Alison Booth

Education

B.A., Bennington
M.F.A, Cornell
M.A., Princeton
Ph.D., Princeton

Biography

I enjoy teaching courses in Victorian fiction, women writers, Gothic, narrative theory, auto/biography, travel, and digital humanities; intersectional feminism and social justice are persistent themes.  In research, I have expanded my feminist and narratological studies of cultural and literary history in Britain and North America since 1830 into digital humanities and bibliography. My first book, Greatness Engendered (Cornell, 1992), explored historical concepts of a common life and a female literary tradition in George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, two authors surviving the process of eliminating women writers from the canon. Collective biographical history, including museums, also underlies my most recent book, Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries (Oxford, 2016), a transatlantic study of writers’ house museums and narratives of pilgrimage in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which I further explore reception history, gender, and race/nationality. I have persistently worked across the boundaries of period (nineteenth to twentieth centuries), nationality (particularly transatlantic Anglophone), media and audience (word-image, novel and film, celebrity and popular culture). I have applied narrative theory particularly to life writing and the prevalent form of collections of short biographies (prosopographies): How to Make It as a Woman (Chicago, 2004), and an annotated bibliography and database, Collective Biographies of Women, hosted by University of Virginia Library in collaboration with the DH Center. We can study trends in women’s biographies over time and compare versions of interrelated individuals or types; some books feature Jewish women of biblical and modern times. From 2016-2022, I was Academic Director of the Scholars’ Lab, UVA Library, and hosted two Feminist DH@UVA conferences with support of Women, Gender, and Sexuality; in 2023-2025, I was Faculty Director of the DH Center. My courses on women writers recently include studies of the Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer (1882-1975).