Books
For an unorthodox kind of humanities textbook, consider Writing on Fire: A Fierce Yet Friendly Guide to Writing Humanities Essays in College (Broadview, 2024). The book offers detailed advice on the fundamentals of paper-writing, with chapters on introductions, thesis statements, conclusions, and other key basics. It also includes short chapters on how to analyze humanistic subjects like novels, poetry, works of visual art, historical documents, and film. The book uses a fun, accessible tone while making an argument for humanistic college writing as a vital form of self-expression.
You can find it on Amazon and at Broadview Press.
Picture World (Oxford UP, 2020) studies the new visual media of the nineteenth century—the mass-printed photographs, posters, cartoons, and illustrations that transformed everyday life. Each chapter pairs a new kind of picture with a foundational keyword in Victorian aesthetics. The book approaches “character” via the caricatures and cartoons in the mass press of the 1830s; “realism” through pictorial journalism; “illustration” via illustrated Bibles; “sensation” through carte-de-visite portrait photographs; “the picturesque” by way of stereoscopic views; and “decadence” through advertising posters. The result is a kaleidoscopic account of the dreamworlds of the nineteenth century, as channeled by the era’s pictures.
Picture World was awarded Honorable Mention by the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) for the Best Second Monograph Prize. You can find it on Amazon and Oxford University Press.
The Literate Eye (Oxford UP, 2009) explores how Victorian writers turned to the visual arts to imagine new modes of living, thinking, and feeling. Their art writing, which gained a huge following, paved the way for later experimental art movements fascinated by form, abstraction, and avant-gardism.
The book studies well-known works by John Ruskin, Walter Pater, William Morris, and Oscar Wilde, alongside lesser-known texts drawn from the rich field of Victorian print culture—gallery reviews, scientific treatises, tracts on early photography, even satirical cartoons.
The book was awarded the Sonya Rudikoff Prize for Best First Book in Victorian Studies in 2010. You can find it at Amazon and Oxford University Press.