Amanda Shubert

Amanda Shubert
Lindsay Family Humanities Teaching Fellow
PhD University of Chicago 2019
Teaching at UChicago since 2015

Synopsis

I teach and write about nineteenth-century British literary, visual and media cultures, from the rise of the novel to the invention of cinema. My current book project, Virtual Realism: Victorian Fiction as Optical Technology, explores the relationship between the realist novel and pre-cinematic optical technology in Victorian Britain. It argues that the realist fictional aesthetics of writers like Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Thomas Hardy are embedded in the visual culture of popular nineteenth-century optical devices such as magic lanterns, stereoscopes, and moving image toys. What distinguishes such devices is the way they create virtual images that exist only through the interface of the viewer’s perception and the apparatus. One of the central endeavors of this project is to show how the Victorian realist novel understood itself like an optical technology: as a medium for creating virtual experience. My research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Franke Institute for the Humanities and the Nicholson Center for British Studies.

Biography

As a Lindsay Family Humanities Teaching Fellow, I teach courses in the Departments of English and Cinema & Media Studies and the Humanities Core. Much of my teaching is interdisciplinary and invites students to think across different types of media, from fiction and poetry to film, photography, and graphic novels. I am committed to what is broadly called “inclusive pedagogy”: a set of strategies and practices for ensuring that every student has equal access to learning. From 2016-2018, I was a Teaching Fellow at the Chicago Center for Teaching, where I led workshops on the fundamentals of teaching and inclusive pedagogy. I am also a past coordinator of the Race and Pedagogy Working Group at the University of Chicago and have developed workshops and resources on implementing anti-racist pedagogies in the classroom.

Select Publications

  • “’A Bright Continuous Flow’: Phantasmagoria and History in A Tale of Two Cities.” Victorian Literature and Culture, forthcoming.
  • “The Ghost of Pauline Kael.” Book chapter in Talking About Pauline Kael, ed. Wayne Stengel (Lanham, MA: Scarecrow Press, 2015).

Teaching

As Instructor of Record:

Realism, or, Illusions of the Real
(Undergraduate, Winter 2018)
Department of English, University of Chicago

As Course Assistant:

Virginia Woolf (Undergraduate, Winter 2017); Introduction to Fiction: Narrative, Violence, Justice (Undergraduate, Fall 2016); History and Theory of Drama I (Undergraduate and Graduate, Fall 2015). 

As Workshop Leader:

Fundamentals of Teaching Literature (Graduate, Fall 2016, Winter 2017 and Fall 2017), Chicago Center for Teaching, University of Chicago 
Department of English, University of Chicago

Other Workshops or Teaching:

Anti-Racist Pedagogy, Here and Now (organizer and moderator, November 7, 2017); Inclusive Teaching in STEM (organizer and facilitator, February 5, 2018).