Professor Regenia Gagnier
Professor of English
Extension: 4260
Telephone: 01392 724260
CV for Professor Regenia Gagnier
Professor Regenia Gagnier
Research Interests
Professor Regenia Gagnier is a committed critical thinker who always historicizes. Her books have shaped the study of Victorian and modern culture with highly influential work on decadence, aesthetics and aestheticism, lifewriting and subjectivity, economics, individualism, and globalization. Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, 1986) considered the role of the artist in market society. Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832-1920 (Oxford, 1991) analyzed the relationship of social class and gender to literary form. The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago, 2000) traced the moment when aesthetics and economics shifted from substantive to formal models and production to consumption. Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: on the Relationship of Part to Whole 1859-1920 (Palgrave Macmillan 2010) explores the relation of the individual to increasingly larger social units, from the dyad to the world citizen. Her current research is on the global circulation of the literatures of decadence and liberalization.
Gagnier is Editor in Chief of Literature Compass http://literature-compass.com (the leading online journal of the discipline as a whole, with 18 international section editors) and its Global Circulation Project http://literature-compass.com/global-circulationproject/; associate editor, Feminist Economics; associate editor, Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities; editorial advisor to Women: A Cultural Review; and on the editorial boards of Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Literature, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Partial Answers, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long 19C, Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, Kritika Kultura, and RaVoN (Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net).
Gagnier has won numerous awards and fellowships for teaching as well as research in North America, Britain, Australasia, and Europe and reads widely for journals and academic presses. She has served on seven MLA Division Executive Committees in the USA and the AHRC Research Panel and CCUE Executive in the UK as well as other national and international professional bodies. In 2006, she was made Honorary Centenary Fellow of the English Association, in 2008 elected to the Royal Society of Arts, in 2011 elected to the International Association of University Professors of English, and in 2012 received by the Queen at Buckingham Palace for heritage and scholarship in literature and theatre. In 2012, she was the Macgeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne and in 2013 she will give the Ian Fletcher Lecture at Arizona State University at Tempe. 2009-2012 she was the President of the British Association for Victorian Studies http://www.bavsuk.org/contacts.htm.
Gagnier is a native Californian who took her undergraduate and graduate degrees in English at the University of California at Berkeley. She was tenured and made full professor at Stanford University, where she taught for fourteen years in English, Modern Thought and Literature, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and the Cultural Studies Group. In 1996, she moved to the UK and the University of Exeter, where she is the Professor of English and Senior Fellow of the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis). From 2008-2010 she was Director of Exeter's Interdisciplinary Institute (EII). 2009-2010 she was Chair of the Consortium of Institutes of Advanced Study UK and Ireland.
Research Specialisms:
- Victorian Britain, esp. the fin de siecle;
- literary and social theory;
- gender and feminist studies;
- interdisciplinary studies;
- migration studies and the global circulation of literatures and cultures;
- digital humanities
