Julia Brown

Professor Brown is both a Professor of English and Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department. While the main focus of her teaching and research has been nineteenth century British literature, she is drawn to authors who live on the edges of that century—Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde. Professor Brown is currently working on a book on the Bildungsroman and its afterlife in film, and has developed a particular interest in the films of John Schlesinger. In addition to standard courses in nineteenth century British literature, she recently developed two courses that continue to engage: “The Question of the Real in Fiction and Film”, which explores conceptions of the ‘real’ in both highly realistic and fantastical works of fiction (Chekhov, Poe, Tolstoy, Kafka) together with German Expressionist and Italian Neoreal films, and “Home and World,” a course that considers the changing relations between home and world in a wide selection of works including the paintings of Vermeer, major English novelists, films about cosmopolitanism such as Satyajit Ray’s “The Stranger,” and contemporary fiction with global concerns, such as that of Mohsin Hamid. Professor Brown is also interested in developing a more critical awareness of the state of the academy today—for example, its growing dependence on informational apparatuses, rather than on intellectual inquiry.