Tina Lupton
Professor, English
Education
Ph.D., Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
M.A., University of Sussex, Brighton, England
B.A., Flinders University, South Australia
Research and teaching interests
Materiality of the Book, History and Future of Reading, British and American Novel, Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Literature and/as Work
Biography
Christina teaches the theory of the book, very broadly defined, and works on the history of reading from the eighteenth century to the present. Her main body of research has been into the history of reading as an activity that is both materially defined by the codex format, and politically tied up with the history of work and leisure. Reading and the Making of Time (JHU, 2018) explores these themes in the context of a group of eighteenth-century readers, largely women, and mostly professionals, who make and struggle for time for books in their lives.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Christina was part of a team studying the habits of novel readers under more recent conditions. The results of that study, Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic, (OUP, 2022) was published as a co-authored book and won the British Association for Contemporary Literature Monograph Prize in 2023.
Christina is now working at work on two different projects, Literature and the Working Day, a study of the way that the novel has reflected and complimented working life since the 1700s, and Paid Leaves: Writing a Life Around 1968, which explores the sponsorship of life writing by state and social policy at that moment in the US and the UK. She remains interested more generally in the work of Michel Serres, Jacques Rancière, Peter Weiss, Siegfried Kracauer, Hannah Arendt, and Raymond Williams and in recent fictions that engage with the relationship between work, reading, and temporal experience.
Representative publications
“Jacques Rancière, J.M. Coetzee, and Doing Things Oneself,” New Literary History, Autumn 2024, Vol. 54, no. 4., 1595-1611.
With Ben Davies and Johanne Gormsen Schmidt, Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic, Oxford University Press, 2022. (Winner of 2022 British Association for Contemporary Literature Monograph Prize)
“Queer Times for The Straight Book: Maggie Nelson and Michel Serres” POST 45, September 2019.
Reading and The Making of Time, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.
Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.