Position Title
Assistant Professor
Imogen Forbes-Macphail studies the relationship between poetry and mathematics in nineteenth-century Britain. Her current book project, Line and Number: Formal Problems in Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Mathematics, explores how Victorian poets and mathematicians come to be invested in similar kinds of formal problems, arguing that a more sophisticated understanding of developments in mathematics can transform our understanding of the era’s literary innovations. She is currently the Victorian Poetry Caucus representative at the North American Victorian Studies Association, and is co-editing a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies with Anna Henchman, on women’s writing and the production of scientific knowledge (“Longing to Know”). Prior to joining UC Davis, she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (2022–25).
- Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
- M.Phil., University of Cambridge
- B.A. (Hons), University of Western Australia
- Honorable Mention, “Expanding the Field” Essay Prize, Northeast Victorian Studies Association (2022)
- Susan Morgan Graduate Student Essay Prize, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (2019)
- Sally Mitchell Prize, North American Victorian Studies Association (2018)
- Honorable Mention, Susan Morgan Graduate Student Essay Prize, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (2018)
- Sussex-Samuel Prize for Postgraduate Students, Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association (2013)
- ENL 164, Writing Science
- “Logic,” Victorian Poetry (forthcoming)
- “Real and Imaginary Worlds: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Mathematics,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science, ed. by Pamela Gilbert (forthcoming)
- “The Four-Color Theorem and the Aesthetics of Computational Proof,” Critical Inquiry 51.3 (2025): 470–91.
- Review, Naomi Levine, The Burden of Rhyme: Victorian Poetry, Formalism, and the Feeling of Literary History, Review 19 (2025), https://www.review19.org/view_doc.php?index=683.
- “Topological Poetics: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Nineteenth-Century Mathematics, and the Principle of Continuity,” ELH 88.1 (2021): 133–66.
- “‘Colours of the Dying Dolphin’: Nineteenth-Century Defences of Literature and Mathematics,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics, ed. Robert Tubbs, Alice Jenkins, and Nina Engelhardt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 473–92.
- “‘I shall in due time be a poet’: Ada Lovelace’s Poetical Science in its Literary Context,” in Ada's Legacy: Cultures of Computing from the Victorian to the Digital Age, ed. Andrew L. Russell and Robin Hammerman (New York: Association for Computing Machinery and Morgan and Claypool, 2015), 143–68.
- “The Enchantress of Numbers and the Magic Noose of Poetry: Literature, Mathematics and Mysticism in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Language, Literature and Culture 60.3 (2013): 138–56.