 (1998): 187-209.

Selected conference papers and talks

“Memorable Birthdays,” Dickens Society of Madison, WI, 24 April 2005

“‘All I have is a voice’: Poetry after 9/11,” MMLA conference, 6 November 2004.

“Vengeance in your heart, fish down your pants, or, Theory made me do it!” MMLA conference, 7 November 2003.

“From Bertrand Russell to Jane Russell: Excess and Decline in Narratives of Celebrity,” Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, UC-Berkeley, 28 March 2003.

Awards and honors

Mrs. H. K. Babcock Award (selected by Lawrence students)

Freshman Studies Teaching Prize

Lawrence University Young Teacher Award

Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities

Current projects

I’m working on Victorian celebrity culture, focusing largely on the figure of Dickens.