Vita

Dr. Johnson came to Penn State Harrisburg in 1989 after teaching for four years at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. She is a specialist in Victorian literature and regularly teaches courses in 19th- and 20th-century British literature, women’s studies, feminist criticism, and interdisciplinary humanities. She has also served as coordinator of the Humanities Graduate Program and is now coordinating the English Program.

Dr. Johnson‘s research is focused on the novel and its representations of women and class issues. She is currently working on the poetry, fairy tales, and novels of British working-class writer Ethel Carnie Holdsworth.

Education

• Ph.D., University of Minnesota
• B.A., Earlham College

Research Areas

• Victorian literature
• Women’s writing
• Working-class writing
• The British novel

Selected Publications and Creative Projects

• Hidden Hands: Working-Class Women and Victorian Social-Problem Fiction. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2001.
• "Finding Her Voice(s): The Development of a Working-Class Feminist Vision in the Poetry of Ethel Carnie," forthcoming in Victorian Poetry, Fall 2005.
• "Embodying Losses in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy," forthcoming in Critique.
• "The Gendered Politics of the Gaze: Henry James and George Eliot," Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 30, No. 1 (March 1997), 39-54.
• "‘This Heretic Narrative’: The Strategy of the Split Narrative in Charlotte Bronte‘s Villette," SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 30 (Fall 1990), 617-31.

Professional Affiliations

• Modern Language Association
• Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Society

Course Offerings

• English 401 Studies in Genre: The British Novel
• English 453 Victorian Novel
• English 489 British Women Writers
• Humanities 530 Seminar: Feminist Approaches to Literature and the Arts