Research Interests: Victorian literature, culture, and media; digital humanities; technology and the liberal arts
Alison Byerly works at the intersection of literature and other media. She is the author of two books, Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge, 1998), and Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (U of Michigan, forthcoming 2012). Are We There Yet? connects the Victorian fascination with "virtual travel" with both the rise of realism in nineteenth-century fiction, and twenty-first-century experiments in virtual reality. She has published on Victorian technology, such as the railway and telegraph, and is equally interested in contemporary technology and its role in higher education and culture. She has lectured on the topics of digital humanities, curricular innovation, and social media past and present, in venues including the annual conference of the Modern Language Association, the Media in Transition Conference, and MIT's Communications Forum.
Byerly holds an interdisciplinary appointment as College Professor at Middlebury College, where she served in the College's administration for thirteen years, most recently as Provost and Executive Vice President. Courses she has offered at Middlebury over the last several years include "Time and Narrative," a team-taught International Studies seminar on "Politics and the Novel," and a multimedia course on "Fictional Worlds." Though she will not be teaching any courses at MIT in 2012-13, she welcomes contact from students who share her interests.
Alison Byerly's personal homepage http://blogs.middlebury.edu/alisonbyerly/
"Technologies of Travel in the Victorian Novel," Oxford Handbook to Victorian Literature, ed. Lisa Rodensky (Oxford UP, forthcoming)
"'A Prodigious Map Beneath His Feet': Virtual Travel and the Panoramic Perspective," Nineteenth-Century Contexts Vol. 29, Numbers 2-3 (June/September 2007): 151-69. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08905490701584643
"Rivers, Journeys, and the Construction of Place in Nineteenth-Century English Literature," in Steven Rosendale, ed., The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment. (Iowa University Press, 2002): 77-94.
"The Uses of Landscape: The Picturesque Aesthetic and the National Park System," in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Harold Fromm and Cheryll Glotfelty. (University of Georgia Press, 1996). http://goo.gl/CgJSV
"'The Masquerade of Existence': Thackeray's Theatricality," Dickens Studies Annual 23: (1994): 259-86.
"'The Language of the Soul': George Eliot and Music," Nineteenth-Century Literature, June 1989: 1-17. http://www.jstor.org/pss/3045104
