Hi! I am Teaching Faculty in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I teach and write on Victorian literature and culture. I also serve as the English Department’s educational innovation lead. In 2023-2024, I am on research leave as an ACLS Resident Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW-Madison.
I am working on a couple of research projects. The first is Seeing Things: Virtual Aesthetics in Victorian Culture, an academic book that is under contract with Cornell University Press. Seeing Things is a cultural history of seeing things that are not there. It draws on the archives of fiction and optical technology to argue that virtual aesthetics — the aesthetics of “seeing things” — became a dominant media aesthetic of the Victorian era. The second project is a study of Arab Jews in British India that looks at the visual and material archives of my Iraqi and Syrian ancestors in Calcutta to explore how this community imagined and reimagined itself as Indian Arab Jews and British colonial subjects in an era of rising nationalism and imperial expansion. What holds my work together is the practice of creating rich, capacious, and politically informed cultural histories of the nineteenth century through imaginative close readings of images, objects, and texts.
Teaching is among my greatest joys and I have developed courses on topics like visual storytelling, global film history, global nineteenth-century women’s writing, and the literature and visual culture of the Raj. I bring to the classroom expertise in inclusive, anti-racist, and student-centered pedagogy, a belief in the transformative potential of collaborative critical thought, and a willingness to try anything once, however weird.
I like to hike, lift weights, travel, and read detective mysteries. I live in Madison, WI with my partner Peter McDonald, who is a play scholar and game designer, and our dog Zora.
You can reach me at ashubert[at]wisc[dot]edu.