DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Biography

Johana Godfrey (PhD, Northwestern University) specializes in the literature of the long-nineteenth century, with research and teaching interests in scientific discourse, material culture, empire, and women's studies. Her work appears in Victorian Studies, and her dissertation received the Jean H. Hagstrum Prize for Best Dissertation. She is currently at work on her first book on anachronism, and the ways that nineteenth-century writers played with time and history to experiment with new, liberatory forms. More broadly, she is interested in the spaces where error intersects with imagination, and the ways that orthodox scientific discourses and new knowledge practices become misinterpreted in the popular imagination.