James Eli Adams
Professor
Graduate Faculty Member
- Degrees
- Cornell University
Ph.D., M.A. - Oxford University (Rhodes Scholarship)
B.A. - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
S.B.
Bio
James Eli Adams writes and teaches on a wide range of nineteenth-century British literature and culture, but he is best known for his work on Victorian gender and sexuality. From 1993-2000 (when he taught at Indiana University) he co-edited the journal Victorian Studies. He is the author of Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity, (1995), the co-editor, with Andrew Miller, of Sexualities in Victorian Britain (1996), and the editor-in-chief of An Encyclopedia of the Victorian Era (2004). His most recent book, A History of Victorian Literature, appeared in 2009. He is at work on two large projects: The Uses of Inheritance: Identity and Agency in Britain, 1789-1895, and a series of essays on the varieties and prospects of literary history.
Research and Teaching Interests
- Victorian Literature and Culture
- Gender and Sexuality
- The 19th-Century Novel
- Aestheticism
- Children’s Literature
Current Projects
- Wildean Inheritance
- Industry and Insurrection: Narrating Manhood in the Industrial Novel
- The Discourse Did It: Forms of Agency in Current Literary History
- The Uses of Inheritance: Identity and Agency in Britain, 1789-1895