Rachel Michelle Stern

Rachel recently received her doctorate from the English Department at Harvard. Her dissertation, "Social Science and the Realist Novel's Turn to Character," demonstrates how the new sociological idea that human behavior on a large scale could be treated as scientific fact reshaped the aesthetics of character in Victorian prose fiction. Her research explores the interrelationship among histories of epistemology, phenomenology, and secularization in the nineteenth century. Rachel teaches on a range of topics across the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, from Swiftian satire to Faulknerian tragedy. She believes that what the world needs now is Matthew Arnold.