This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Kathy Psomiades works on Victorian literature and culture. She is the author of Beauty's Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford, 1997), and co-editor, with Talia Schaffer of Women and British Aestheticism (Virginia, 1999). She has been the recipient of an NEH fellowship, and a Kaneb award for undergraduate teaching at the University of Notre Dame. Her current book project, Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology and the Novel, examines the intersections between the novel and anthropology in the second half of the nineteenth century.
So I tend to like the more lyrical and aestheticist of the Victorian poets. I am fond of Tennyson, and I really love the Pre-Raphaelites: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, the people that I wrote about first. I’ve also had a weakness for Swinburne since I wrote my senior thesis on him—for which I only got a B-plus, by the way. But I really love those writers.
As far as the novelists go, I'm just not really a novel person. I read novels as if they were really, really, really long poems. But I like thinking with Elliot's Daniel Deronda, and I'm very fond of Bronte’s Villette, and I actually like to read Oliphant for fun. With that said, as Victorian writers go, I really enjoy the poets.
I was an extremely bookish little kid. I think it's partly that my parents thought that TV was a bad thing, so we didn't have TV. And in my apartment building in New York City, there was a tiny, private children's library full of all these books from the 20th century. Somebody had started it back in the ’20s, so they had everything. Every week, I would go down and get six books, and since there was no TV, I had plenty of time to read.
The first chapter book I ever read was Cherry Ames, at Hilton Hospital. Cherry Ames was a nurse, and she had a whole series about her. I remember liking it because she was a brunette—she was not a blonde heroine. After that, I think it was sort of written that I would like novels, books, and poems.
In addition to loving all that sort of stuff, my father was a professor of political science—lest that sound really tweedy, he was actually the first person in his family to go to college. He was never like ‘oh, I am an intellectual, and I will do this and that." He just really loved the idea that, instead of doing really strenuous work—or the blue-collar jobs his brother did—he got to do this pleasant, happy thing, and people paid him money for it. He never lost the sense of what a great thing that was, and I was exposed to the possibility of being an academic from a young age.
Of course, there were other things that I thought I might want to be when I was an innocent child. I was fascinated by nuns. I went to a school run by Episcopal nuns, and they had cool outfits. They wore the full wimple and veil, and they seemed to have enviable lives. There was also a time when I thought I could just go be a lawyer. But I got to college, took my first Victorian poetry course, and was like, ‘oh, OK, this is what I'm doing.’
I did. I considered it very seriously around like 10, 11, or 12. I liked the whole headdress, not having to fix your hair thing. You didn't have to get married. You didn't have to have children. Your life had meaning. It's sort of like being a lady professor.
Part of it is that I kind of came to the Victorians through poetry, not the novel. Most people come to Victorian literature through the novel, but that was not me.
Victorian poetry and art are very concerned with larger than life feminine figures who are sort of goddessy. They have lots of hair and they have incredible amounts of power and it's sexy in a Victorian way. So it was partly that the stuff I enjoyed was very colorful, sensuous art and poetry about love, and death. Essentially, these big issues were built into the stuff that I looked at.
When I started graduate school in the ’80s, it was the heyday of theoretical graduate education. It was just such an exciting time to be around. People were doing literary theory and focusing on any number of hard and intimidating things. When I started to read feminist theory about gender and sexuality—things that had meaning for me, as a female person in a body, in ways that other theory didn't—it became a gateway drug to theory more generally. It also gave me a language for talking about why I found Victorian Literature so compelling, and why it was important.
Oh, it was a long trip. So I went to graduate school, and I wrote a dissertation. Then, as people always do when they're in graduate school, I went on the job market. The first time, I didn't get a job. But the second time I went on the market, I got a job at the University of Notre Dame.
I was from New York City. I had never lived in a city that did not have an ocean coastline. I didn't even know what state South Bend was in. And which one was Indiana? Was that near Idaho, Illinois? But that was where I got my job, and so I went.
Ultimately, it was wonderful. I had such wonderful, wonderful colleagues and great students. I got a whole second education in how to be a professor and a scholar. But I really was not very fond of living in South Bend. So for the 13 years I lived there, I kept applying for jobs, and I kept not getting any. And then one year, there was a job at Duke. I thought, ‘oh, I'm not getting any jobs and I shouldn't apply.’ Then I got a letter from the search committee, and they were like ‘apply, apply!’ So I did, and eventually I got this job!
I’ve now been here at Duke since 2003, and I adore it. Notre Dame was a really great place to have a first job, and in a lot of ways I was super fortunate—but South Bend never really felt like home. On the other hand, from within the first year, when I’d fly into Durham, into RDU, and see Raleigh from the sky—I’d think ‘oh, I'm home.’
I think it has really changed. These big shifts started happening in the 2000s with the recession, but COVID has accelerated a process whereby the whole shape of the academy is changing. I honestly don't know if there will even be English departments ten, fifteen years from now. There are a whole bunch of people trying to consolidate the humanities and move the focus towards — well, away from the humanities. I don't know where they're moving it towards, because I think people in STEM would say, ‘they're not giving it to us!’ Yet there is a palpable shift. I don't think anybody feels like they can predict what things will look like even five years from now, which I don't think was necessarily the case in my first, let's say, twenty years in this profession.
So it's not a good thing. I mean, we still have some graduate students who are getting academic jobs, but the number of academic jobs is tiny. And by tiny, I mean really tiny, like one or two in the field in a year. I have no idea what’s going to happen to graduate education in the humanities in the next ten years. Duke is trying to prepare for it as a whole, but I'm not sure where we will wind up. It's so sad, really. I feel sad that more people won't get to do what I got to do. And with that sadness, I feel so grateful that I got to do it when I did.
I've always been really interested in people, and in other people’s thinking. I mean, I think we read to find out how other people think. We have conversations with other people to find out what they think. And in the same way, both in research and in teaching, you're always sort of thinking and reading with other people. You are constantly getting ideas from them, passing on what you like, and learning about what they like. Some of it is a very solitary pursuit, but, in truth, you are very rarely alone. Even when you're sitting there alone in your office, writing, you're not alone, because there are people in all those books on your shelves who you are writing about.
Then, when you get into the classroom, you always learn so much. In classes, I meet new students that read material I know well—and they tend to see things that I haven't noticed. That experience is incredibly gratifying. Furthermore, having grad students who go on and write their own stuff is incredibly rewarding. Having graduate students allows you to take vicarious pleasure in new thinking. They are coming up with all manners of new ideas that are not yours, but you get to take vicarious pleasure in them anyway.
Well, I really prefer in-person. I was lucky to have a hybrid class last semester for a part of that experience, but I have also been very lucky to have help switching to Zoom. I was so lucky last semester to have Greg Brennen as my TA, and he already had so much training for teaching on Zoom. He's just such a fabulous guy and a fabulous teacher, and he gave me all kinds of ideas. So his help made the transition so much easier. This semester, I have taken many of the things that I learned from Greg and tried to use them as much as I can.
I think the main difference is figuring out how to put together assignments that fit the Zoom attention span and the complications of life that people are working around. On the plus side, I think it has taught me more active class techniques because you can't, you know, sit there and just blather on. I mean, I'm an English professor, so I could sit there and blather on about anything—but I do try to use techniques that push people in the direction of interaction. It has certainly been hard, but I think it's going great. I’ve even had fun trying to create less traditional writing assignments. I didn't think that people had the bandwidth for the kind of writing we normally do, so instead I used different kinds of assignments, some of which I'm going to keep because I think that they worked well and gave students valuable tools that are applicable on and offline.
That's so interesting. I don't think anybody has had that wild of a Zoom background, but there was one time in my Victorian literature class when a student showed us the Victorian Airbnb he was staying in. There was a whole bunch of Victorian furniture, and I thought that was quite fun.
That's so hard. This problem is, all the people I would choose are people who probably couldn't talk to the other people.
Yes! The people you would invite to this dinner wouldn't necessarily be the people that you would most like to talk to yourself, because you want to be a good hostess, so you would want the guests to be able to talk to each other. That makes it very complicated. And then it's dinner, right? So that means you've got to pick eras in which there's personal hygiene. And people that have their own teeth, right? I mean, it's all very complicated.
Although, I think Daniel Deronda, because of his excessive empathetic social skills, would probably be a good person to have at any dinner party. You could have him and Jane Eyre. He would ask her nice conversational questions and not respond with ‘what are you nuts?’ if she did anything odd. So, I think they might work. Maybe some of the authors would like to be together, and I certainly would be interested in talking too.
Part of this, though, is something that I have always thought about writers—one of the wonderful things that print does, is it detaches your ideas, your thoughts, and the stories that you tell from you. You don't actually have to like a writer—or approve of them, or approve their politics, or want to know them, or even want to have them at a dinner party, in order to enjoy and appreciate what they have written. So, in a way, maybe I'd rather just have a stack of books. I’ll eat my own pizza.
English Department
