Miriam Elizabeth Burstein

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Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, Ph.D

Professor and Chair

(585) 395-5827
mburstei@brockport.edu
Office: Liberal Arts 227

Education

• PhD, University of Chicago, 1997
• MA, University of Chicago, 1993
• BA, University of California-Irvine, 1992

Areas of Specialty

• Victorian studies
• Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and intellectual history
• Literature and religion
• Historical ficton
• Neo-Victorianism
• The history of the historical novel
• Women writers

• Recent Publications

  Books

  • Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820-1900. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013.
  • Editor, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere. London: Victorian Secrets Press, 2013; 2^nd ed., 2018.
  • Narrating Women’s History in Britain, 1770-1902. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2004.

  Articles and Chapters

  • “Novels.” The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion, ed. Jeffrey Barbeau. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
  • “Religion in the Nineteenth Century.” Handbook of the English Novel, 1830-1900. Ed. Monika Pietrzak-Franger and Martin Middeke. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. 
  • “A Forgotten Novel: John Riland’s Memoirs of a West-India Planter (1827).” Slavery and Abolition 41.3 (September 2020): 582-98; first published online 7 January 2020: https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2019.1702770. 
  • “Thoroughly Modern Mina.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 8 (July 2019)
  • “Father Clement and the Form of Protestant-Catholic Controversy.” British Catholic History 34.2 (May 2019): 396-423. 
  • “Hybridous Monsters: Constructing “Religion” and “the Novel” in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion: Literary, Historical, and Religious Studies in Dialogue. Ed. Josh King. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2019.
  • “Catholicism and the Fin-de-Siècle.” Edinburgh Companion to the Fin-de-Siècle. Ed. Josephine Guy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
  • “‘In ten years there is an increase of 450 priests of Antichrist’: Quantifying Catholics in The Bulwark.” Journal of British Studies 56.3 (2017): 580-604. 
  • “Parody after Providence: Christianity, Secularism, and the Form of Neo-Victorian Fiction.” Neo-Victorian Humor: Comic Subversions and Unlaughter in Contemporary Historical Re-Visions. Ed. M. L. Kohlke and Christian Gutleben. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2017.  
  • “The ‘Papal Aggression,’ 1850-1852.” BRANCH. Ed. Dino Felluga. December 2016. http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=miriam-burstein-the-papal-aggression- controversy-1850-52
  • “The Religion(s) of the Brontës.” Blackwell Companion to the Brontës. Ed. Diane Hoeveler. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 2016.  
  • “‘I have remembered how to seem’: Symbolic Monarchy after King George.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 32.2 (Feb/Mar 2015): 162-78.
  • “Victorian Historical Writing.” Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature. Ed Pamela K. Gilbert and Linda Hughes. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2015.
  • “New Scholarship on Religion and Literature, 2000-12.” Choice 51.3 (November 2013): 393- 407.
  • “When Did Charlotte Brontë Read Vanity Fair?” Brontë Studies 37.2 (April 2012): 159-62.  
  • “The Mid-Nineteenth Century Reception.” The Brontës in Context. Ed. Marianne Thormahlen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
  • “Protestants, Convents, and Seduction by Matthew 10:37.” Victorian Review 37.2 (Fall 2011): 16-20.  
  • “Reinventing the Marian Persecutions in Victorian England.” Partial Answers 8.2 (June 2010): 341-64.  
  • “Anti-Catholic Sermons in England, 1820-1900.” A New History of the Sermon: The Nineteenth Century. Ed. Robert Ellison. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010. 233-68.
  • “Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry.” Handbook to Victorian Literature. Ed. Alexandra Warwick and Martin Willis. New York and London: Continuum, 2008.
  • “‘The Reduced Pretensions of the Historic Muse’: Agnes Strickland and the Commerce in Women’s History.” Journal of Narrative Technique 28 (1998): 219-42.
  • “‘From Good Looks to Good Thoughts’: Popular Wome’s history and the Invention of Modernity, c. 1830-c. 1870.” Modern Philology 97 (1999): 46-75.
  • “‘Unstoried in History’? Early histories of Women at the Huntington Library, 1652-1902.” Huntington Library Quarterly 64 (2001): 469-500.
  • “Protestants against the Jewish and Catholic Family, c. 1829-1860.” Victorian Literature and Culture 31 (2003): 333-57.
  • “‘Not the Superiority of Belief, But Superiority of True Devotion’: Grace Aguilar’s Histories of the Spirit.” Silent Voices. Ed. brenda Ayres. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. 1-27.
  • “Reviving the Reformation: Victorian Women Writers and the Protestant Historical Novel. Women’s Writing 12 (2005): 73-84.
  • “Counter-Medievalism; Or, Protestants Rewrite the Middle Ages.” Beyond Arthurian romances: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism. Ed. Loretta holloway and Jennifer A. Palmgren. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 147-68
  • “The Historical Novel and Contemporary Criticism: A Survey, 1990-2004.” Choice 43.1 (September 2005): 45-58.
  • “Emily Sarah Holt and the Evangelical historical Novel: Undoing Walter Scott.” Clio’s Daughters. Ed. Lynette Felber. Newardk, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2007. 154-78.
  • “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn, 1901-2006: How to Do Things with the Queen.” Clio 37.1 (Fall 2007): 1-26.

  Companions and Encyclopedias

  • “Barbauld, Anna Letitia”; “Bulwer, Edward”; “Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan”; “Milman, Henry Hart”; “Biography.” The Continuum Encylopedia of British Literature. ed. Steven Serafin and Valerie Grosvenor Myers. New York and London: Continuum, 2003.
  • “Royal Lives”; “Women Worthies.” A Companion to Women’s Historical Writing. Ed. Mary Spongberg et al. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
  • “Sir Walter Scott: ‘The Highland Widow.’” A Companion to the British Short Story. Ed. Andrew Maunder. London and New York: Facts on File, 2006.
  • “Unitarianism”; “Agnes Strickland.” Encyclopedia of Victorian Women Writers. Ed. Lesa Scholl and Emily Morris. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020-21.

  Miscellaneous

  • “How to Write a First Person Essay.” Chronicle of Higher Education 11 August 2006: C4.
  • “Oh, the Futility! Adapting Jane Eyre.” Open Letters Monthly: An Arts and Literature Review 1 July 2011
  • “I am the Very Model of a Pundit Academical.” Inside Higher Education 24 May 2018 (https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/05/24/gilbert-and-sullivan-take-academe- opinon).
  • The Little Professor (http://littleprofessor.typepad.com)
• Presentations

  Invited Talks

  • “‘Unhappiness and Misery’: Interfaith Marital Gothic in the Nineteenth Century.” Branton Lecture, Washington and Jefferson College, April 18, 2017.  

  Conference Papers by Invitation

  • “Keyword: Public.” Modern Language Association: 123rd Annual Convention, Chicago, 2007. Invited by the MLA Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession.
  • “A Bible on Every Table: Victorian Women Writers on the History of Protestantism and Domesticity.” Feminist Genealogies, Boston University, February 18, 2011.

  Conferences

  • Central New York Conference on Language and Literature
  • 18th & 19th-Century British Women Writers Conference, Hystorical Fictions: Women, History and Authorship (University of Wales
  • Midwest Modern Language Association
  • Midwest Victorian Studies Association
  • Modern Language Association
  • Neo-Victorian Cultures (Liverpool John Moores University)
  • Nineteenth-Century Studies Association
  • North American Society for the Study of Romanticism
  • North American Victorian Studies Association
  • Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies
  • Victorians Institute Conference
  • Victorian Popular Fiction Association

Academic Positions

• State University of New York, College at Brockport, Dept. of English (September 2005-present) Associate Professor
• State University of New York, College at Brockport, Dept. of English (September 1999-June 2005) Assistant Professor (tenure-track)
• University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Dept. of English (September 1998-May 1999) Lecturer (Full-time)

Conferences and Professional Activities