Jill Galvan

Jill Galvan is an Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University, within the College of Arts and Sciences. She specializes in Victorian literature and culture, Twentieth- and Twenty-first-century fiction, aesthetics, and media theory and history. Her current research project, The Quiet Fight: Feeling, Time, and the Form of Marriage Fiction, examines the genre of stories about marital difficulties across literature, film, and television, challenging traditional narratives of the marriage plot and its role in realism.

Galvan holds a PhD and MA from the University of California – Los Angeles and a BA from the University of Texas – Austin. Her scholarly works include The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult and Communication Technologies, 1859-1919 (Cornell University Press, 2010) and co-edited Replotting Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (The Ohio State University Press, 2018). Her research frequently intersects with spiritualism, communication technologies, and gender studies, particularly in analyzing Victorian-era texts and their influence on modern thought.

Her articles explore topics such as occult networks in literature, the role of Victorian poetry in shaping spiritual beliefs, and the literary devices used in séance communications. These works highlight her interdisciplinary approach, bridging history, media studies, and literature to interrogate evolving concepts of realism and the supernatural.

• Awards: OSU English Undergraduate Organization's Professor of the Year (2021).

In teaching, Galvan focuses on the long nineteenth-century British literature and modern/contemporary works. Recent specialized courses include 'Undoing Victorian Realism,' 'Rethinking the Marriage Plot,' and 'The Fin de Siècle.' She has also taught thematic courses on Charles Dickens, Gothic literature, and Oscar Wilde.

Her work on the cross-correspondences case—part of early twentieth-century psychical research—demonstrates her engagement with historical and literary phenomena. She argues that Victorian poetry and literary allusions provided the emotional and conceptual framework for interpreting the case’s scripts, linking them to broader themes of spiritual evolution and the persistence of cultural memory.