Janine Barchas
Phone: +1 512 471 8379
Email: barchas@austin.utexas.edu
Janine Barchas joined the University of Texas at Austin in 2002, after teaching at the University of Auckland in New Zealand for five years. Her first book, "Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel" (Cambridge UPress, 2003), won the SHARP book prize for best work in the field of book history. In her next book, "Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity" (Johns Hopkins UPress, 2012), Barchas argued that Austen carefully selects historically resonant names and settings for her fictions.
In 2013, Barchas unveiled the first instalment of the "What Jane Saw" website (www.whatjanesaw.org), which currently offers digital reconstructions of two Georgian museum blockbusters, as they looked to Austen in 1796 and 1813. This open-access project has received global press attention as an innovation in Digital Humanities, including two feature stories in the New York Times.
Beyond books and digital projects, Barchas has published articles on writers from "the long eighteenth century" in academic journals such as ELH, Review of English Studies, Eighteenth-Century Life, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Persuasions as well as in the popular press.
She is currently co-curating an exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington entitled Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity that runs 6 August 6 Nov 2016.
Her teaching ranges from classes devoted to the work of Jane Austen to seminars on the history of the modern paperback book.