Pamela Gilbert

Albert Brick Professor Emerita

Pamela Gilbert’s book Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History focuses on the history of the body, medicine and realism in the nineteenth century, with special attention to skin and surface. This is an extension of her long-term work on the history of the body and medicine in the period, and on the history of genre. Other areas of interest include popular literature and medical humanities. A new edited collection Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1860s (Cambridge UP, 2024) is just out.  Some recent essay publications include “Evidence”, Keywords for Health Humanities. Priscilla Wald and Sari Altschuler, Eds. NYU Press, 2023; “Unsettling Affect” and the related essay “Antipathy” in Victorian Studies.  64.4 (2022); “Responsibility and Community: Narrating the Individual and the Collective in Pandemic Times.,” Special Issue Forum on the Pandemic; Journal of Victorian Culture, 27.2 (2022); “Skin Deep: Reading Race in the Nineteenth-Century Novel,” in Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Skin, Silk, and Show.  Ed. By Sibylle Baumbach and Ulla Ratheiser. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021:  59-77; and “Cosmopolitan Skin: Tattoos and Travel in British Fiction”.  La Peaulogie. 5 (Feb, 2021): 20-43. She was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (2016), a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell (2016-17), and the Margaret Belcher Fellow in Victorian Studies at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford University (awarded 2021, resident in 2023). She was on the executive committee for NAVSA (the North American Victorian Studies Association) and am the series editor for the SUNY Press book series Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. At UF, she was affiliated with the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies and am a founding member of CISMaC, the Collective for the Interdisciplinary Study of Medicine and Culture. She regularly taught courses in Victorian Literature, Literature and Medicine, and topics in Victorian Gender and Class.