My three most recent / current projects reflect very well my enduring scholarly interests. In 2019 I published The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Market (Cambridge UP), which studies the rise of autobiography as a commercial genre and traces the effects of that rise into the commodified subjectivities of the mid-century Victorian novel. In November 2024 Edinburgh UP will publish my edited collection, Life Writing and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Market. And I am currently co-authoring (with Sara Malton) Reading Dickens, which introduces Dickens to students and young scholars and explores the ways in which he continues to be relevant to our concerns in the early part of the twenty-first century. I have published extensively on Dickens and his enduring relevance in other contexts, too–for instance, in “Bent and Broken,” Dickens Quarterly 41.1 (March 2024); in “‘Laws of the game’: Play, Trauma, and Great Expectations,” in Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America (2021); and “Recent Dickens Studies 2019: A Journal of the Plague Year,” Dickens Studies Annual 52.1 (2021).
I have been a Trustee, the Vice President, and the President of the Charles Dickens Society and have served two terms as Executive Secretary of the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA). I am on the editorial boards for both Dickens Quarterly and Dickens Studies Annual, have twice won support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for my work, and am the series co-editor (with Ann Hawkins and Leigh Bonds) of the SUNY Press series for the History of Books, Publishing and the Book Trades. Prior to arriving to UF in fall 2024, I was a member of the English faculty at Texas Tech University and Iowa State University, and also at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where I served as Department Chair 2020-2024.
Contact
- office: 4332 Turlington Hall
- voice: (352) 294-2831
- fax: (352) 392-0960
- email: <sean.grass@ufl.edu>
- Bluesky: @gongdonkey.bsky.social