Profile
Nineteenth-century British literature
Zarena Aslami researches and teaches in the fields of nineteenth-century British literature and culture, history and theory of the novel, feminist and gender theory, cultural studies, and critical theory. In particular, she has been interested in moving beyond accounts of liberal political subjectivity that privilege rational deliberation, self-transparency, and other fantasies of liberal agency, inquiring how people become and remain committed to the hegemonic forms that oppress them.
Aslami’s current book project, State Fantasy: Late Victorian Liberalism, Unconscious Citizenship, and the Ends of the Realist Novel, is an historical and formal meditation on modern political attachment. By closely examining fiction and non-fiction from the Victorian period, the book tracks how differently marked and located subjects in the newly dawning liberal age not only experienced, but also came to have optimism in "the political." It then considers the various destinies of that feeling of optimism, including its ultimately inhibiting tendency to stand in for active, participatory citizenship.
Courses Taught
ENG 210 Introduction to the Study of English
ENG 310C Literature in English: 1789–1900
ENG 459 Victorian Studies
ENG 460 British Literature in the Age of Empire
ENG 816/992D (variable topics) "Victorian Liberal Theory and the Novel"; "Victorian Realisms"
