Stefanie Markovits, the Charlotte Marion Saden Professor of English and chair of the Humanities Program, researches and teaches English literature of the long nineteenth century: both Romantic and Victorian, both poetry and the novel. Other areas of interest include German classical literature (especially Goethe and Schiller), aesthetic theory, war and literature, and genre theory.
Her first book considered the treatment of literary and political action in writers from Wordsworth to Henry James. While her second, on the Victorian response to an unpopular war (the Crimean War, 1854–56), was narrower, allowing her to think further about the impact of social and political matters on formal ones: how (for example) does patriotic poetry translate the blunders of the Crimea into verse? Her third book offers an in-depth account of the verse-novel as it arose in the mid-Victorian period, focusing on how the split allegiances of its component genres allow for the unleashing of radical energies. Her most recent book, The Number-Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, considers how the many numbers scattered through the literature of the period contribute to their meaning-making.