Education

• Ph.D.  2005  Vanderbilt University
• M.A.  2001  Vanderbilt University
• B.A.  2000  Truman State University

Teaching Interests

• Nineteenth-century British literature
• literary theory, science and literature

Shalyn Claggett teaches courses on nineteenth-century British literature and literary theory. Her book Equal Natures: Popular Brain Science and Victorian Women's Writing (SUNY Press, 2023) argues that notable women authors, including Harriet Martineau, Anne Brontë, and George Eliot, used scientific understandings of the brain to challenge socially constructed forms of power.

She is the co-editor (with Lara Karpenko) of Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age (University of Michigan Press, 2017), a collection that explores unconventional forms of scientific inquiry and its cultural representation in Britain during the Victorian period. She is currently at work on a book titled Victorian Cinema: Magic Lantern Shows and the British Imagination, which explores mass-production, distribution, and consumption of audio-visual magic lantern narratives. Her essays have appeared in such journals as Nineteenth-Century Contexts, SEL, Victorian Literature and Culture, Prose Studies, and the Journal of Narrative Theory.

Books

• Equal Natures: Popular Brain Science and Victorian Women's Writing, SUNY Press, 2023.
• Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age (Co-edited with Lara Karpenko), Michigan University Press, 2017.

Articles and Essays

• "The Animal in the Machine: Punishment and Pleasure in Victorian Magic Lantern Shows." Nineteenth-Century Contexts 40.1 (2018): 1-18.
• "Fiction over Fact: Narrative Ethics in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Eugene Aram."  Journal of Narrative Theory 46.2 (2016):171-95 .  
• "The Human Problem." Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions. Ed. Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2015. 353-60.
• "Turning the Corner of Interpretation: A Response to Elena Anastasaki."  Connotations: A Journal of Critical Debate. 21.1 (2012): 72-85.
• "George Eliot’s Interrogation of Physiological Future Knowledge." Studies in English Literature 51:4 (2011): 849-64.
• "Victorian Pros and Poetry: Science as Literature in William Acton’s Prostitution."  Prose Studies 33.1 (2011): 19-43.
• "Putting Character First: The Narrative Construction of Innate Identity in Phrenological Texts." Victorians Institute Journal 39 (2011): 103-26.
• "Harriet Martineau’s Material Rebirth." Victorian Literature and Culture 38:1 (2010):53-73.
• "Narcissism and the Conditions of Self-Knowledge in 'The Jolly Corner.'" The Henry James Review 26.2 (2005): 189-200.

Professional Honors and Awards

• 2024 SAMLA Book Award Winner for Equal Natures: Popular Brain Science and Victorian Women's Writing
• 2015 College of Arts & Sciences Teaching Award for the Humanities, Mississippi State University
• Mississippi State University's 2012 Humanities Teacher of the Year (College of Arts & Sciences and Mississippi Humanities Council)
• Selected for the Project Narrative Summer Institute, led by Robyn Warhol and James Phelan at the Ohio State University, 2010

Professional Service

• Treasurer, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS), 2017-2019
• Board Member, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS), 2014-2016

Conference Committees

• North American Victorian Studies Association Conference (2011)
• International Society for the Study of Narrative Conference (2012, 2015)

Referee

• PMLA
• Genre
• Pickering and Chatto
• Journal of Narrative Theory
• Victorians Institute Journal
• Nineteenth-Century Studies