Amanda Shubert
Position title: Teaching Faculty; Educational Innovation Coordinator
Email: ashubert@wisc.edu
Address:
6121 Helen C. White

Personal Statement
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.
Research Interests
Victorian literature and culture; empire, colonialism, and diaspora; film and media studies; visual studies; Jewish studies
Degrees and Institutions
- Ph.D. University of Chicago
- B.A. Oberlin College
Recent Publications
Seeing Things: Virtual Aesthetics in Victorian Culture (Cornell University Press, 2025).
“Ghosts in the Glass: The Rise and Fall of Victorian Autostereoscopic Photography.” Early Popular Visual Culture (December 2024), 1-17.
“To Become a Devil: Special Effects, Magic Tricks, and the Technological Image in Faust.” Film Criticism, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Spring 2024).
“(Post-)Colonial Biography.” Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, 2023.
“In Defense of Credulous Women: Magic and Optical Spectatorship in Cranford.” Victorian
Studies, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Spring 2021).
“Contracts for a Time of Crisis: What I Learned from Grading in a Pandemic.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Spring 2021).
“‘A Bright Continuous Flow’: Phantasmagoria and History in A Tale of Two Cities.” Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Winter 2020).
“Conversations with Pauline Kael.” In Talking About Pauline Kael. Edited by Wayne Stengel. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. 159-169.
Courses Taught
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