Professor Christina Lupton

Email: c dot lupton at warwick dot ac dot uk

H515 Humanities Building, University Road University of Warwick Coventry CV4 7AL

About

I teach the theory of the book, very broadly defined, and work on the history of reading from the eighteenth century to the present. At Warwick my courses include modules on literature and time, the eighteenth century, and contemporary fiction and media theory. I supervise students in all of these areas. My recent research has been into the history of reading as an activity that is both materially defined by the codex format, and politically tied up with the history of work and leisure. Reading and the Making of Time (JHU, 2018) explores these themes in the context of a group of eighteenth-century readers, largely women, and mostly professionals, who make and struggle for time for books in their lives.

My new project, Literature After Work: a History of the Future of Free Time, explores the way different strands of twentieth-century theory have imagined the reorganization of the worker’s day and the time to be given to education. I am interested in particular in the work of Michel Serres, Jacques Rancière, Peter Weiss, Siegfried Kracauer, Hannah Arendt, and Raymond Williams and in twentieth-century fictions that engage with the realtionship between work, reading, and temporal experience.

Reading and the Making of Time was supported by a Leverhulme Fellowship and a Humboldt Fellowship. I have recently organised conferences on the topics of Literature and Contingency (now published as a special issue of Textual Practice) and on the way recent novels travel in translation. I direct the Warwick Humanities Research Center and sit on the board of the US English Institute. I also write on contemporary issues and media use for publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, n+1 and the TLS, and I speak regularly in both European and North American contexts on contemporary and eighteenth-century themes.

Research interests

Eighteenth-century literature; the historical experience of time; theories of the novel; it-narratives; material cultural studies; theories of media and mediation; systems theory in a literary context.

Teaching and supervision

I supervise projects on eighteenth-century literature, those working at the intersection of media history and literary practice, and students interested more generally in the ways literary texts from all periods engage with their material and institutional contexts.

Recent publications

Books

Reading and the Making of Time, Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, August 2018:

https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/reading-and-making-time-eighteenth-century

Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain, University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 2012.

Ed. Jane Austen, Pride and Predjudice, Oxford World Classics, forthcoming 2019.

Recent Articles

Literature and Contingency, a special issue of Textual Practice, ed. Christina Lupton and Carsten Meiner, forthcoming in 2019.

"Repeat" forthcoming in Further Reading, ed Matthew Rubery and Leah Price, OUP.

“Paper Ontologies: Reading Sterne with Bruno Latour,” Textual Practice, Volume 30, No 1, Winter 2017

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/uRY5ZIh636km6IGtXC9G/full

“The Novel as the Future Anterior of the Book: Tom McCarthy's Remainder and Ali Smith's The Accidental,” NOVEL, Volume 49, No 3, Fall 2016. pp 504-18.

http://0-novel.dukejournals.org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/content/49/3/504

with Sean Silver, "Latour and Eighteenth-Century Literary Studies" The Eighteenth Century, Vol 57, No 2, Summer 2016. pp 165-179.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/634860/pdf

“Immersing the Network in Time: from the Where to the When of Print Reading,” Proceedings of the English Institute 2014, special issue of ELH, Vol 83, No 2, Summer 2016. 299-317.

http://muse.jhu.edu/article/621628/pdf

“Codex, Contingency, the Eighteenth-Century Novel” ELH, 81.4, Nov 2014. 1173-1192

"Gender, Materiality and Metaphor on the Eighteenth-Century Page," Studies in English Literature,1500-1900, 54:3, Summer 2014. 605-624.

With Alexander Dick, “On Lecturing and Being Beautiful: Zadie Smith, Elaine Scarry, and the Liberal Aesthetic” English Studies in Canada, Summer 2013

Some of my other shorter essays and reviews are here:

Not Reading, Working

The Searcher of Patterns and the Keeper of Things

To Read is to Choose

After Mothers' Day

Still Life: Brexit with a Sick Child

London This Week

Qualifications

• MA (Sussex)
• PhD (Rutgers)