Amanda Shubert

I teach and write about the literature and cultural history of nineteenth-century British Empire. My first book, Seeing Things: Virtual Aesthetics in Victorian Culture (Cornell University Press, 2025) 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.

My current research project focuses on Middle Eastern 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, Jewish and subjects of the British Empire in an era of imperial expansion, decolonization, and the emergence of Zionism and Indian nationalism.

ENGL 176: Visual Storytelling, ENGL 176: Feeling Real, ENGL 345: Nineteenth-Century Novel, ENGL 444: India and the Victorian Imagination, ENGL 444: Women’s Writing and the Global Nineteenth Century, COMA 333: Global Film History, COMA 333: Cinematic Realisms