Amanda Shubert

I teach and write about the literary and cultural history of nineteenth-century British Empire. I am currently at work on a couple of book-length research projects. *Seeing Things: Virtual Aesthetics in Victorian Culture* (under contract with Cornell UP) is a cultural history of virtual aesthetics before the invention of cinema. It tells the story of how the experience of seeing things that are not there became a dominant media aesthetic of the Victorian era that set the terms not only for early cinema spectatorship, but for how we relate to film, television, and digital media today. This project has been supported by fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW-Madison. The second project, still in the early stages of development, is a study of Arab Jews in British India. I use the visual and material archives of my Iraqi and Syrian ancestors in Calcutta–including photographs, illustrated marriage certificates, cookbooks, and ritual objects–to explore how this community imagined and reimagined itself as Indian Arab Jews and British colonial subjects in an era of rising nationalism and imperial expansion. In recent years, my research has been supported by awards and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW-Madison.

Visual Storytelling, Nineteenth-Century Novel, India and the Victorian Imagination, Women’s Writing and the Global Nineteenth Century, Global Film History, Cinematic Realisms