Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 1995
M.A. UC Berkeley, 1986
B.A. Oxford, 1983

Catherine Robson specializes in nineteenth-century British cultural and literary studies. Her work has appeared in a range of scholarly journals, including PMLA, Victorian Literature and Culture, Dickens Studies Annual and Journal of Victorian Culture; in 2003 she joined the Norton Anthology of English Literature as co-editor of The Victorian Age.

She is also a member of the faculty of the University of California Dickens Project and a UCD Chancellor's Fellow.


Publication Spotlight

Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman
 by Catherine Robson

 A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2001

 "[An] illuminating study of the relationships that existed between little girls and a whole synod of Victorian middle-class men. . . . What Robson detects in these men is less paedophilic desire and more a melancholy sense of something lost. . . . Ruskin, Carroll, and their fellow enthusiasts, she contends, were chasing their own pasts. . . ."-- Matthew Sweet, Independent on Sunday

 BBC Interview for: Men in Wonderland

Recent Publications (selected)

• "Historicising Dickens." In Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies, ed. John Bowen and Robert L. Patten. London: Palgrave, 2006.
• "Bloody, but Unbowed." The Times Literary Supplement, July 29, 2005:13.
• "Standing on the Burning Deck: Poetry, Performance, History." PMLA 120 (2005): 148-62.
• "Where Heaves the Turf: Thomas Hardy and the Boundaries of the Earth." Victorian Literature and Culture 32 (2004): 495-503.
• The Victorian Age, co-edited with Carol T. Christ. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8th ed. New York: Norton, 2005.
  

Honors

    Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Institute of Advanced Studies Fellowship, 2008-09

    Winner (for "Standing on the Burning Deck: Poetry, Performance, History") of the North
    American Victorian Studies Association's 2005 Donald Gray Prize for the best essay in
    Victorian studies.

    Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship , 2004-05

    Residency, Rockefeller Foundation Study Center, Bellagio, 2004

    NEH Fellowship , 2003-04

    UC President's Fellowship in the Humanities , 2003-04

    UC Davis Chancellor's Fellowship , 2002-07

    Davis Humanities Institute Fellowship , 1997-98

    Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities Fellowship, UC Berkeley, 1994-5

Email: cmrobson@ucdavis.edu