Emily Steinlight

Emily Steinlight is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Arts & Sciences, specializing in nineteenth-century British literature with research foci spanning the history and theory of the novel, critical theory, comparative race and empire studies, gender and sexuality studies, and literature and science. Her work investigates the relationship between political thought and literary form, particularly regarding population, labor, and the Victorian natural and social sciences.

Her academic trajectory includes a Ph.D. from Brown University (where she held a Cogut Center for the Humanities Graduate Fellowship and Roland G. D. Richardson Fellowship), prior teaching appointments at Trinity University and the University of Chicago (as Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor), and current leadership in the V21 Collective. Her research interests form an interconnected web examining how literary form engages with biopolitical questions of surplus life, mass politics, and social organization.

Steinlight's scholarship reveals consistent thematic threads across her publications: the politics of narrative form in addressing population crises, the temporal disjunctions between historical consciousness and literary presentism, and the representation of marginalized subjects within Victorian social structures. Her work demonstrates how novels like Bleak House generate political force through narrative techniques that expose systemic inaction and surplus populations.

• Sonya Rudikoff Prize for best first book in Victorian studies (2020)
• David Delaura Teaching Award (2021)
• Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching by an Assistant Professor (2015)

As a dedicated mentor, Steinlight has chaired five doctoral dissertations examining topics from embodied belonging in British fiction to landscape aesthetics in realism. Her teaching portfolio spans courses on the novel, Victorian fiction, reproductive narratives, and critical theory. She actively participates in scholarly communities through the V21 Collective, which organizes summer reading groups addressing planetary concerns, state formation, and equality.