Dr Victoria Baena
- College positions:
Research Fellow
- Subjects: English Modern & Medieval Languages
Degree(s)
BA History and Literature (Harvard College), MA, MPhil, PhD Comparative Literature (Yale University)
Research interests
My research focuses on the novel, narrative theory, and the politics of aesthetics from the late eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. In my current book project, Provinces of the Mind: Time, Narrative, and the Modern Novel, I trace a literary history of the province-capital divide across the Francophone and Anglophone traditions. This work has led me to engage in particular with feminist and Marxist theories, critical approaches to geography, and histories of empire and (anti-)colonialism.
I am also currently at work on a book on the friendship in letters, and eventual rupture, between Gustave Flaubert and Am茅lie Bosquet, a socialist-feminist novelist and activist in the waning years of France鈥檚 Second Empire.
Teaching Interests
Writing Revolution, 1789-1961
Introduction to Narrative: Fictions of Mobility
Translation & Transformation in Literature
Travel Narratives
Writing the Self
Awards and prizes
Jental Arts Residency (2024)
Shortlist, Tony Lothian First Biography Prize, Biographers鈥 Club (2023)
Kathy Chamberlain Award, Women Writing Women鈥檚 Lives Association (2023)
Finalist, Royal Portrait Society Critical Writing Prize (2023)
Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship, New York Public Library (2022)
Teaching Innovation Grant, Yale University (2021)
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library Research Fellowship (2019)
Naomi Schor Memorial Award, Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association (2019)
Paul Mellon Centre for British Art Research Grant (2018)
Selected Publications
鈥楶谤辞惫颈苍肠颈补濒,鈥&苍产蝉辫; Victorian Literature and Culture 51.3 (2023) [special 鈥楰eywords Redux鈥 issue]
鈥楥artographies of Region and Empire: Scaling Le tour de la France par deux enfants (and its Afterlives),鈥 Dix-Neuf (2023)
鈥嬧淗istory鈥檚 Borrowed Languages: Emily Bront毛, Karl Marx, and the Novel of 1848,鈥 鈥ELH: English Literary History [forthcoming, 2023]
鈥淩omanesque Commitments: Am茅lie Bosquet鈥檚 Narrative Theory and Popular Aesthetics,鈥 Nineteenth-Century French Studies (vol. 50, nos. 1鈥2), 2021
鈥嬧淭he Classroom in Crisis鈥 (review essay), Boston Review, September 2021
鈥淟abor, Thought, and the Work of Authorship: Virginia Woolf and Hannah Arendt,鈥 鈥Diacritics (vol. 48, no. 1), 2020
Translator, Marie NDiaye, 鈥淪tep of a Feral Cat,鈥 in Visible: Text + Image, Two Lines Press (Calico Series), 2022
Other interests
I also regularly write essays and reviews for venues like , , , , , and the .