Jill Galvan’s research and teaching encompass Victorian, modern, and contemporary fictional studies, often combining these areas. Her work turns frequently to a few main topics: affect; social being and self-other relations; and genre, medium, and aesthetics. Her first book was The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult and Communication Technologies, 1859-1919 (Cornell University Press, 2010). She is co-editor of the essay collection Replotting Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (The Ohio State University Press, 2018). Her forthcoming book, The Quiet Fight: Marriage, Time, and the Fiction of Love Trouble, argues for a genre of story now common in novels and on screen: about ordinary love troubles within married couples. Ranging from the Victorians (George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, George Gissing) up to the 20th and 21st centuries (Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Jenny Offill, Tayari Jones), and from literature to film (Scenes from a Marriage, Killer of Sheep, 45 Years, Past Lives), this book offers a new account of emotion, time, and relationality in marriage fiction. This account deliberately shifts away from a focus on the marriage plot and related critical views of lifelike fiction. Focusing instead on everyday wedlock difficulty revises our sense of the fiction of life and reality, uncovering how challenging, as well as temporally provocative, this fiction is, including in its representations of race, gender, history, and the human. Her next research project close-reads 20th- and 21st-century horror films and tracks the lineage of their tropes in nineteenth-century literature and cultural history.

Galvan was awarded the OSU English Undergraduate Organization's Professor of the Year in 2021. Some topics of recent specialized courses: rethinking marriage fiction; the fin de siècle; Oscar Wilde; and varieties of the gothic and modern horror.

Selected Articles

• “Love Story’s Ontology: Species Feeling in New Grub Street.” Victorian Review, vol. 48, no. 1, 2022, pp. 69-90. (Winner of annual Victorian Review essay prize.)
• "Marital Realism: Beauty and Pettiness in Middlemarch." Novel, vol. 54, no. 2, 2021, pp. 189-209. (Republished in the Norton Critical edition of Middlemarch, ed. Ronjaunee Chatterjee.)
• “Character.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, no. 3/4, 2018, pp. 612-16. (Keywords issue.)
• “Occult Networks and the Legacy of the Indian Rebellion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” History of Religions, vol. 54, no. 4, 2015, pp. 434-58. (Winner of annual Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies essay prize.)
• "Corelli’s Caliban in a Glass: Realism, Anti-Realism and The Sorrows of Satan." English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, vol. 57, 2014, pp. 335-60.
• "Tennyson's Ghosts: The Psychical Research Case of the Cross-Correspondences, 1901-c. 1936.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga. (Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 2012).
• "The Victorian Post-Human: Information, Transmission and the Séance." The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn. (Ashgate, 2012).

Curriculum Vitae